Part 3: Resilience Is Risky Business – The Role of Personality and Risk

What Type of Thinker Are You?

This is my third post on the topic of resilience.(Go here if you want to read Part 2.) We have established that resilience is a real-life response skill that resides in all of us, but our ability to bounce back from adversity can be developed by intentional practices. In this post, I’d like to share more about how our personality and relationship with risk can affect our resilience capacity.

Being in the business of helping people discover and embrace their wiring, I have noticed possible correlations between specific personality tendencies and risk-aversion levels with varying responses or reactions to adverse circumstances.

In my life coaching practice I have utilized a tool with clients looking to map out their next season of life called the LifePlan. The creator of this powerful process, Fortune 500 Business Management Consultant, Tom Paterson, (and author of Living the Life You Were Meant to Live),  also employed a spectrum to illustrate the various types of thinkers. Included in the type distinctions is the relationship each type has with risk.

The Thinking Wavelength divides us into five types of thinkers:

·      Grinders – those who get the work done

·      Minders – those who use both people and organizational skills to manage a team

·      Keepers – people who can manage ‘the whole store’ due to appreciation for both the administrative and strategic sides

·      Finders – these are the entrepreneurs of the world with their more abstract than concrete thinking

·      Theorists- those who belong in the research end of things rather than in business, majoring in postulating theories, rather than executing their large visions.

As you can see from the chart above, each type of thinker relates or responds to risk differently – from the most concrete Grinder who is notably risk-adverse, to the abstract Theorist who embraces the risk necessary to bring about disruptive breakthroughs in their field of passion.  

My experience has been the less risk-averse a person is the more likely he or she possesses the tendency to see uncertainty and risk as opportunity,

about which Happiness podcaster, author and Harvard Professor Arthur C. Brooks, writes and speaks.I believe Dr. Brooks would agree:

 Every problem or struggle can be an opportunity to create

Back to where I started this resilience discussion...The Japanese art form, kintsugi, is a beautiful illustration of this principle: an unfortunate circumstance results in a valued vessel breaking into pieces. With a vision for what it can become, the artist increases the broken vessel’s value and beauty by accentuating the breaks by filling them with liquid gold.

A problem can become an opportunity to create

 Thus, the problem becomes an opportunity to create for the inspired artist.

If you follow my writing at all, you know how strongly I believe discovering and embracing your unique, God-given wiring is the first step to finding your ‘sweet spot’ for living a fulfilling life. What kind of thinker you are is yet another way of understanding your natural internal framework.

This matters because how we relate to risk often predicts how we respond to adversity. Are you energized by uncertainty? Or do you need structure to survive it? Neither is better—but knowing your pattern helps build resilience your way.

Curious about your wiring? I invite you to reflect on how you handle risk...

·      Where would you place yourself on the Thinking Wavelength?

·      What’s one time your relationship to risk helped (or hindered) your bounce-back?

·      What is one takeaway from exploring this topic of risk that you could turn into an enlargement of your resilience capacity?

*If you contact me via ‘chat w/ me’ on Perils & Pearls, I will send you my  Whole-Person Engagement Worksheet for your intentional resilience practice.

*And if you have been stirred to further explore your unique wiring – strengths, passions, challenges - & you would like to experience a strength assessment with a certified life coach, I invite you to contact me.

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Blessed to play a part ~

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