Resilience is our capacity to recover and bounce back under trying circumstances. That resilience can be physical, but in so many ways, we have to fight for mental resilience. Resilience is the ability to keep going in the face of failure; the ability to push through and come out stronger for it. It isn’t just surviving difficult circumstances.
There are many aspects to resilience, some of which we don’t always think of:
The ability to bounce back from failure or difficulty
Keeping your head up high in the middle of tough circumstances
Being satisfied with giving your best effort despite outcomes
Healthily coping with life’s difficulties
Determination to pick yourself back up
When it comes to building resilience, whether you’re struggling at work or fighting to develop better habits, there are three essential components, according to psychologist Susan Kobasa.
Challenge
When we look at the psychology of failure, we see that it’s necessary to view difficulty as a challenge. If we approach problems with a sense of doom or allow it to paralyze us, we render ourselves ineffective. Instead, seeing troubles as a challenge offers an opportunity to stretch ourselves, find our limits, learn something new, and grow personally and professionally.
Commitment
It’s impossible to build resilience if you lack commitment. To build resilience, we can’t crumble under the weight of the task. Commitment means you’re going to stick it out. You refuse to give up, flake, or compromise where it counts. Resilience means pushing through painful moments...because you’ve committed, either to yourself or others!
Personal Agency
Resilient people don’t focus on the things in life that they cannot change. Instead, they do their best to influence results, events, and outcomes that are, in fact, within their ability to change. They strategically target the areas where they can have the most significant impact, thereby lending a sense of pride, agency, and confidence rather than powerlessness to change the future.
These are essential qualities of a resilient person. But how do we really, truly build resilience? No matter your context, these tips will help you withstand any obstacle in your way and emerge more durable and determined than ever.
3 Daily Habits that Build Resilience
1) Get out of your comfort zone.
Resilience and flexibility go hand-in-hand. Both demand agility, quick-thinking, and the ability to move on when things don’t go as we expect them to. Part of building resilience means jumping out of your comfort zone — thereby testing your flexibility. Try new hobbies, new meals instead of your old standby, meet different people, research new topics. Be okay with spur-of-the-moment changes. Fretting about what was in the face of what is will only hinder your ability to adapt and thrive. Fill your daily life with small adventures, risks, and step beyond the safe and comfortable.
2) Free your perspective.
When confronted with failure, we easily fall into rumination. Rumination is the process of dwelling on hurt or failure, playing the events over and over in your mind. Rather than helping you discern causes and solutions, rumination only serves to hold you back from real growth and progress. Instead, it keeps you fixated on the emotional pain of failure — the anxiety, the fear, the bitter disappointment.
Break out of a cycle of rumination by shifting your perspective. Seek out a support network that can offer an objective view. Write down the events, how you feel about them, and how you want to move forward. Try to find positives in the situation when all you feel is negativity. Focusing on good things, like a better future, can help you move forward without the baggage of disappointments and failures.
3) Set short and long-term goals.
I’m a big fan of setting goals. That’s true of just about any endurance runner — goals are essential! When it comes to building resilience, a habit of goal-setting helps. That’s because it helps us clarify where we need to go. When facing a challenge, we can get lost in feelings and unfortunate circumstances. Having a goal in mind allows you to re-center on what’s important to you.
Being able to plan, step-by-step, what you want to accomplish, even in the middle of a crisis, builds that resilience that we all need. It gives us direction and purpose when we need it most!
Do you consider yourself resilient? Share what has made you this way in the comments.