What is resilience and how can we strengthen it?

Resilience is not about a life free of challenges. It is about our ability to bounce back from those challenges.
It is about facing them head on, overcoming them and becoming stronger in the process.

Resilience is also not something you are born with. It is something that is learned and developed over time.

To make it easier to comprehend, have a look at this little comparison between someone who is resilient and someone who lacks resilience. While reading this, you might even find that at your job you are resilient but within your relationship, you lack resilience.
This gives you a great foundation to work with and take your skills from one scenario to the other.

Someone who is resilient:
- finds growth from receiving feedback rather than viewing it as a failure
- is emotionally regulated rather than be overcome with stress, overwhelm, depression or anxiety
- makes confident decisions rather than making leaky decisions
- adapts to change rather than defying it
- gets back up when knocked down rather than crashing, burning and feeling like life is over

So, it is easy to see that life gets to be better when you develop higher levels of resilience.

But how do you strengthen your ability to bounce back and be resilient in the face of adversities?

• Cultivate a growth mindset
  A growth mindset is embracing the belief that challenges and failures are opportunities for growth and learning.
  Rather than seeing obstacles as insurmountable, view them as chances to develop new skills and insights.
  A growth mindset helps you stay motivated, persistent, and adaptable in the face of adversity.

• Build a support network and positive social connections
  When “shit goes south”, having people to lean on is always going to make things better!
  They encourage and support you, give you advice and are people you can openly and honestly express your feelings to.

• Practice gratitude
  Focus on what you do have, not what you don’t.
  Gratitude allows you to see the positives, know that life isn’t over when something doesn’t go to plan and

• Develop coping mechanisms
  As I said earlier, resilience isn’t about a life free from challenges.
  You are always going to have challenges arise so developing a strategy that helps when they do to avoid overwhelm and spiraling.
  This might be talking to someone from your support network, practicing mindfulness or participating in a hobby.

• Audit and learn from adversities
  Auditing anything provides the opportunity to learn from it, improve on it and get better results next time.
  In the face of adversities, spend time journaling (or thinking!) about what went well, what could have been done better, how it has impacted you and the benefits/positives that have come from what happened.

A hot topic recently has been the spicy cough which has been an incredibly influential event in improving everyone’s resilience.
On one hand, it has been such a tragic event.
However, on the other hand, SO many positives came from it.
People learnt so much more about themselves, it made them stop for a moment, it created such awareness around their feelings.
People left relationships or job, they found hobbies, they discovered who they are, they became more appreciative and grateful.

There are always positives in situations and always opportunities to grow and develop.
We just need to seek them out sometimes.

I feel like I write it almost every blog that we talk about changing your life, however, it is always so important to practice
self-compassion, be patient with yourself and set realistic goals for yourself.
Ironic with this topic - building resilience will come from being resilience and one of the best ways to be resilient is to start with being kind to yourself when you mess up.