What We Need is More Rē-Zilience!

“What’s your ‘word’?  Mine is Zilience!”  Me

As a response to the epidemic of distress and burnout, resilience is something that all healthcare providers have been told they need more of, and a whole industry has been created around this aim.  The dictionary defines resilience as: “the power or ability to return to the original form, position, etc., after being bent, compressed, or stretched.  The ability to recover readily.”

Certainly, resilience certainly seems like a good thing to have.  But for some time now I have found the seemingly endless push for more of it as an end in itself to be inherently bothersome.  At first, I couldn’t identify why.  And then it struck me.  If, as the data suggest, many working in healthcare are living in “survival mode” at best, then “returning to this original form after being compressed,” while better than the alternatives, is in no way advancing their well-being, but rather reinforcing their status quo. 

Further inquiry into the prefix “rē” indicates that its origins are from Latin and means “again” or “again and again” to indicate repetition.  So having greater resilience could imply the emotional equivalent of “Groundhog Day,” where one continues to get compressed, deformed, and distressed, only to return to the same, often struggling state, again and again.  Sound familiar?!  I concluded that resilience, while necessary, is not sufficient to bring us to a state of optimal well-being, whatever you would call it … unless ….

If one is going to recover, again and again, it would certainly be desirable for them to be at their highest functioning, so that this would be the state they would bounce back to.  But there is no word “silience” in the English language to attach the “rē” to!  So I crated my own, “Zilience,” which I define as “The state of being one’s highest self, including having and living from a deep sense that your life is about something larger than you.”   Zilience is a transformation of the word resilience .  This is the higher state I aspire to return to, again and again …. 

How about you?  What’s your word that describes your highest, best self?  The time has arrived for you to embrace that state, and then to keep bouncing back to it, again … and again.  It’s time for us each to embrace our equivalent of rē-Zilience!