From the President's desk: 'Why we needed resilience in spades'

This month I am going to speak about resilience. The dictionary defines resilience as the capacity to withstand or recover quickly from difficulties.

I like to describe it as the ability to take positive steps in circumstances which threaten to overwhelm you. For example, the loss of a loved one, facing financial hardship, coping with bullying at work, coping with bullying at home.

We need to stand together and appreciate our responsibility to support and protect those whose values we share.

How do you ensure that you don’t succumb to the hopelessness those circumstances can engender? The feeling that things are beyond your control and you might as well just give in. There is a school of thought that resilience is innate, but I would disagree. A colleague suggested to me that her resilience came from getting angry. That in turn fostered a determination not to allow the situation to get the best of her. Her ability to take positive steps in those circumstances had its source in her anger, which she then channelled in a constructive way.  Sometimes it is the support of family and friends which enables you to focus on the positive. And sometimes it is just the recognition that you’ve faced challenges before and can do it again.

I do think that an excellent example of resilience was our response as solicitors and as the Law Society to the Covid pandemic. How quickly we adapted to virtual meetings, virtual courts and online correspondence. Rather than holding up our hands and checking out we worked together and changed things in small but constructive ways to enable us to continue to provide a legal service to the public. Houses were bought and sold, people were divorced, children were protected despite the closures of public agencies like courts and the Registers of Scotland.

Personally I think the key to resilience is the ability to break the situation down into little manageable chunks. For example with the loss of a loved one the initial challenge is to face the day. Once you do that you move forward to an acknowledgement that life goes on, and to thinking what your loved one would want you to be doing. The trick is to find the positive things you can do to enable you to manage in the difficult circumstances. To figure out what you can do to give yourself control because it is the lack of control which cause us to feel overwhelmed. And in certain circumstances such as being bullied that might be easier said than done, because you have very little control. But stepping back and getting a perspective may show you have options.

As members of the Scottish legal profession we are required to dig into our resilience reserves for various reasons at various times. For Law Society colleagues, resilience has been required in spades as they’ve navigated what’s been a decade-long process with the new Regulation of Legal Services (Scotland) Act, and may be required on a smaller scale from the profession as a whole as the legislation is implemented. Lawyers also need to show resilience on the global stage to protect the rule of law  as it is challenged in ways we haven’t seen for decades. We need to stand together and appreciate our responsibility to support and protect those whose values we share.