Radical Resilience

I remember back in ‘95 I was completing a summer internship at a large Sydney law firm. In the exit interview with a partner, he said something that came from left field.

He said they thought I was RESILIENT.

I don’t know if they had been observing how we interns worked under pressure, and if indeed that was part of the model. But resilient? I’d never heard that term before in that context, and the immediate question that came into my mind was: ‘What, are you planning to try to break me’?

I didn’t end up accepting the job offer for other reasons, but that word stuck with me.

Two years later, I found myself running Australia’s fledgling Internet Industry Association and we’d quickly identified cybersecurity as an emerging impediment to trust and uptake. As time went on ‘resilience’ entered the parlance as a quality of both organisational risk posture, but also the people who worked there (ie. human vulnerability through ignorance, carelessness, etc.) That’s largely how it’s still used today, in both of those senses - which are of course related.

But just prior to and during COVID, it occurred to me that the burnout we were starting to see in our cyber defenders spoke of another type of resilience — actually more closely aligned to how I first encountered the term. Our protectors were reaching the limits of human tolerance. And that’s how Cybermindz was born. Because by then I’d found a solution that could scale and was effective.

Now ‘radical’ resilience is a word play on both the problem and the solution. Radical derives from the Latin (root) - so something that is radical is, in its literal sense, connected close to the source or foundation of something.

When people become disconnected from their inner source of strength - or what Dr Richard Miller terms their ‘inner locus of control’ or their ‘unbreakable sense of well-being’ due to work pressure, stress, overwhelm etc., then their confidence and sense of self-efficacy begins to waver.

The research says this is a predictor of burnout and even resignation intent.

Using the iRest protocol, we are fortunately able to reconnect people back to that aspect of self that is beyond attack, and over time the brain reasserts structural change to support a new calmer, happier default state.

So that’s a short intro to Radical Resilience. But maybe Richard’s “Unbreakable Well-being” is a better term. ;)