Did we all become more resilient or are we just fawning?

Employees' needs have increasingly come to the fore. At least people are talking about it a lot more in the workplace. Or maybe we've all just become louder. While in the workplace, people are talking (more) openly about feelings, fears, worries as well as expectations, plans and the need for change. Values are increasingly being used as a compass for personal and professional decisions. The big picture that is happening in the world is being integrated into daily reflection. In theory, everyone wants to remain true to their own values; in theory, respect and appreciation are an integral part of working together; in theory, everyone is prepared to speak up if they feel that their own world view has been violated. In theory. In my 1:1 conversations, in peer exchanges, I experience time and again how cohesion is great, how dissatisfaction is countered with constructive and creative solutions. But then (usually) nothing happens. The conversation with the manager, for which you had prepared with great enthusiasm, turns out differently; instead of writing the planned 10 applications during the weekend because it has become so unbearable in your current job, you'd rather go out for ice cream; the frustration you shared with your colleagues is still there the following week.

Are we putting up with too much?

Is life according to our values too stressful after all?

Is everything we complain about perhaps not so bad after all?

Or have we (finally) become more resilient?

What neuroscience says about human behavior in stressful or dangerous situations is well known. Humans instinctively react by fleeing, fighting or freezing. However, there is now talk of another “F” state: fawn (seeking or used to seek approval or favor by means of flattery), basically “adaptation”, “crawling”, “agreeing with someone so as not to create conflict”.

Observation shows that for some people, adaptation equals acceptance. However, acceptance in this case is not to be understood as “letting go of things that you cannot influence”. This is the correct and healthy attitude that mindful and resilient people have. Fawning is rather to be understood as passive acceptance: People prefer to choose not to decide and avoid conflict by agreeing with superiors, adapting and deliberately ignoring certain aspects of reality. These human reactions are understandable and even expedient in certain life situations. But one thing should not happen: to confuse this fawning behavior with resilience. Although resilient people also go through certain reaction phases, they are generally self-effective and therefore able to activate their resources in such a way that they make proactive and conscious decisions. Because they trust in their strengths, because they seek support when making decisions, because their attitude is solution- and future-oriented.

The term “resilience” has been overused in recent years and has often taken on a negative connotation. It is therefore important to give the term the right meaning: Resilience is prevention, it is the work we do on ourselves continuously and not just when we get into challenging situations. It is the relationships that we cultivate and that we can come back to; it is the care of our physical and mental health; it is the curiosity with which we learn new things; it is the conscious and loving confrontation with what happens to us that strengthens our basic trust. Resilience is the “immune system of our

soul”: with the right strengthening, we will continue to flee, fall into rigidity, fight or sometimes even crawl to adapt - but we will always choose the constructive and therefore fulfilling path more quickly, effectively and intuitively.