Resilience is your ability to recover quickly and positively from setbacks, adapt well to change and keep going in the face of adversity. It has also been described as the ability to ‘keep going’, ‘pick yourself up’ and ‘bounce back’ when something challenging happens in your life. Resilience helps you to handle anything from a minor change to a major setback.
Everyone will experience setbacks, change, adversity and challenging and difficult times in their life and at work, whatever their level of resilience. However, the more resilient you are the quicker and more positively you will recover and bounce back and the more able you will be to keep going.
So how can you build your resilience?
Find meaning and purpose. Know what motivates and inspires you and have a strong commitment to achieving this and your goals. You will then find strength through your meaning and purpose in difficult times.
Accept the reality. Setbacks, change, adversity and challenging and difficult times are an inevitable part of life. Whenever you are faced with any of these, fully understand and accept the reality of the situation you in.
Take responsibility and be positive. Take full responsibility for the situation you are in and believe that things will improve.
Focus on what you can control. Focus all your energy into what you can control, and accept things outside your control, so that you feel on top of the situation.
Be flexible, adaptive and creative. To survive and thrive in challenging times requires you to be flexible, adaptive and creative in order to generate options, solutions and opportunities.
Persistence and hard work are key. Resilient people persist when it would be easier to give up and accept that positive results are not achieved without a lot of hard work.
Build a support network. Build a support network of trusted friends, family, contacts, colleagues, professional advisors and people that you can rely on, so you have support to call on when times get difficult.
Be decisive. Decision making is challenging in uncertain times, as information may be scant and imperfect. However, it is imperative, to use the resources and people you have available, to make decisions quickly and effectively.
Exercise emotional and behavioural control. Take control of your emotions and behaviour and stay calm and approach each day in a measured way.
Control your thinking. Unhelpful thinking can lead to stress and anxiety, resulting in poor decision making and actions. Notice how you are thinking and where it is unhelpful, think in different ways to change your perspective and outlook.
Look after your health and wellbeing. To increase your resilience, look after your health and wellbeing, both mentally and physically, so that you have the strength and reserves to meet the challenges you may face.
What changes are you going to make to build your resilience?
How to find out more
If you would like to find out more about resilience why not take one of our resilience courses on Learn Formula or CPD Formula, which include lots of resilience tips and strategies.