It’s a new year and there is so much hype on shopping sales, spending tips, diet programs, resolutions etc, to kick-start your year. I’m jumping on that bandwagon, but promoting a life skill called RESILENCE!!!
I read Dr Karen Reivichs’: The Seven ‘Learnable’ Skills of Resilience a few days ago and I decided to blog on it, generating 20 points and expanding them to the best of my ability.
The post in context:
It focuses on several ways to build resilience in order to have the capacity to cope and feel competent dealing with your daily affairs.
What is Resilience?
It is the ability to spring back from and successfully adjust to the complex issues of life. Yourdictionary.com defines resilience as the the ability to recover strength, spirits, good humour from your frustrations.
This list will help you cross examine various areas of your life and identify useful ways of building resilience in difficult times.
The benefits of building resilience are as follows:
- You enjoy positive moods that are good for your health.
- It enables you handle and cope with various forms of pressure.
- It builds optimism living through life’s difficulties.
- It creates progress in different areas of your life.
- It facilitates change.
In no particular order here are 20 ways of building resilience.
- Discover your purpose for living.
- Be confident in who you are.
- Try as hard as you can to identify and exercise control over your feelings/emotions. Don’t let it get the worst of you, bringing out the frightful child or wild beast in you.
- Think carefully before making decisions.
- Take life one step at a time.
- Develop a realistic form of optimism.
- Build confidence in your ability to solve problems.
- Learn to accept and adapt to change.
- Don’t give up easily; find out what you are good at.
- Create reasonable goals in order to resolve various problems
- Be sensitive to the feelings of other people.
- Analyse the problems you face with a view to finding a resolution for it.
- Be willing to take risks and try out new things/ideas.
- Focus on your strengths and accomplishments.
- Build positive relationships with friends, family, colleagues.
- Take care of yourself physically, mentally and spiritually.
- Engage in self discovery.
- Develop a healthy level of self esteem.
- Avoid blowing events out of proportion.
- Maintain a positive attitude.
Could you come up with other useful ways of building resilience?
I look forward to your comments and suggestions.
Ayo Olaniyan is a certified Unitive Life Coach, an Accredited Professional Counsellor with the Counselling Society and the editor of The Life Skills Magazine. For further information, please complete this form.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Hello, Ayo, I admit, I don’t give much thought to my resilience. I just assume that when I get knocked down, I bounce back eventually. But your enlightening post lets me see that there are things we can do to fortify our resilience. And your list, essentially, promotes mindfulness, peace, love and other things that help us be as close to our true selves as possible. In other words, this list can help keep our essence intact — not diluted or watered-down. It keeps us from dying slowly inside; you know, when a negative experience doesn’t exactly kill us but it slowly kills our spirit.
Thank you for a thought-provoking post!
hello belinda,
Believing you would bounce back eventually when you get knocked down at times highlights optimism. Optimism is one of the factors required to build resilience and you right by saying there are several things we can do to fortify our resilience.
One more thing, thanks for your kind words.
i loved this article ayo.