How To Train Resilience
“Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.” - Helen Keller
Resilience is the ability to adapt in face of stressors and challenges, persisting towards your goals or finding new goals to work towards. It involves behaviours, thoughts and actions, and therefore can be trained. This blog aims to provide you with tips that will help you with building up your resilience.
Beat The Streets cares a lot about building up resilience in children and youth. A big key to being resilient is a positive mindset, as it fosters the idea that everything will turn out okay and you will succeed. Please take note that being resilient does not mean not experiencing difficulty, distress, or depression. Self-esteem allows you to continue fighting despite setbacks and failures because you believe you are capable of achieving your goals.
Positive thinking
Positive thinking means having positive expectations that things will turn out well and that you will succeed. This gives courage to persist with life changes and stand up to challenges. Here is how you can train yourself to think more positively:
Identify areas of change: Ask yourself, what aspects of your life do you think negatively about? Then, start focusing on trying to think positive. For example: instead of thinking "I don’t like my job," try thinking "my job helps me pay my bills and gives me an opportunity to live."
During the day, pause and consider what you’re thinking: If your thoughts are negative, try to put a positive spin on them.
Studies have shown that exercise positively affects mood and reduces stress. Blog #8 will go into detail on how exercise helps with stress management, as well as tips to utilise the great stress reducer.
Purpose
A sense of purpose helps people overcome challenges and not let events in their lives define them, because they have something to strive towards. Here is how you can tap into the benefit of purpose:
Help others: This fosters self-worth, which empowers you to grow your resilience.
Set goals and move towards them. This gives you both a sense of purpose and a sense of accomplishment, which grows your self-esteem and therefore your resilience.
Self discovery: search to understand yourself, and find your purpose.
Embracing Change
By embracing change and being adaptable, you are better equipped to respond to abrupt changes in your life. Resilient people embrace change and find new opportunities in it. A positive mindset helps with finding opportunities in the changes that occur.
Problem Solving Skills
People who are practiced in coming up with solutions to problems are better equipped to handle the problems in their own life. Here is how you can improve your problem solving skills:
Whenever you encounter a challenge, jot down a list of things you could do to solve it.
Evaluate the effectiveness of your solution to better your problem-solving skills every time.
Conclusion
Being resilient helps people withstand and recover better from life crises. Resilience can be trained, and the tips above will help you on your journey of training. Refer back to this blog anytime to refresh your memory!