Personal hardiness

Abstract

Stress is a word, that more and more often describes a negative companion to our day-to-day life, either personal or professional. We meet stress on bigger and smaller occasions that can be either positive or negative to us. Long-term exposure to negative stress events causes burnout syndrome, which is known across all working professions and is more and more frequent cause of psycho- physiological illnesses. But, we are not only susceptible to stress, we cal also be resilient to it. This phenomenon is called personal hardiness, a relatively young concept of Suzanne Kobasa, developed in late seventies. Due to observations and recognitions of different values and behavior patterns, connected to stress-resilience, explorers distinguished three important characteristics (commitment, challenge and control) and combined them into a new construct. As these three characteristics personal hardiness is, though importance of early-childhood experience, susceptible for learning anytime during lifetime. As so it explores dynamics of identity and person’s capacity to integrate experience into a new system.