Why are some people more resilient than others?
Resilience is the ability to adapt in face of stressors and challenges, persisting towards your goals or finding new goals to work towards.
In the previous blog post in the series, we've looked in depth into what resilience is, as well as how to train it. However, although resilience can be trained, some people are just naturally more resilient than others. This is often connected to people facing certain situations in early childhood that forced them to be resilient, such as moving from place to place and being forced to learn to adapt to big changes like their residence. However, natural resilience is also tied in to people having the characteristics and behaviour which is observed in resilient people. More about these characteristics can be learned in Blog #2: How to train resilience for actionable tips to help you.
Childhood factors that increase resilience
Here are some of the factors that increase resilience in children:
Having at least one stable, supportive relationship with a parent, guardian, or other adult.
Having opportunities to strengthen adaptive skills. Adaptive skills are everyday skills needed to function and meet the demands of one’s environment. Examples include communication skills, self-care skills, problem solving, and social skills.
Building a sense of self-efficacy and perceived control. Simplified, it is the belief that your actions will make a difference. For example, you feel that you can stand up for yourself against adversaries and achieve results. This helps in making children not feel helpless in the face of difficulties, because they know that their actions will make a difference.
Learn coping strategies to manage stress. This is achieved through experiencing “manageable stress” to learn to cope with it. These are experiences children face in their everyday life, such as arguments with friends. These experiences teach positive coping strategies such as rational thinking (thinking the problem through), exercising to ease the stress, and writing or drawing it out.
Avoiding repeated exposure to uncontrollable stress and trauma.
Mindset
A positive mindset is having positive expectations that things will turn out well and that you will succeed. It is the difference between saying "I can't" versus "I can't YET".
Try to remain hopeful: part of being resilient is thinking "this isn't all, I'll get over this and things will get better."
Blog #2: How to train resilience has a lot more tips for improving your mindset.
Please remember that having a positive mindset does not mean not having negative thoughts and/or never falling into depression. A positive mindset is attempting to have a positive outlook on things, but it does not rid you of negative emotions.
Conclusion
The events in one's life that play a role on one's resilience. However, the outlook on those events is what makes the bigger difference. Resilience can be trained at any point of one’s life, so check out Blog #2: How to train resilience for actionable tips to help you!