What resilience actually looks like

Following on from my post about Hay Festival last week…

I’ve been thinking more about how we define resilience.

We often describe it in bold terms:

“Bouncing back”
“Staying strong”
“Pushing through”

But what struck me in Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s story is that resilience can look very different.

Sometimes it looks like:

• Repetition

• Focus

• Making something small, with your hands

She described sewing as a kind of safe space. A way of creating calm and structure when everything else felt uncertain.

And that resonated deeply with what I’ve seen throughout my career.

At Art Acumen, we explore creativity through our WIDER Framework: Wellbeing, Innovation, Diversity, Engagement and, more recently, Resilience. Of all these elements, resilience is becoming increasingly significant.

Because creativity does something remarkably powerful.

It provides people with:

• A sense of agency

• A way to process experiences

• An opportunity to regain control, even in small but meaningful ways

Perhaps most importantly, it does this without requiring words.

In today's working environments, where pace is relentless, pressure is constant and uncertainty has become the norm, we ask people to be resilient.

Yet we don't always provide the tools that help build and sustain that resilience.

Creative engagement is one of those tools.

Not in a superficial "let's do something fun" sense, but in a deeply meaningful way:

👉 Creating space for pause and reflection
👉 Allowing people time to process and make sense of experiences
👉 Supporting individuals to reconnect with themselves

Over the next few posts, I'll be exploring this idea further.

Because I believe it's time we rethink where creativity truly sits, not on the periphery of our lives and workplaces, but at the very centre of how we think, work and thrive.