Building Resilience through Lifelong Learning

Well, I finally did it. After navigating through pain in my left hip for nearly five years, I’ve got a shiny new titanium ball and socket. I’ve known I was on an irreversible course toward this surgery for nearly two years, but consciously avoided getting it done by telling myself one fiction after another. I’d say things like: “If I do more stretching exercises, the pain will get better,” or “The pain’s really not that bad, I’ll just avoid certain activities and it’ll get better on its own.”

Once I made the decision to have surgery, I was able to start shedding the dread that had been building within me and turn my energy toward preparation and planning for the future. Unlike other orthopedic procedures, a hip replacement is a life-changing event. I will never be the same and there are certain movements that are now permanently off limits. No more jumping from stage risers with my guitar. No more deep, counter-rotation pretzel moves in my yoga practice.

Deep in the night after surgery, I was laying in my hospital bed, lamenting that I wouldn’t be able to sleep comfortably on my side for the foreseeable future. In this moment, my mind wandered to the concept of resilience. After 57 years, a part of my body had broken down due to my active lifestyle and poor soft-tissue genetics, with genetic disposition the primary culprit. In the years leading up to this moment, my body was doing something to me and I had to make a conscious decision to either continue to ignore it and turn into an old man, or do something about it.

What is Resilience?

Merriam-Webster defines resilience as “an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change.” In terms of the physical world, a resilient object quickly regains its form after exposure to an external stressor (e.g., rubber bands are highly resilient). Hence, we commonly frame resilience in the context of how quickly we can return to our current state in response to external forces that throw us off course. 

I’d like to expand the definition of resilience to consider how we not only return to the current state, but use periods of disruption as an opportunity to continuously improve. Applied to humans, resilience should help us navigate toward that next best version of ourselves.

Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, the concept of resilience has received a lot of attention. Clearly, external forces are shifting the ground beneath our feet and those who have well-established resilience muscles have tended to fare better than those who have difficulty regaining their balance after the evening news anchor delivers a new batch of bad news on what seems like a daily basis.

Building Resilience through Choice and Self-Determination

If those who are more resilient pivot and adjust more easily in times of personal, economic, and societal stress, how do we build resilience so we’re more prepared for the next disruption in our lives? The answer is to practice becoming purposefully uncomfortable at an early age and extending that practice throughout our lives.

I posit that natural risk-takers have an easier time building resilience because they’re predisposed to purposeful discomfort. The ability to “snap back” from adversity comes naturally. The rest of us who value safety and security over the thrill of a roller coaster ride need other ways to build resilience, but how? 

An answer is lifelong learning.

Education that leads to personal growth and is durable through time occurs when we choose to place ourselves in an uncomfortable situation. Unfortunately, many adults believe that their learning days are behind them after completion of their secondary or college education. In my estimation, individuals who adopt a lifelong learning mindset are likely the exception and not the norm. Building a stable, secure nest in an attempt to minimize risk may feel good when times are calm, but what happens when a storm blows your nest out of the tree?

Arguments Around the Prevalence of a Lifelong Learning Mindset?

Some may be saying, “wait a minute, I’ve seen studies that say the majority of the population are lifelong learners.” Indeed, a 2016 study on lifelong learning by Pew Research showed that many adults consider themselves lifelong learners, but the results varied significantly across the vectors of education and income with 72 percent of college graduates indicating they took a course or engaged in training over the last twelve months compared to only 49 percent for high school grads. 

This data is confounded by the results of a 2016 Gallup study performed by my colleague Brandon Busteed and Jessica Stutzman that showed graduating from college is not necessarily a predictor of an increased desire to “learn or do something interesting each day.” Given that many of the individuals in the Pew study likely took a course or engaged in training due to a workplace requirement, meaning they engaged in a learning activity at the direction of their employer, the statistics regarding the true “lifelong learner” population may be artificially inflated.

Start Small, but Start

If we follow the advice of public healthcare professionals by wearing masks, social distancing, and getting vaccinated when it’s our turn, we will come out the other side of this pandemic. Out of necessity, your resilience will likely have improved. However, like any muscle, resilience must be continually developed and maintained. My recommendation is that when the storm is over, you not take a sigh of relief and retrench to a position of safety and security.

Instead, consciously choose to disrupt yourself through learning and education.

What you choose to do and how you learn can take many forms. Yes, returning to college to get the degree you’ve been putting off for years is one path, but large, monolithic experiences like degree programs may be too big and audacious as a starting point. Alternatively, there are a growing number of shorter term program options for lifelong learners, from bootcamps to online courses and myriad industry-recognized credentials and certifications that can be used to level-up in your current career, or even help you reskill for a move to another career ladder.

If you need more data to support the urgency of adopting a lifelong learning mindset, in early 2019, the World Economic Forum published their work “Toward a Reskilling Revolution,” which posits that the need for upskilling and reskilling our population is at an all-time high - they estimate that we will need to reskill up to a billion people globally over the next ten years! 

The point is that choosing to adopt a lifelong learning mindset is a low-risk way to build resiliency and add to your skill portfolio so the next time the unexpected knocks you off your feet, the more prepared you will be to meet adversity head on and not allow it to wash over you. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for safety and security, but striving for building the perfect nest must be balanced with purposeful disruption to build resilience and grit. Our choices matter.

Conclusion

I should never have allowed my hip to get as bad as it did. When the surgeon showed me the picture of my tattered femoral head, it was a real wake up call. I need to do a better job of being proactive about taking care of my physical self and relying on the resilience muscles I’ve developed over the years as a lifelong learner to ensure I use the purposeful disruption of self-care to build the next best version of myself.

As I write this, I’m nine days into my rehab and I can see clearly the choices that lay in front of me. I choose the path that will lead to a new, athletic version of myself - albeit with permanent alterations to the version that came before. I reject the path that leads to the couch, an intimate relationship with the television remote, and a more rapid slide to old age. 

Now where did my wife hide the Thin Mints?

Andy