Research is rarely a smooth ride. Experiments fail, funding falls through, papers get rejected, and the path forward is often anything but clear. Yet resilience, one of the most important skills for navigating all of this, is almost never part of formal academic training.
That’s starting to change. As part of ReSkillSpan, a Horizon Europe project equipping researchers across Europe with the transversal skills needed for impactful careers, the training module Discover Your Resilience shows researchers at all career stages where to start by offering a structured space to understand, reflect on, and actively build their own resilience strategies.
The module is developed and delivered by Young Entrepreneurs in Science (YES), an initiative of the Falling Walls Foundation for PhD students, postdocs, and early-career researchers with the aim to spark enthusiasm for entrepreneurship among scientists.
More Than Just Bouncing Back
Resilience is often a misunderstood concept. It’s not some innate toughness you were either born with or not. The American Psychological Association defines it as the process of successfully adapting to difficult or challenging experiences through mental, emotional, and behavioural flexibility.
To some extent it can be learned and trained, like a muscle.
ReSkillSpan’s workshop introduces six key indicators of resilience — self-care, an optimistic outlook, social support, active problem solving, moving toward your goals, and finding meaning and purpose outside work. Rather than presenting these as a checklist, participants explore which of these show up most naturally in their own lives, and where their personal strengths already are.
You Already Have More Than You Think
One of the more quietly useful ideas in the workshop: most researchers already have resilience resources they haven’t fully noticed yet. The exercises are designed to surface them.
In the first exercise, Doors Closed, Doors Open, participants are invited to reflect on past setbacks, moments that felt like failures or dead ends, and trace what actually helped them through. What shifted their thinking? What opened up afterwards? It’s a reframe that most people don’t give themselves time for, and it tends to reveal more than expected.
The second exercise takes that reflection and turns it into something forward-looking: a personal resilience plan. Participants identify a current difficulty, map it against their known resources and strategies, and then share and refine their plan with peers. The group exchange, sharing what works for different people in different situations, is often where the session comes alive.
Built for the Realities of Research
The workshop is grounded in the specific pressures of academic and research life. Doing a PhD or building a research career means working in what is known as VUCA environments: volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous. The same is true for founding a company, which is why the entrepreneurial perspective fits so naturally here.
As Ben Horowitz, serial founder, once put it: managing your own psychology is by far the hardest skill to master — harder than organisational design, hiring, or strategy. Researchers rarely hear that framing applied to their own world.
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Visit https://youngentrepreneursinscience.com/events/ to see all YES workshops ahead.
Discover Your Resilience is part of the ReSkillSpan training programme, a Horizon Europe project co-funded by the European Union. Young Entrepreneurs in Science is an initiative of the Falling Walls Foundation, enabled by the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space.
Author: Eva Kirchner, Young Entrepreneurs in Science