by Joel Bennett, PhD, CWP
President, Organizational Wellness & Learning Systems 

Note: The following article provides background for the Resilience and Thriving Facilitator Certificate course, which Organizational Wellness & Learning Systems (OWLS) has offered in collaboration with the National Wellness Institute (NWI) since 2018. In 2023, OWLS widened the aperture of the program to include “time wisdom,” as explained below.

There is a path from past adversity through current resilience to future thriving, and it depends upon a healthy, wise, and expansive relationship with time. This article reviews ideas to help you build that relationship. Spoiler alert: personal and collective wisdom plays a central role. 

Having delivered many workshops on time perspective and resilience, I have found that all of us, especially wellness students, know that time pressure hurts well-being. 

Research shows that heavy work pace, impatience, workaholism, and cultures that promote these processes contribute to a host of adverse outcomes: burnout, cardiovascular disease, anxiety, depression, addictive tendencies, presenteeism, sickness absence, and many stress-related disorders. Fortunately, we now have resilience programs and tools to help address adverse conditions.   

THE RESILIENCE STORY 

Sharing or journaling one’s personal resilience story is perhaps the most fundamental of these tools. We need to create multicultural conditions for psychological safety and guide students, clients, families, teams, organizations, and communities in how to get in touch with—and continually update—their resilience story. We also need to know our scope of practice, as sometimes the story includes significant trauma. Then, refer to a licensed therapist or Employee Assistance provider. 

THE S.E.C.R.E.T. POWER PROCESS OF STRESS 

Given a safe space, adults remember and, appropriate to the setting, they (1) find the right level to share current or past challenges (the “pivot point”), and (2) affirm how they overcame and also evolved from those challenges (i.e., “made lemonade from lemons”).  

We call this Affirmation after the Pivot Point the SECRET power of stress, as taught in the Resilience and Thriving Facilitator Certificate course and featured in my Raw Coping Power (Stress → Evaluate → Cope → Resilience → Evolve → Thrive). All of us can engage in a whole-time process of continual growth, narrative review, re-learning, and memory reconsolidation. By doing so, we evolve, cultivate wisdom, and foster a healthy relationship with time. 

A NEW PARADIGM 

This “thriving-informed” view of resilience is emerging inside and outside the wellness and helping professions. There are modalities for team, organizational, and community resilience; and multilevel resilience. Jeremy Rifkin, social theorist and political advisor, compels us to see humanity as moving past the “Age of Efficiency” to the “Age of Resilience.” Here are some hallmarks of this new paradigm: 

  1. We understand how the resilience narrative makes memories malleable for update and upgrade (search memory reconsolidation). 
  2. We transition from defining the stress response as only “fight and flight” to also “friending, figuring out, and flourishing” (search neuroplasticity). 
  3. We embrace a more balanced focus that includes thriving (see thriving informed) and not only trauma. 
  4. We reimagine time as a resource for wisdom and not only a tool for efficiency (and the negative consequences associated with time pressure for production). 
  5. We view the above as a moral imperative to foster unity and compassion—moving away from negative, partisan, stereotyping, and stigmatizing communication (often rooted in insecurity and unresolved trauma). 

In other words, we feel called to (personally and collectively) transform stressors by releasing the past (letting go of resentment), reviewing, and updating our story to help us all slow down, pause, and connect.  

This is wisdom (see Grossman, 2017): intellectual humility, compromise, recognition of uncertainty and change, seeing our situation from different perspectives, focusing on the bigger picture, more complex emotional representation, less reactivity to adverse events, adaptive emotion regulation, and greater forgiveness. Such wisdom requires that we slow down; we become connoisseurs of time. 

TIME WISDOM 

There is a growing field of research on time perspective, well-being, and wisdom. I highlight some of this in The Connoisseur of Time (free download) and the Quest for Presence series. Here are some findings: 

  • People who manage their time well also have more significant health and well-being in their personal life. 
  • The development of wisdom occurs from a lack of focus on negative aspects of our past and being less fatalistic in thinking about the present and the future. 
  • Wisdom and well-being correlate negatively with a past-negative and fatalistic view of time and positively with an optimistic orientation toward a meaningful future. 
  • The well-being of those with greater wisdom is less susceptible to the negative impact of adversity than those with lower levels of wisdom. 

These and other studies indicate a time-freedom cycle: (1) the less we ruminate (repeated negative thoughts) on our past and see our future as close-ended and (2) the more we see the whole-time of our life as something we can update, then (3) the more well-being we have. 

RESILIENCE + TIME WISDOM = WELL-BEING 

Fortunately, we know how to fuel this cycle with such tools as our resilience story, the S.E.C.R.E.T. of stress, and the emergence of a thriving-informed paradigm worldwide. With these tools, we can work alone and together by taking time for conversation, training, workshops, and conferences. Collective wisdom is the inevitable result. We widen the aperture. We move from the “past” focus of resilience (the bounce back) work to a more whole view of time, one brought on by wisdom. 

A lot depends on collective work, the We in Wellness, and a willingness to tap into our soulful capacities to be more present to ourselves and each other. We accept through forgiveness and gratitude, stay present in the reality of our whole situation, flow with the results of our new actions, and find meaning with synchronicity in the magical coincidences that arise. And, perhaps, you happen to be reading this right now… at just the right time for your own evolution! 

SOME REFERENCES 

Ardelt, M., & Jeste, D. V. (2018). Wisdom and hard times: the ameliorating effect of wisdom on the negative association between adverse life events and well-being. The journals of gerontology: series B, 73(8), 1374-1383. Https://doi.org/10.1093/geronb/gbw137 

Bennett, J. B., & Tetrick, L. E. (2013). The “We” in wellness: workplace health promotion as a positive force for health in society. In Using industrial-organizational psychology for the greater good (pp. 205-236). Routledge. 

Grossmann, I (2017). Wisdom in context. Perspectives on psychological science, 12(2), 233-257. Https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691616672066 

Rifkin, J. (2022). The age of resilience: Reimagining existence on a rewilding earth. St. Martin’s Press. 

Timoszyk-tomczak, C., & Szcześniak, M. (2020). “Time for wisdom”–the relationship between wisdom and the time perspective. Socialization & Human Development” international scientific journal, 2(1), 107-121. 

Puchalska-wasyl, M. M. (2022). When do time perspectives promote wisdom? Exploring the moderating effects of internal dialogues. Time & Society, 31(2), 205-225. Https://doi.org/10.1177/0961463×211037534 

 


Dr. Joel Bennett founded Organizational Wellness & Learning Systems in 1990 and has since authored over 30 peer-reviewed scientific articles as well as several books, including Raw Coping Power, Your Best Self at Work, Well-Being Champions, Time & Intimacy, Heart-Centered Leadership, and the Quest for Presence series. He is the lead developer and instructor for NWI’s Resilience & Thriving Facilitator Certificate course.