I am in the midst of significant change – which is testing every fibre of my resilience muscle! I coach clients who are or have gone through a very similar experience, and I am growing to appreciate that one can adequately prepare for such events. Have you ever wondered why some people sail through life’s storms, while others are knocked down? Resilience is the answer!
A Short Definition of Resilience
Resilience is our ability to respond well to challenges and setbacks, to persist in the face of failure rather than give up, to cope effectively with stress, and to recover from difficult experiences.
Building resilience is the key to turning everyday challenges into successes.
This article outlines what resilience means and which factors contribute to a resilient character. Fortunately, resilience can be learned and trained, and I would like to take this opportunity to share some of my experiences as it relates to my current life challenge. Shall we begin?
What is Meant by Resilience?
Resilience can be viewed as a form of protective shield for our soul. It is the ability to cope with the demands and challenges of our daily work, duties, and life in general. Being resilient means staying healthy, recovering fast, and making the best out of challenges and setbacks. It
is especially important to proactively prepare for future challenges.
We need resilience when we want to achieve something or when we are faced with a crisis. We all face problems, setbacks, or challenges from time to time. These can be internal (e.g. lack of certain skills) or external (e.g. job loss).
Resilient people can adapt to change and are prepared for future challenges. They react flexibly to the demands of changing situations.
Examples of Resilience
- Mastering stress and difficult situations
- Maintaining balance and health during difficult times
- Dealing successfully with health problems
- A person who has the amazing feeling of being in control of life
- Staying calm in the face of challenges and problems
- Transforming failure into success
I have listed the key attributes that it takes to become a resilient person. You may have mastered already a few of them but others might still offer room for improvement. So, take a look at all of them and identify which qualities you want to particularly focus on while training and building your resilience.
Training & Building Your Resilience Muscle: Tips and Exercises That Will Help You (Which Have Helped Me and My Coaching Clients)
Finding & Understanding One’s Purpose in Life
What’s my purpose and destiny in life? Why do I get up in the morning? Trying to answer life’s biggest question can be a massive challenge. However, investing the time and effort to find out your purpose and destiny in life will set you up for success in the long run.
People who have a clear purpose and direction for their lives find it easier to bounce back in challenging times by providing perspective, stability, confidence, and determination. It’s much harder to be defeated when you are passionate, skilful, and purposeful about your life journey.
Understanding this will support you to be more resilient. While some people get knocked down and stay right there, resilient people bounce back from their setbacks with a smile on their faces and are ready to overcome the next challenges.
Your Resilience Journey – Living Authentically
One element to becoming more resilient is living authentically. Being authentic means coming from a real place within (our heart). We live authentically when our actions and words are congruent with our values, attitudes and beliefs. It means living our true selves.
Living an authentic life involves following one’s passion and being connected to our natural abilities, strengths, desires, and talents. It is being ourselves, not an imitation of what we think we should be or have been told we should be. There is no “should” in being authentic.
To live our true selves requires to know who we are (our values and strengths). It means we have to examine our current life. We should identify the areas in which we already live our values, identify where we already leverage our strengths, and which areas offer room for improvement.
Exploring and Strengthening Our Sense of Self
Our sense of self refers to our perception of the collection of attributes that define us. Our personality traits, abilities, the things we like and dislike, our belief system or moral code, strengths, weaknesses and the things that motivate us – these all contribute to our unique identity as a person. Being aware of these attributes leads to healthy self-esteem and that increases our resilience.
If it’s easy for us to define these aspects means we have a quite strong sense of who we are. But even if we find it hard: Don’t worry! Sense of self can be trained.
Examine Our Inner Dialogue and Gain More Self-Awareness
After learning more about our sense of self, it’s time to increase our self-awareness. This results in healthy self-esteem, and thus a better resilience whenever we need it.
A great way to increase our self-awareness is to monitor our inner dialogue. The inner dialogue is quite simply your thoughts. It is the little voice in your head that comments on your life, whether that is what is going on around you, what you’re doing, or what you are thinking consciously or subconsciously. Ideally, we don’t judge ourselves while analysing our inner dialogue. We take the perspective of a neutral observer (bird’s eye view). Is our dialogue mostly positive and encouraging or does it tend to be negative?
Becoming More Resilient by Staying Healthy
A healthy lifestyle will help you thrive and flourish throughout your life. Making healthy choices isn’t always easy. Finding the time, motivation, and energy to exercise regularly, prepare healthy meals, or getting enough sleep can be a massive challenge. However, your efforts will pay off in many ways. It will not only increase your feeling of well-being but also strengthen your resilience.
Planning a healthy lifestyle is very straightforward, but the key to success is persisting to do it. This is especially challenging when under pressure or stress.
Establishing a Work-Home Transition Routine
Many people battle to leave work behind when at home and vice versa. They still feel stressed and have a hard time switching off after a workday. This is especially true for people who work from home.
Being able to switch off is important to maintain a good life-work integration and to stay resilient in stressful and challenging times. Creating a work-home transition routine is a great way to draw a line between work and free time.
Recognising and Managing Your Emotions and MoodHow to Cope With Stress And Become More Resilient
Our emotions are powerful. They influence our mood, how we feel, how we interact with other people, and how we perceive the world around us (our perception-filter). They also influence how we deal with challenges and problems.
Managing and controlling your emotions will support you become mentally stronger. Gaining control over them requires self-awareness of your current emotional state and the ability to manage it.
Training this muscle will help you to master stress and challenges better, and will have a positive effect on your well-being and your relationships. Managing your emotions and mood is an important attribute to becoming more resilient.
How to Cope With Stress And Become More Resilient
As I have mentioned already, many of us are facing challenges or tasks that can be stressful, overwhelming, and cause strong emotions, and adversely impact our mood. Learning to cope with stress healthily will make you a lot more resilient.
Stress can cause the following:
Feelings of anxiety, depression, anger, sadness, worry, numbness, or frustration
Difficulty concentrating or making decisions
Difficulty sleeping, nightmares, and restlessness
Physical symptoms, like headaches, body pains, feeling tense, and other problems
Worsening of chronic health problems
Worsening of mental health conditions
The first step in reducing your stress is to establish how stressed you are right now, by taking a look at your stress-related symptoms and triggers. It is important not only to understand what causes stress for you but also how it is affecting your well-being. I encourage my coaching clients to us a ‘stress journal’. This is a great tool to get insights and emotional distance, which will help you to take another perspective.
Once this is done it’s time to find ways for coping with this stress and to reduce or eliminate it.
Self-Efficacy And Why Believing in Yourself Matters
Self-efficacy is the belief in yourself. It’s the level of confidence in your ability to succeed in specific situations or accomplish a task or goal.
Someone with high levels of self-efficacy for a challenge or task will be resilient and persistent in the face of hurdles and setbacks, while someone with low levels of self-efficacy for that challenge may disengage or avoid the situation.
That’s why self-efficacy is an important component when comes to building resilience.
How to stand up for your own opinion and convictions (even when no one else agrees with you)?
Many people find it very hard to stand up for their own opinion, especially when no one else agrees with them. This is particularly tricky with so-called authorities such as parents, teachers, or our boss, but it can also be a challenge when talking to friends.
There are various reasons why we decide not to stand for our position:
We want to avoid arguments or being criticised, we want to be accepted instead.
Perhaps we are also afraid of critical questioning that forces us to justify our point of view with numerous arguments. In these cases, it is usually more convenient to remain silent or to agree with the opinion of the majority (peer pressure).
Expressing and standing up for your own opinion, which may differ from the mass opinion, usually requires a healthy portion of self-confidence.
The first step is to become aware of your own opinion. You could ask yourself – when confronted with a statement:
Do I agree?
Do I have doubts or the feeling that there’s something wrong with this?
Is there any evidence missing that would convince me? (Ask the other person to prove their point)
What’s my point of view on this?
What reasons support my opinion?
Do I only follow this opinion because everyone else does?
The next and much more difficult step is to express and stand up for your own opinion, even when no one else agrees with you. That’s where many people fail. The reasons have already been mentioned above.
At first, it might seem to be the safe and more convenient way to just stay silent or to agree with others, but this can be dangerous:
Not standing up for your own opinion could lead to an inner conflict that builds up over time and gets bigger and bigger. It does not matter in which area of our lives we remain silent, whether it is at work, in our partnership, or among friends.
We feel more and more dissatisfied and frustrated. The hurdle to stand up for your point of view gets bigger and bigger every time. You become less authentic.
The only way out of this dilemma is to express and defend your own beliefs and opinion more and more often. You can train it with less significant topics (e.g. when discussing what to eat today with your family).
Over time you will gain the confidence to express your opinion on every topic without giving in when no one else agrees with you. This leads to increased self-confidence, appearing stronger, and is an important element in building your resilience.
A simple exercise is to practice in front of a mirror. Express your point of view on certain topics and imagine how you would react to critics. Try to understand which experience and knowledge eventually led to your belief and support your opinion.
A Robust Personal Support Network
Social support means having friends and other people, including family, to turn to in times of need or crisis. This support boosts the quality of life and provides a buffer against adverse life events.
Our personal network kicks in where our abilities and know-how end. It’s a system of giving, receiving, and sharing within a community of like-minded people. This kind of support is exceptionally important for maintaining good physical and mental health. Overall, it appears that positive social support can enhance our resilience to stress.
Having access to such a network is valuable when we’re looking for advice, feedback, or psychological and physical help. Some challenges and problems can be difficult to overcome when alone and unsupported.
It makes you mentally stronger, enhances your confidence, and amplifies your possibilities to overcome challenges, difficult situations, and problems.
Vice versa you can bring in your strengths and qualities where others need them (making them more resilient).
Achieving a Healthy Life-Work Integration
Life-Work Integration is a broad concept including proper prioritising between “life” (Health, pleasure, leisure, family, and spiritual development) on the one hand and “work” (career and ambition) on the other.
Having a healthy Life-Work Integration contributes to your resilience. An integrated life (that is well balanced) leads to more energy, physical and psychological health, and for that reason to a better ability to deal with stress, hurdles, and challenges.
Become a Solution Finder And Possibility Thinker
We all face complicated challenges and problems in our lives that can sometimes seem impossible to overcome. Problems that can keep us up at night and leave us feeling exhausted and frustrated.
But there’s no need to despair. Even when we feel like we’ll never come up with the right solution, there are strategies we can use to reposition and refresh our thinking. We can learn to become a possibility thinker and solution finder.
Try to come up with creative solutions to your most difficult challenges and problems. It often just takes a fresh perspective to find a way out of a seemingly helpless situation.
It’s about gaining distance (emotionally) and getting a new perspective to find creative solutions for small and big challenges. This could be using unusual helpers or methods that are not even thought of at first opens up in many cases unusual, but very effective solutions.
It’s about letting go our belief systems and expanding them creatively. Think about possibilities and options. This ability will strengthen your resilience and self-efficacy. You will learn to listen to your intuition (inner voice) and also become more optimistic because you know you can always rely on your solution-finding skills.
Conclusion
I hope you find these tips helpful and that you will apply some of them in your life. If you want to start building your resilience right now – feel free to reach out to me. I offer Coaching in the area of resilience as an accredited facilitator of the Synergistix Resilience™
Training Programme (https://quintuswealth.co.za)