Resilience: What's the buzz?Resilience: What's the buzz?
All In The Mind
As Lynne Malcolm gets ready for life outside the ABC, she’s been thinking about how all of us cope with changes and challenges, and how our sense of ourselves is influenced by our surroundings. This has become even more relevant for us as we get through the COVID-19 pandemic.
41:58•15 Nov 2020
Resilience, Identity and Bouncing Back When Life Changes
Episode Overview
- Resilience is described as positive adaptation to adversity, influenced by both genetics and life experiences, with roughly half of wellbeing shaped by environment.
- High wellbeing tends to sit alongside good sleep, regular exercise, a healthy diet, better attention and a calmer resting brain state.
- Simple practices such as self-compassion, acts of kindness and positive reminiscence can measurably lift wellbeing over just a few weeks.
- Personal stories of motherhood, postponed weddings and missed Olympic dreams show that identity can shift, yet purpose and satisfaction can be rebuilt.
- Allowing yourself to feel grief and disappointment, rather than bottling it up, can actually support longer-term resilience and healthy change.
“I’ve built resilience through allowing myself to fail and being human about it.”
How do people find hope in the darkest times? This conversation from *All In The Mind* looks at resilience as a real-life skill rather than a buzzword, especially in the upheaval of the COVID-19 pandemic and big life changes. Host Lynne Malcolm, preparing to leave the ABC after many years, uses her own career transition as a springboard to ask what helps people bend without breaking.
Senior scientist Dr Justine Gatt explains resilience as “a process of positive adaptation to some sort of adversity or stressful life event”, shaped by genes, environment, social support and learned coping skills. Her twin study shows that wellbeing is roughly half genetic, half environmental, giving plenty of room for growth.
Identical twins Rachel Bradshaw and Amy Maitland share how resilience plays out in everyday stresses: sleepless nights with a new baby, postponed wedding plans, and shifts in identity as life stages change. Amy talks about leaning on meditation, exercise and family support, while Rachel speaks honestly about feeling she’d “lost a lot of who you were” in early motherhood before gradually rebuilding a new sense of self. Former Olympic hurdler turned doctor, Yana Pittman, brings a high-performance perspective to setbacks.
She talks openly about assault, a painful marriage, miscarriages, harsh media scrutiny and missing out on Olympic gold, yet says she has “built resilience through allowing myself to fail and being human about it.” For her, letting herself grieve the end of her sporting career made space for a deeply meaningful identity in medicine. Across these stories, you’ll hear practical ideas like self-compassion, acts of kindness, positive reminiscence and skill-building, all grounded in evidence rather than clichés.
Anyone facing change, loss or long-term recovery may find themselves asking: which of these small shifts could help me bounce back a bit stronger?
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