Being Hard is not being resilient

​More and more, I have a growing fear that people are being encouraged to 'be hard' instead of 'be resilient.' Although I think there are times being hard can be a life saver, if being hard becomes our primary tool for managing stress, most of us will end up with a life of stress.

I do a lot of presentations on resiliency. I usually open them by admitting "I hate the word resiliency." It's not because I don't value someone being resilient. I do. A lot. It's just that I know the moment I start talking about someone becoming more resilient, the audience immediately thinks I'm talking about someone becoming more hard.

Let's stop and think for a second about how we are built to manage stress.

We come into this world little balls of stress. We emerge from a comfortable dark and quiet and warm womb where we've been hanging out for nine months, and then abruptly face a world of lights and noise and chaos.

Talk about stress. And then someone meets us screaming 'stay hard.'

No, that's NOT how someone meets us in that moment. Most of us were met by someone showing up to help us manage our stress. They held us. They used a reassuring voice. They smiled at us.

Resilience building began with someone showing up, not someone challenging us to suck it up.

In the earliest days of our life, resilience building is someone showing up in our stress, helping us learn to manage the level of stress we're in, so that the next time we encounter it we are better equipped to manage it on our own. Which sets the stage for us to learn to manage the next level of stress.

Please note that I said 'manage' stress - and not 'be hard' through it.

Most of the time, when people are encouraging us to stay hard, they want us to believe that no matter how tough times become we have the personal capacity to endure them. We have what it takes inside us to deal with our circumstances long enough that we will somehow come out the other side as survivors.

Again, I think there are moments in life we need to know we are hard enough to survive.

But when we begin adopting 'be hard' as our way of managing all challenging moments in life, we are not doing life, we are surviving it.

Be hard is a 'you've got this' mantra for life.

Be resilient, that's a 'we're in this together' mantra. The mantra that has been wired into us from the moment we emerged from the womb.

We are not wired to be hard, we are wired to be together. We are not wired to endure stress, we are wired to navigate it with each other.

The more we come to believe that being hard is the same thing as being resilient, the more we start to believe people have the power to endure things most people are not wired to endure, the more we believe people can do things on their own they just can't do - the moment we start believing people have a hardness they just don't have - the less we show up for them.

There's a lot of research that says we are lonelier than we've ever been. I think that's because we've come to believe we and the people around us are hard enough to go it alone.

And you know what, we're not. We were never wired to be hard enough to go it alone. We are paying a price for confusing hard with resilient.

We can fix it, though. We can. We can start showing up for people instead of telling them to harden up. After all, that's what we were made to do.