July 2026 Vol 8 Issue 7
Tell Your Story Newsletter (TYSN):
Teaching English to Economic Immigrants
Let Us Help You Tell Your Story!
Welcome Mid-July 2026!
After weeks of grey, rainy (and windy) weather, Saskatonians have finally enjoyed some summer heat, with temperatures recently soaring into the mid-30s.
With the Jazz Festival now behind us, and new seasons for the Fringe Festival and Shakespeare-on-the-Saskatchewan about to start, there’s much to do in and around Saskatoon. I hope you will enjoy the out-of-doors for the next eight weeks, Good Readers, whether locally or from afar! Autumn will feel so much better if we take the time to unplug from our technology and “soak” in the sunshine.
In “Article One” this month, I summarize an article that really deserves more prominent posting, but which has resonated powerfully with me: US ecologist Philip Starks argues why we must resist the popularity of “resilience talk.” What is that? Read Article One for an eye-opener.
In “Shop News,” I thank at least a few of the folks who continue to “show up” in my line of sight, even (or especially) in these fleeting summer days.
And, as always, Good Readers, please share any tales of summer adventures you enjoy for a future issue of “Tell Your Story Newsletter.”
Sincerely,
Elizabeth Shih
Principal, Storytelling Communications
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IN THIS ISSUE:
->ARTICLE 1: Countering “resilience talk”: on recovery and improvement with ecologist Philip Starks
-> SHOP NEWS
->ABOUT US
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Article One: Countering “resilience talk”: on recovery and improvement with Philip Starks
Nearly 10 years ago, I wrote and self-published an ebook (with a small print run) featuring interviews with local artists, entrepreneurs and other creatives. The central concept of “resilience” was much used in conversation at the time, and I suggested it was a “keyword” (to use Raymond Williams’ concept)—a word that describes the nature of society by reflecting its shifting values, and that acts as a barometer of social change.
Since that time, use of the word “resilience” has resurged as a buzzword, to the point of becoming cliché—as the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips says—a word that reduces its user to a “ventriloquist’s dummy.” When we use clichés, we parrot the thinking and language of someone else who pulls the proverbial strings.
That means, as Phillips said in a recent interview, that we lose our free-will and the power to think for ourselves. Since Trump took office in the US, especially, I’ve begun to distrust how easily “resilience” (as a word) has entered common parlance, noticing how superficially it is used, that it seldom reflects social change or values as it did in some cases, back in 2017.
So I was heartened this summer to read a pithy article in the online magazine, “Psyche,” written by Tufts’ University behavioural ecologist, (Dr.) Philip T. Starks. I welcome Starks’ article, entitled “True resilience is not about bouncing back,” and wish I’d had the opportunity to speak to him on the topic 10 years ago, when I was thinking and writing on it.
He writes forthrightly: “I hate talk of resilience: it places an expectation on people to return to how they were. That’s not how real recovery works.”
Starks continues: The term has “become one of our favourite compliments. People praise resilient children, resilient workers, resilient patients, resilient communities. The word shows up in school mission statements, corporate emails and therapy offices. It sounds humane and encouraging. But . . . it does something else: it lets the person doing the praising back away . . . When someone calls a person resilient, they reassure themselves that whatever happened to that person didn’t really change anything—not that person, and certainly not themselves.”
Starks cites engineering as a field where “resilience” has a somewhat “more precise meaning: how quickly a system returns to baseline after a disturbance. How fast a bridge stops shaking after an earthquake. How rapidly a power grid stabilizes after a surge.”
In his own field of ecology, Starks says that early on, the “resilience of ecosystems [was] measured as return time in equilibrium,” until, in the 1970s, ecologist C.S. Holling argued that “real ecological resilience wasn’t about snapping back,” as engineers would have it. Instead, it was “about persistence: the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance, reorganize and continue—retaining its identity [but] often in a changed form.
While Holling’s distinction was crucial, it wasn’t well received. Starks says that “outside the ecology literature, and increasingly even within it, the simpler, engineering definition of “resilience” won out. What moved easily across disciplines and into public life, where I read about it, mostly lacked “Holling’s complexity,” conveying instead “a safer, more convenient idea—resilience stripped of its teeth neutered down to endurance.”
The unease I felt as I copy edited my book in 2017 (and so refused to write a conclusion for it) was that the “public life” the term “resilience” was gaining seemed to connote a person’s health and even cheerfulness, when neither was necessarily at hand.
Starks says: “This is why resilience has such cultural appeal. Part of the appeal is that calling someone resilient in the endurance sense sounds kind. It feels like encouragement rather than judgment. But communicating kindness without taking any responsibility is just a way to make yourself feel more comfortable—that everything will be OK. The word ‘resilient’ reassures the speaker that they’ve done their part” when, as I (Elizabeth) worry, no substantive action or difference has necessarily developed.
To be clear, the interviewees in my book moved from endurance toward change, but the shift was hard-won, required much collaboration with supportive family and community; and ultimately, had no guarantee of permanence.
Holling had distinguished endurance, for getting through what the military terms preventable conditions, from recovery, which meant getting better. Yet, 30 years later, when I read recent instances of the use of “resilience,” I notice that we resist just as strongly Holling’s (1970s) distinction and confuse endurance with lasting recovery or growth. (I’m reminded of Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant, amongst others, who in the late 2010s aligned “resilience” with the easy positivity of another catch phrase–“post-traumatic growth.” They hurried to latch onto a concept of “growth” when the sufferer may not have felt the shock and worked through the trauma.)
Across disciplines in academia, business and beyond, cultural confusion of endurance with genuine recovery has serious consequences. Starks writes: “Whereas endurance can be demanded of someone, recovery requires support. Glorifying endurance shifts attention away from systems and places expectations on to individuals.” That’s very convenient when oligarchs and despots usurp political power around the globe.
Being “resilient,” Holling says, has been used “as praise for enduring conditions that were often unnecessary or preventable. The words would stop the conversation, putting an end to any further reflection or reform. If you were resilient, the system didn’t have to be. Even when it’s well-intended, talk of ‘resilience,’ as we use it in everyday conversation, often functions as a protective shield for the broken institutions around the person who is enduring harm.”
If we stay true to science, when we think and speak of “resilience,” Starks writes, “the whole point of a disturbance is that it changes the system. The hurricane that batters the coast doesn’t make the beach ‘resilient’ in the colloquial sense. It reshapes it, resizes it.” That was Holling’s point.
I extrapolate to the forest fire that decimated much of Jasper National Park only two years ago. The disaster did not “return the land to what it was.” Starks writes as an ecologist that “the land is reshaped, and what grows back is something new. We don’t talk enough about the cost of ‘bouncing back,’: the wear and tear, the scar tissue, the strain that never fully heals. We admire apparent recovery without counting what accumulated along the way.”
Here, the unease we can feel now surrounding the term “resilience” is due to the political and social quietism it engenders.
Starks further calls out a “quiet statistical trick,” a “survivorship bias” that has become embedded in our “resilience talk”: “Modern culture celebrates the people who make it through hardship and treats them as proof that the system works. Too often, we fail to count those who didn’t have the support, safety or luck to endure it at all. Praise replaces accountability. . . .We validate a filter that selects for the fortunate and calls it excellence.”
Across all fields of academia, business and vocational life, Starks says that “many people treat the path of success as meritocracy, conveniently forgetting the role of circumstance” and luck: “Modern society attributes the survivor’s status to grit, ignoring the invisible scythes—such as bad advice or simple misfortune—that harvest the rest.”
We focus on those who “reached the podium,” not the “ghosts of others” who were discarded by “shifts in funding” or “a lack of pedigree”; or the entrepreneurs who lost the “high-stakes gamble faced by the startup founder.”
Starks’ grievance is that this is why stories of resilience are so seductive: “they spotlight the survivor and erase the system that selected for survival in the first place.”
So what can be done to address the inward-turning, false and survivorship bias that have taken root in contemporary stories and “talk” of “resilience?” Starks suggests a different metaphor, that is “closer to biology and less self-flattering.”
Think, he says, of athletes who exercise by regularly lifting weights: in the process, “they do damage. [They] tear muscle fibres. Then if [they] rest, eat and recover, [their] body rebuilds them stronger. Stress plus recovery equals growth. Skip the rest or the nutrition, and you don’t get stronger—you get hurt. Rather than being a form of resilience, the process of muscle growth involves adaptation.”
In human culture, “the same logic holds . . . . You break down, repair and rebuild something new. The challenge itself doesn’t make you stronger, your response does. No recovery, no gain. In the gym, we understand this. In life, we pretend the damage didn’t happen and call it strength.” 
Furthermore, our muscles “don’t love the tear,” but “rebuild because the body takes care of them.” Starks concludes that his opening “hatred” for “resilience talk” is that it is “cowardly.” Resilience talk “makes pain tidy. It replaces responsibility with admiration. Praising endurance is easier than changing conditions and far more comfortable than staying present with suffering . . .
When we call ourselves resilient, we hide the truth that growth hurts and leaves marks. . . . But our bodies [and minds] remember. Our relationships remember. Our communities remember.” And, from that, they struggle. And, I’d add, in the domain of the literature and literary theory in which I was educated, we must recognize that there is seldom lasting (and certainly not easy) “re(-)membering” of the damage done.
“Without care,” Starks confirms, “damage just accumulates.”
So what alternative do we have to the bias and falseness of recent “resilience talk?” Starks observes that we “don’t need a new buzzword. We need an honest one.”
He suggests “recovery” or “rehabilitation” (neither very flashy) and argues that we need to support and use “environments that allow repair. For children, that means stable adults, predictable routines, chances to rest and reconnect. For adults, it’s permission to slow down, seek care, rebuild trust and start small again. None of that fits on a motivational poster, but it works.”
I certainly have stopped calling others “resilient” or (even worse) I never ask others to “be resilient”—which, Starks has shown is “asking them to stay the same.” He observes that we abandon the process of genuine recovery when the people involved “are old enough to be praised instead of protected.”
Starks’ article (and part of what drew me to it) is his insistence that “the language we use matters.” There is no use or self-respect in becoming a “ventroloquist’s dummy” for morally empty “resilience talk”; that’s apparent to me, as a long-time English major and teacher of language. I’m sure it’s clear to my readers, as well.
Back in 2016 and 2017, when I read theories of resilience with curiosity and pondered them as the starting point for a short collection of interviews, I optimistically thought “resilience” might be that “keyword” from Raymond Williams (a concept vastly different from today’s “buzzword”). I offered my reflections on “resilience” before the word and its use had become cemented as “resilience talk.”
I pored over a word that appeared to describe the nature of society, to reflect its shifting values, and potentially to be a barometer of social change. How diminishing to find that “resilience talk” instead reflects society’s aversion to feelings, especially to pain, and to the often inconvenient processes of recovery.
Starks closes as powerfully as he began: “When we tell people to be resilient, we ask them to stay the same. When we talk about recovery, we invite change. One hides pain; the other honours it. One imagines a spring snapping back; the other imagines repair through time and care.”
Just as we believe in neo-natal intensive care for the most vulnerable premature infant, or casts and rest for anyone’s broken bones, Starks says, “we should offer the same grace for the invisible injuries—the social, emotional, or moral ones. Resilience says ‘return.” Recovery says ‘grow.’ I don’t want resilience. I want improvement.”
What might recovery as growth for invisible injuries look like for you, for those you care for and for our troubled planet?
Please write in; I’d be delighted to hear from you.
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SHOP NEWS:
I continue to appreciate the nearly weekly webinars on professional issues for ESL teachers, offered by my training institute, TEFL.org, by host Carl Cameron Day and tech strategist, Alan Moir.
These two gifted and experienced teachers share useful knowledge and hands-on marketing strategies in their presentations and on-demand Q&A periods.
I have no doubt that TEFL.org has earned its B-Corps certification status for responsible company culture, and fair treatment of both learners and teachers alike.
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I’ve enjoyed teaching pronunciation issues to a fourth newcomer and to two groups of economic immigrants who are employed by a manufacturing company in north Saskatoon.
I especially appreciate the learners who jump feet first into the concepts and processes I share, especially because real change in speaking has been estimated (by speech-language pathologists) to require at least three to four months of intensive, directed practice. . . .
And it has been fortifying to see the growth of the Ukrainian refugee living in Saskatoon whom I tutor via the Toronto-based charity, FindHaven.org . After last year’s long and dreary winter, I’m glad to see this newcomer faring well and studying English with much dedication.
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Thanks to fellow writer Greg Gilroy and Betty Gilroy for sharing some of their retirement time with me, as I close files on my late mother’s passing.
Our families were close as we “grew up,” enjoying fun as well as losses; I appreciate remembering some of those shared times.
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Thanks to “happily retired” communications friends Michael and Jackie Robin (the latter, a favourite editor of mine), and my many-year friend, Dani Van Driel, for sharing good conversation (and some lovely peonies that followed), over (another!) artisan ice cream at “Fable” in Holiday Park.
While summer is still with us (and therefore underpins my repeating this promotion), I encourage you to try Fable’s homemade ice cream, on Avenue H, across from Riversdale Park.
Fable favours fresh fruit densely combined with cream, instead of sugar and preservatives. A waffle cone and single scoop feel like a full meal—and one served by local youth in the community. (Disclosure: I receive no affiliate fee for recommending Fable or any other businesses in our city.)
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Special thanks to the always energetic and generous Fafa Ahianonu at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian for leading the children’s worship programming throughout the program year.
This month and next, I look forward to stepping in to assist these young minds and souls, through leading the children’s programming, while Fafa takes an epic journey to her birthplace of Ghana.
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And thank you, good readers, for continuing to read and reflect on this newsletter, now into its 16th year of production.
There are always new stories and new people to promote in “Shop News.” But this is a wrap for mid-July.
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ABOUT US:
Between 2011 and December 2018, Elizabeth Shih Communications chronicled the stories of B2B marketing and communications on the Prairies and across the country.
Effective January 1, 2019, I rebranded as “Storytelling Communications.” I teach economic immigrants to secure better jobs or larger contracts by improving their English language skills.
In doing so I help them to integrate into our community and marketplace more easily than they would working (in isolation) alone.
Interested in learning more? Please contact me through my (still CASL-compliant) website (www.elizabethshih.com)
After I receive your message, I’ll be pleased to discuss projects with you!
Please visit my website for more information (www.storytellingcommunications.ca).
