Ben Aldridge – How to Build Resilience: Four Ideas from Ancient Philosophy That Still Work

Guest article by Ben Aldridge:

There was a stretch in my late twenties when I was, without question, the least resilient person I knew. Anxiety ran my life and I avoided anything that might go wrong. So, I basically ended up avoiding almost everything and my world got incredibly small. What eventually pulled me out was not a breakthrough or a retreat in the mountains… It was a pile of very old books and a series of slightly ridiculous personal challenges (cold showers at first, and it went in a rather strange direction from there).

Resilience has become one of those words that gets used a lot, but not always applied to life. The ancient philosophers treated it as something that could be cultivated. To them it was a skill. Something you practised, the way you would practise scales on a guitar. They even had a word for the training itself. Askesis.

This askesis saved me. It gave me a way to rebuild after the anxiety, and most of what I learned came from a handful of ancient Greek thinkers who had worked all of this out long before I turned up. Their ideas became the foundation of how I build resilience now.

Four ideas from ancient philosophy on building resilience

Here are four ideas from that tradition that I found profoundly helpful during my recovery. And being two and a half thousand years old, they’ve certainly stood the test of time.

1. Work out what you actually control

Epictetus was born into slavery and spent his life teaching one central idea. Some things are up to us, and most things are not. Our judgements, our effort and our responses sit in the first category. Other people’s opinions, the weather, the restructure, and traffic sit firmly in the second.

This sounds obvious until you audit a week of your own worrying. Most of us spend the bulk of our energy on the second category and then wonder why we feel wrung out.

Try it properly. Take whatever is currently bothering you and split it into two lists. Things you can influence, and things you cannot. Then act on the first list and practise letting go of the second. You will not manage it perfectly. Nobody does. But the act of sorting it all out is where the relief starts.

2. Rehearse the difficult day before it arrives

The Stoics had a practice called premeditatio malorum, which translates roughly as premeditation of evils. It is much less gloomy than it sounds. Seneca recommended spending a few minutes imagining the things that could go wrong, not to catastrophise, but to take the sting out of them in advance.

The presentation falls flat. The client says no. The train is cancelled. Sit with each one for thirty seconds and ask yourself what you would actually do.

What surprises people is how calming this is. Anxiety thrives on vagueness. The moment you give a fear a shape and a plan, it shrinks. I still do this before every keynote, and the number of disasters I have rehearsed that never happened is enormous. The handful that did happen felt oddly familiar by the time they arrived.

3. Get deliberately uncomfortable

This is the idea I have built most of my work around. The Cynics, Diogenes chief among them, thought comfort made people soft and fearful. Their answer was to seek out hardship on purpose, in small doses, so that when real hardship turned up it found them prepared.

Modern life removes friction brilliantly. Everything arrives, everything streams, everything is one tap away. The unintended cost is that our tolerance for difficulty quietly erodes. Voluntary discomfort puts some of that friction back on your own terms.

Start absurdly small. A cold finish to your shower. A walk without headphones. Skipping the thing you reach for when you are bored. The point is not the cold water or the silence or the avoidance. The point is proving to yourself that you can do something uncomfortable and come out the other side intact. Do that often enough and your sense of what you can handle starts to shift.

4. Keep the practice small and unglamorous

Marcus Aurelius was arguably the most powerful man in the western world when he was the Emperor of Rome. Interestingly, he spent his evenings writing notes to himself about being less irritable! Those notes became the Meditations (Stoicism’s most well-known book). They are repetitive, occasionally grumpy, and wonderfully human.

That is the honest shape of resilience training. It is not dramatic. It is a few minutes of reflection, a slightly harder choice than you needed to make, a difficult conversation you had rather than dodged. Repeated for years.

The people I meet who handle pressure well are almost never the ones with the most impressive coping toolkit. They are the ones who have quietly practised the boring version for a long time.

Where to begin?

Pick one of the four. Run it for a fortnight. Notice what changes.

Resilience is not something you either have or lack, handed out at birth like eye colour. It is trained, and the training is available to anyone with a cold tap and five spare minutes.

Ben Aldridge is a bestselling author and international keynote speaker whose books have been translated into eleven languages. He speaks on resilience, practical philosophy and mental health for audiences including Microsoft, the NHS, Heathrow, Salesforce and Capital One.

Book Ben Aldridge for a keynote or talk: 1 (704) 804 1054 or ben.aldridge@premium-speakers.com