‘We are built to bounce back’: UAE educators say resilience is key to success

Resilience – the ability to recover from challenges – is not a learned behaviour but a biological gift that needs to be nurtured through education, experts said during a session titled ‘Grit factor: Resilience skills for tomorrow’ at the Gulf News Edufair Dubai 2025.

Dr Christopher Abraham, CEO and Head of Dubai Campus, and Director of Executive Education at SP Jain School of Global Management, said resilience is a biologically endowed blessing for all human beings.

“All of us human beings are endowed with this amazing gift to be resilient. We all go through challenges – financial, health, relationships, family, personal, professional. So, to live this biologically endowed blessing, we have to understand it,” Dr Abraham said.

He cautioned that external negativity often weakens people’s natural ability to bounce back. “Your brain biologically knows that it can bounce back, but the narrative that comes from outside is not very encouraging. So, it has a dilemma. And there are times when it also does what you call learned helplessness. Getting up every time is the most important. We are not cut out to fail. We are cut out for success.”

Addressing the role of failure in building character, he said: “Most of us from the Asian-African context have this phenomenon that we need to succeed in everything. Nothing wrong in that aspiration. But the greatest success stories – like Michael Jordan – show us that failure is part of growth. The celebration of failure should be part and parcel of our vocabulary.”

Omer Khan, Team Leader, Admission, Jaipur National University, said parents play a crucial role. “Parents have to motivate their child to do things in life, and not compare them,” he said.
Parents, Khan noted, need to look beyond engineering and medical field.
“These AI courses are introduced to help students understand that they are future-ready programmes. We do need engineers and doctors in the market, but without experts in areas such as cybersecurity and artificial intelligence, we won’t be able to survive.”
Dr Abraham called for a shift from traditional education choices.
“STEM today has evolved into STEAM, bringing in humanities and arts. Till you die, you have to continuously keep learning. We say learn, unlearn, relearn,” Dr Abraham added.