Resilience, Endurance, and Internal Transformation
By: Jorge L. Toledo
Dear Readers:
As a marathoner for more than 20 years, endurance has been a fundamental principle and key performance indicator in my running activity, whether training or during a race. Furthermore, I found a correlation between the marathon, from race training vis-à-vis my daily life. I recall saying to myself: “If I have the discipline and perseverance to train for a marathon for 18 weeks and then run 26.2 miles, I can do anything in life”. My “anything in life” came into reality when I was taken hostage in Venezuela for 1,775 days, the hardest race I’d ever run.
The way I visualized “endurance” was whenever crossing the marathon finish line and feeling such a unique sense of achievement. The best definition of endurance I’ve found came from William Barclay, a Scottish theologian, author, and professor at the University of Glasgow: “Endurance is not just the ability to bear a hard thing, but to turn it into glory”. The materialization of “turning into glory” is achieving an objective after hard work and overcoming or surviving a difficult circumstance.
Get Jorge Toledo’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
During the first two years of imprisonment, I heard the word “resilience” and its reference to human affairs from some of my cellmates. Right after my second year of captivity, I started getting messages from friends and family, some of them referred to “my resilience to cope with the circumstance I was living”. What I had in my mind was the technical definition of resilience associated with materials, which I learned in college while getting my engineering degree. Resilience of a material is defined as the amount of energy the material can absorb and still return to its original state.
Psychologists define resilience as the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats, or significant sources of stress — such as family and relationship problems, serious health problems, or workplace and financial stressors. Resilience is the process and outcome of successfully adapting to challenging life experiences, especially through mental, emotional, and behavioral flexibility and adjustment to external and internal demands (APA Dictionary of Psychology). Based on this definition, the keywords are “adapting” and “to resist”.
One step ahead from endurance and resilience represents value captured from change, challenges, and adversity. The value indicates what is important to people, those things and conditions that enhance the experience of living. Value is neither something that exists outside us, as something to be discovered, nor is it a preexisting set of criteria against which behavior is judged. We can create value at each moment through our responses to our environment. Depending on our determination and direction, the value created from any given situation can be positive or negative, minimal or infinitely great. Even what may seem at first sight to be an intensely negative situation can serve as an opportunity for creating positive value.
After a few months of being imprisoned, I realized that my ordeal was my mission, a prerequisite to evolving and taking my life to a higher level, changing poison into medicine. Within our daily lives, the process of changing poison into medicine begins when we face difficulties with the confidence that we have the resources to overcome them. Problems are problems precisely because we doubt our ability to surmount them; however, when we confront challenging circumstances with faith in the unlimited potential of our innate human nature, we change our life state and transform our deluded responses. To change poison into medicine results in our internal transformation and integration with our environment since we are part of the universe. The oneness of life and its environment.
It is common proneness to blame our problems and sufferings on things outside ourselves — other people, circumstances beyond our control. The principle of the oneness of life and its environment, however, demonstrates that the causes of our joy and sorrow originate within us. When we base ourselves on this principle, seeing our environment as a reflection of our inner life, we can take full responsibility for our lives and become empowered to solve our problems and create positive outcomes. This is the value extracted from change, challenges, and adversity, and it is way beyond resilience and endurance.
From my five-year ordeal, I brought values translated into patience, tolerance, common sense, respect, prudence, and a new set of priorities in life. Also, stronger leadership, persuasion, and negotiation skills, a pragmatic change and risk management approach, and a compelling ability to motivate and help others. The result of changing poison into medicine.
