I get knocked down, but I get up again

The Retune Blog - 12th July 2024

If, like me, you've been watching Euro24 you might have noticed a change in the tone of how the commentators have been talking about the England team. During the group stages the general spirit was one of resignation that things weren’t working. But the narrative has started to change to one of resilience. After the semi-final victory over the Netherlands the tone was characterised by commentators speaking of a team which could face adversity and pull through.

It’s an interesting change of perspective, and one that has a fantastic life lesson at its heart: Things don’t always go the way we planned, but we can still get back up and carry on. And there’s no better song for expressing this than Chumbawamba’s Tubthumping:

I get knocked down, but I get up again. You are never gonna keep me down.

In psychological terms, this skill is known as resilience, and as a skill it’s something that we can practise and get better at. But the skill is based on a perspective, note the defiance in the never gonna keep me down. This form of resilience can be seen as being expressed in three different ways:

• Resistance resilience - standing strong through hard times.

• Recovery resilience - getting back up when knocked down and going back to where you were.
• Reconfiguration resilience - getting back up and developing the perspective that you can use the experience to make you stronger and know yourself better.

I think the third of these is the one that really helps us to stay motivated. When things don’t go as we planned, we can learn a lot about ourselves and how we see the world. If we then incorporate this into how we live (this is known as post-traumatic growth) we can begin not just to survive, but to thrive.

So, I’m not so sure that “He drinks a Whiskey drink, he drinks a Vodka drink. He drinks a Lager drink, he drinks a Cider drink” helps us to grow, but getting back up again certainly can.

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