How to Build Your Resilience Muscle Through These 5 Implementable Steps
Resilience is one of the most crucial qualities to have to get on with your life.
Resilience is a quality that represents the psychological strength and mental stamina in a person. It’s one of the most desirable qualities to have in your psychological toolbox, that will help you get through life in the most undamaged way, and grow from your unique life experiences.
If you are resilient, you know how to bounce back from adversities and extract lessons from your experiences. You’re flexible and know how to adapt to unexpected situations. You cope with stress effectively.
You don’t latch on to negative, ruminative thoughts but instead look for solutions, with a problem-solving mindset.
While some people may be more resilient than others naturally, resilience is very much a quality that can be learned and nourished in a person at any point in their lives. It’s a muscle you get to build, that will develop with time and practice if you are willing to work on it.
Resilience is not having no problems. It’s the ability to successfully cope with those problems and adversities in life in a way that enables one’s development. In the end, it all boils down to simple but effective mindset changes, some of which we’ll tackle in this article.
Extract a Meaning & Purpose from Adverse Situations
Resilience is about a change in your whole perspective. When you view your past from the perspective of finding meaning out of your experiences, you begin to see everything in a different light.
You start to see your negative experiences as a route to where you are now as a person. You start to see how those experiences made you grow and mature into this human being you are right now, and how you are at a better point thanks to those experiences.
After all, life is a collection of trials and errors. There are going to be a lot of unpredictable events and outcomes at times. It is the natural process of what we call life. And through those errors, you most effectively learn how to be a better human.
“Once man’s search for meaning of life is successful, it not only renders him happy but also gives him the capability to cope with suffering.”
-Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
Try to see the value and meaning behind these adverse situations. If there is none that is obviously visible, extract a meaning yourself out of the situation.
Life is better when you attach meaning to it. You going through that period of your life have taught you something valuable that you couldn’t replace with anything else, and is part of your learning journey. This is the simplest meaning out of almost every situation.
Work on Your Thoughts
Your thoughts are the starting point of everything. They are the igniting flame of your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors cycle (cognitive triangle). Your thoughts are the antecedents that impact how you feel, and respectively, how you respond.
When they hold such importance, doesn't it make sense to screen them and work on them on a regular basis? A lot is going on in our heads and yet we don't have a say on what those thoughts lead us to feel and do but let them carry us away and control each aspect of our lives.
Sometimes we get lost in our thoughts so much that we get strangled in a simple problem, turning an easy issue into a complex one. Those initial thoughts impact our feelings and make us feel anxious and stressed out.
With such emotionality, we act in a way that portrays stress and anxiety, in an unhealthy way. We became the captives of our irrational thinking patterns.
It’s crucial to catch whenever those irrational voices increase their volume in your mind when you face an adverse situation, stop them in their tracks, and replace them with healthier thoughts that are in fact much more realistic and that make sense.
Identifying the irrational thoughts that make you feel terrible will be easier with practice. You just have to work on getting to know that voice and separate it from your healthy, reasonable voice. It will be a gradual process but it’s definitely worth the effort.
Work on Your Problem-Solving Skills
This skill comes hand in hand with working on your thoughts. When you work on shutting down negative thought patterns and instead cultivate a problem-solving perspective into situations, you’ll see that your problems are not as big or unsolvable as they seem to be.
What makes our problems bigger in our heads are our malicious thought patterns. They can make every tiny problem look like a death scenario.
When you increase your awareness of your thoughts, you’ll start to identify those irrational voices and put a halt to being controlled by your automatic, negative thoughts.
By doing this every time you face an adverse situation, you’ll start to find possible solutions to your problems. You’ll be a problem solver instead of a problem creator.
Instead of latching onto and making your problem even bigger than it actually is, instead of overthinking and ruminating, spend your energy and actively work on being aware when the troubling thoughts come to your mind and how to replace them with something healthier.
To practice this, you can put your negative thoughts on paper and work your brain on creating solutions for those things that give you trouble. When you start looking up solutions and writing, you’ll see how many solutions are there and can be implemented.
Catch those thoughts mid-air and instead give ears to a healthier voice coming inside your mind that you can pass that obstacle, it’s not the end of the world, and everything will be okay.
Embrace Change & Learn to Adapt, and Be Flexible
Embracing change is one of the most crucial steps in the route to building resilience. When we accept that change is inescapable and a significant part of life and our own lives, we more easily accept and put meaning into what we’re going through, and how we can grow from it.
With the ability to accept change, comes learning to adapt and be flexible in life’s novel situations. Embracing and adapting to change is in our nature, it’s how we are wired to survive on this earth that we live in.
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.” ―Charles Darwin
When you encounter a sudden, unexpected change in your life’s trajectory; say, your best friend betrayed you or you got cheated on, you didn’t get accepted to the school you applied to but somewhere else you didn’t want as much, or you have to move to somewhere far away, look for the ways these situations can improve you as a person, and what will they teach you. Put your focus on that.
I know it’s easy to say and harder to implement, but still, when you change your mindset into this, step by step, you’ll see that things change and shift and in the end, teach you something very valuable, that you wouldn't learn in any other way.
View these situations from that perspective, get excited for what life will unbuckle for you, and how you plan to tackle the challenges that will come in your way, to make you a better, mentally tougher person.
Learn from Your Past Experiences
Look to your past as it’s an open window to your future. Your past foretells you the things that might happen if you do this, and the decisions you can make based on your already implemented behaviors/actions from your archive of the past.
You lived those experiences for a reason. What do they tell you? What can you extract out of them? What did they teach you? What was their purpose of existing in your life? How can they guide you in the present?
What does your broken relationship with a loved one tell you? How did you cope with a personal crisis in the past? Analyze your old mistakes and lessons learned. Reflect on your past experiences and how did they bring to you here today.
How could you do things differently? What can you do now to reach different outcomes that you desire? What can you change in yourself, in your life?
Don’t ignore these clues. Use them to be more resilient in situations and construct a better future. Your past experiences and knowledge are your guidebook to life. Don’t neglect it.
Last Words
Of course, along with all those above points, it’s also crucial for one to prioritize their health and relationships. Without a support system, it’s much harder to get through adversities in life.
We thrive with social interaction, and sharing our thoughts and feelings with people we trust will help us in significant ways.
But at the end of the day, it is you yourself that needs to apply all that you learned from your experiences to the novel situations in your life and make decisions based on that knowledge.
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