Themes from the Palo Alto Dialogue on Resilience

Participants formed small groups of 8–12 people, including 1–2 moderators, and shared their definitions of resilience and responded to a specific prompt — such as “What was an experience that you had or are having as an adolescent that required resilience? What did that resilience look like for you?”

At the end of their dialogues, each small group “debriefed” by thinking of the major themes that had emerged during their dialogue, and then reported these themes back to the large group. For more information about the event, see the longer blog post here [coming soon!].

Here are the themes listed in full, from all 6 groups:

• Letting go of expectations
• Open to change
• Non-judgement
• Support group/network
• Humility
• Dialogue
• Community as resilience
• Family
• Diversity
• Image
• Competition with yourself
• Multiple forms of success
• Self awareness and self authoring
• Identity external vs internal
• Community
• School structure
• Recognizing the difficulty of one’s situation
• Having perspective maintaining appreciation
• How do we get up after failure?
• Art
• Humor
• Reach out to others when you are well
• Sharing perspectives of resilience
• Waterfall —from far away, this community is beautiful, but it’s overwhelming under the waterfall; how do you experience life without being overwhelmed
• Narrow one track path in high school
• Tools/ self care and sacredness
• External pressures vs. internal wants /needs/desires
• Cultures
• Don’t expect others to know what you have been through and how to help. TELL THEM!
• Communication
• Finding agency
• Humility and accepting failure
• Self-agency
• Dealing with stress
• Finding trust in strangers and loved ones
• Community support groups
• Resiliency as a collective community
• Ability to express feelings and vulnerability
• Care from friends
• Intentional relationships