Is resilience a personality trait that some people, the lucky few, are just born with?

To the casual onlooker, it certainly seems that way. We always hear stories about people overcoming all odds to achieve great successes and we think they are unique, or they are the exception to the rule. But after years of watching people survive poverty, trauma and profound hardship, this is what I’ve come to believe:

Resilience is built one victory at a time.

It grows when people do hard things, succeed, and begin collecting evidence that they are stronger, more capable, and more resourceful than they ever believed themselves to be.

In my work, I have been privileged to witness people who came in carrying years of disappointment and self-doubt, and the belief that they would never work again, complete training programs, conquer fears, secure employment, and begin to imagine futures they had long stopped believing were possible for them. Not because they had suddenly been blessed with an abundance of resilience, but because they were finally given the right conditions in which to grow it.

At Ve’ahavta, we realized long ago that more than just teaching practical skills like how to communicate effectively, how to write a resume or search for a job, we were helping people grow in deeper ways that extended far beyond employment readiness.

A few years ago, we began to quantify this outcome among our pre employment program clients, using a validated assessment called the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale, which measures qualities like persistence, adaptability, stress tolerance, sense of control, and connection to others, taking the first measure when a participant enters our program, and again three months later, when they complete it. Although the improvements we see are modest (exactly what we would expect over such a short period of time), we have consistently seen measurable gains in resilience.

To me, this may be the most important outcome we achieve. Employment can change a person’s circumstances, but resilience changes how they meet the challenges that life will inevitably place in their path. Because no matter who we are, hardship will come. There will be setbacks, disappointments, and moments when the future feels uncertain. What determines whether a person keeps moving forward is not the absence of struggle, but the belief that they can overcome it.

Resilience is the strength to get back up, the courage to keep going, and the confidence that whatever comes next, you can handle it.

Our very intentional recipe for building peoples’ resilience boils down to three things: learning, support paired with accountability, and belonging to a community.

Resilience is built through learning because people cannot solve problems with only the tools and viewpoints they started with. New skills create new possibilities.

Resilience is built through support and accountability because doing hard things alone is overwhelming. People are far more likely to persevere when they have encouragement, structure, and someone continuing to believe in them when they struggle to believe in themselves. At the same time, they need people to challenge them to follow through on commitments. That’s how they begin to expect more from themselves.

Finally, resilience is built through belonging. At Ve’ahavta, people do not only receive support. They contribute to others’ lives, too. They encourage peers, volunteer in programs, and become part of a community where they are needed. Often, it is through contributing to others that people stop seeing themselves as broken and begin experiencing themselves as whole people with something valuable to offer the world.

Over time, these experiences accumulate. Through repeated experiences of doing hard things and succeeding, people begin to compile evidence that changes how they see themselves.

As one client said, “I went from ‘I fail at everything’ to ‘I can conquer anything.’”

Resilience is not something people either have or don’t have. It’s something that is learned, strengthened, and built over time. And when it is, it changes far more than a person’s ability to cope with hardship. It changes the size of the future they believe is possible for themselves.

With gratitude,

Cari Kozierok,
CEO, Ve’ahavta