What is resilience and when do you need it?

Liz Makin Author

Oct 31, 2025 |

Resilience is a commonly used word these days, but what is it and when do you need it?

What is resilience?

Resilience originates from the Latin word resiliens, which refers to the pliant or elastic quality of a substance.

Resilience is the ability to recover quickly and positively from setbacks, to adapt well to change and to keep going in the face of adversity and challenging and difficult times. It can be described as the ability to ‘keep going’, ‘pick yourself up’ and ‘bounce back’ when something challenging happens in your life.

Resilience helps you to handle anything from a minor change to a major setback.

Everyone will experience setbacks, change, adversity and challenging and difficult times in their life and at work, whatever their level of resilience. However, the more resilient you are the quicker and more positively you will recover and bounce back and the more able you will be to keep going.

When do you need resilience?

You call on resilience when faced with setbacks, change, challenging and difficult times and periods of adversity. The scale of these situations will vary and you may be faced with one setback or a series of different challenges, setbacks and change together.

Examples of major situations requiring resilience include moving to a new area, illness, losing a loved one, financial problems, the ending of a relationship, a catastrophic event, changing jobs, a major restructure at work, redundancy or a natural disaster.

Resilience is also helpful in everyday life such as when dealing with a difficult person, when being on the receiving end of criticism, when your responsibilities change at work, when responding to an unhappy customer, when failing an exam and when facing the normal hurdles of day to day life.

Do you want to learn more about resilience?

If you want to learn more about resilience you can take one of our online resilience courses.

Resilience for life: how to be more resilient in life & work

Resilience for business owners, directors & managers

In these courses you will gain an insight into resilience, look at your own resilience and identify the areas to improve on, be given a range of resilience tools, tips and strategies to help you to be more resilient and to build your resilience over time and create a personalised resilience action plan to develop your resilience going forward.

You can take a look at our range of online personal development courses and bundles, including current special offers, at https://onlinecourses.makinithappen.co.uk

Categories: : Business, Life, Personal development, Resilience, Work