Resilience reserves

Do you try to keep a little money in reserve? That parking ticket/broken washing machine/unexpected medical bill fund? Or even a vacation fund for someday. Most folks, including me, do try to keep a reserve fund for those possible expenses. And even when we’re not able to do that, or we have spent it down, most of us aim for building up those reserves. It’s just logical, right? Adults know that expenses will come up – for bad and good reasons – and that there often isn’t time to earn the money then, so it makes sense to try to have it already.

The parallel to this, that I’ve been thinking about a lot since our last Think Tank, is about resilience reserves. 

We know that resilience is a growth commodity – it can rise when we work for it and fall, sometimes predictably and other times somewhat unexpectedly. A lot like our bank account balance. We may not have time to “earn” it when we need it. And we need it in times of change, both good change and bad change. 

It seems logical, too, that we’d care about having reserves of our resilience. So… how?

Well, it seems to me that the first step in this process would be looking at your reservesbalance. I mean, if I want to know how much money I have I look at my bank balance (luckily I’m past the time in my life where all I could do was search couch cushions and the pockets of clothes in my laundry pile).

We’ve talked recently about how one of the key indicators of our resilience is our motivation. Now I’m on the hunt – in research, thought and conversation – for the others. The question I’m working to answer first is this:

What are the indicators that tell you how much resilience you have right now? 

I have some ideas myself, and I’m happy to share those. First I thought I’d ask this group of incredibly smart, thoughtful people (yes, you!), what do you think?

All my best,

Dr. G