Wouldn’t it be great if it were possible to measure how resilient you were before you faced adversity?

How would it change your behavior and your preparation if you could take inventory of your ability to stave off disaster?

What would you pay to have enough advanced warning of potential catastrophe to avoid it entirely?

The concept of avoiding disaster and catastrophe relates directly to the ability to maintain sufficient resilience that needs never exceed resources and that needs never exceed the ability to respond. Physical, emotional, relationship and spiritual resilience are well known as the four categories in which resources are mapped to ensure survival through adversity in business and in life.

But how can we measure our resilience when we are not facing an adversity?

How can we firm the depths of our own reserve when we are not facing disaster or catastrophe? What we need is a fuel gauge, an ability to measure how well our resilience is being taken by our every day life and how well we are replenishing that supply, our resources.

In the late 1960s researchers developed a four part stress inventory that ranked the impact of various life changes (adversities) on four aspects of American life. These aspects of life are:

* Financial

* Personal

* Family

* Career

The title for each of these were based on the predominant factor in each inventory and not wholly encompassing of the spirit of each category.

The “Financial” category deals not only with issues of income and expenses, debt and savings, but almost all other non-personal health related physical resource issues in one’s life including the provision of food and water, housing, clothing and even transportation.

The “Personal” category deals primarily with physical health and personal emotional stressors.

The “Family” category encompasses all you non-workplace relationships.

The “Career” category deals not with just having a job but with the relationships that surrounded your workplace and your community.

It is not difficult to see how each of these 100 point gauges has a different aspect of our resilience. Personal measures our emotional and spiritual resilience as a small portion of our physical resource. Financial is an excellent gauge of our total physical resilience as it relates to our ability to provide for our own resources, personally and in our business.

The family inventory when combined with the career inventory provides an accurate gauge of our relationship resilience as between these two inventories they account for all of the significant relationships that impact our ability to obtain both emotional resources as well as physical resources from those in our network of support.

This quartet of “choke point” inventories provides us an estimate of our resilience in the physical, emotional, relationship realms. The higher the score, the lower your resilience. When there is an area of high score, we then know to focus our efforts on improving our resources in those areas of resilience. This is often done by eliminating the choke point to resilience and occasionally by eliminating those things that are taxing our reserve.

Unfortunately there is no inventory for spiritual resilience. Instead, there is one simple question. Do I believe? Note, this question does not ask do I believe in …? It only asks “do I believe?” This yes no question is an all or none on the 100 points for spiritual resilience. Research has time and time again proven that through the act of believing regardless of what we believe in, we retain all 100 points of resilience.

Dr. Maurice A. Ramirez is co-founder of Disaster Life Support of North America, Inc., a national provider of Disaster Preparation, Planning, Response and Recovery education. Through his consulting firm High Alert, LLC., he serves on expert panels for pandemic preparedness and healthcare surge planning with Congressional and Cabinet Members. Board certified in multiple medical specialties, Dr. Ramirez is Founding Chairperson of the American Board of Disaster Medicine and a Senior Physician-Federal Medical Officer for the Department of Homeland Security. Cited in 24 textbooks with numerous published articles, he is co-creator of C5RITICAL and author of Mastery Against Adversity. Dr. Ramirez invites comments at: http://www.disaster-blog.com

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