So what is Resilience?

Resilience as both process and outcome involves overcoming adversity or navigating challenging life events through psychological, social and behavioural flexibility and adaptation to internal or external stresses or demands.

Factors, such as how people make sense of and interact with the world, the availability and quality of social support, and specific coping strategies, can also play a role in how well people adapt to adversities. Several areas of psychological research show we can develop some of the resources and skills related to resilience.

Resilience is defined as ‘the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness’.

I believe it is much more than that and the 5 Pillars of Resilience is a great tool to help you to build it.

• Self-consciousness
• Intention
• Taking care of your health: self-care
• Relations
• Mindfulness

Self-consciousness

The more self-aware you are, the more resilient you become, namely the way you feel about something at a given moment, or the way you reacted to a fellow human being. Your thoughts and feelings are always subject of your decision-making. The best way to gain more and and areas for improvement. To explore more and more how you handled and reacted to a situation, try something new.

Intention

It matters to have a reason, what I needed was a basis for starting a business to empower people in achieving their best life, for you it might be entirely different; you might want to improve your work situation, or improve your health and wellbeing. That is why it is worth establishing new targets and aims. Write down 5 new things you would like to achieve this year. Then begin to focus, what is going to make it happen? Write that down too, perhaps you have a large goal that you need to break down to smaller chunks in order to make it more realistic/possible/findable.

Taking care of your health: self-care

This will give you more energy and keep you charged up, reduce your stress levels and provide you the opportunity for some self refreshing. You will be best at work.

Self-care can be as simple as doing something you love, eating better food, or walking your dog. Go where your happy place is and spend more time there.

Relations

Resilience buffs healthy relationships. First, there’s no doubt that good relationships are smart. Evidence abounds that social relationships boost health (both mental and physical). In fact, the reasons why they are so often good for us in tough times boil down to the fact that we are psychologically and physiologically buffered from the effects of suffering when we’re not dealing with it alone. Apparently, resilience and social relationships are two sides of the same coin – and they also help each other out when times are hard.

Work harder on the relationships you have already got, and better relationships.

Mindfulness

Then I bring mindfulness to the centre of my life: living in the now, appreciating what has real value in life, such as my health, relationships, connection and roof over my head. Mindfulness can contribute to resilience. It compassion, and is the big muscle we need to flex in life.

Yet resilience helps us emerge stronger: it is our ability to bounce back from the roller-coasters of lifecourse change. Resilience to the adverse mental, physical and social consequences of change, whether it comes from a volcano, a pandemic or the daily threats of ageing, is one of the best and most persistent health determinants we know.

Coping with challenges

There are things in life that can cause stress and setbacks, and that you can’t avoid. It’s possible that you’re going through a series of challenges, or you’ve experienced a traumatic event that you find difficult to cope with. If you know that you have the ability to cope with adversity, you might know that you will be able to get through it.

Using coping strategies to deal with something stressful that is happening to you in your life currently could enable you to find a way of keeping on top of things. There are many different coping mechanisms associated with stress and people are individuals, therefore we all deal with our stress in different ways. Anything that you can do to alleviate and reduce stress in that moment that is not harmful towards your health and wellbeing could be worth a go, including:

• taking time out to relax
• exercise or meditation
• breaking a challenge down into small, achievable goals
• celebrating achieving your goals
• keeping a journal
• thinking about the big picture

Life can often speed us up to a point where we are on autopilot or going through the motions and not actually doing anything purposefully — with focus. So it’s so much better to slow things down, to take that space, to allow for reflection, and to ensure that you are true to what’s important to you all about. And that is what will build you up again.