How to be More Resilient
What is resilience?
Resilience is the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties.
‘Resilio’ is Latin for resilience and it means ‘to jump back’.
It is something that can be developed, and it’s not something just for children - we could all benefit from having more resilience.
Why is resilience relevant?
If you’re plagued with thoughts like “Why am I so sensitive?” or “Why can’t I just get over it?!” then learning more about resilience can reduce how much time you spend feeling bogged down and overwhelmed by certain challenging situations. Instead of your whole day being impacted by one person or one event you can give yourself an hour or two to process what happened.
Don’t be harsh on yourself… “When a flower doesn't bloom, you fix the environment in which it grows. Not the flower”.
Why might we be less resilient?
Social media impacts our resilience levels - so much of what we do is filmed and photographed, including our mistakes, they are harder to forget about. This is particularly relevant for young people in our increasingly digital world. Seeing our embarrassing moments online, knowing it’s up there for the world to see can be so exposing and anxiety provoking.
Some modern parenting practices are overprotective - this sends the message that the world isn’t safe and that we don’t trust our young people. Remember - some stress is good. We need exposure to stress - as do our children. We need to be in situations where we fail in a contained way. Failure is part of life, but we can all try to control the extent of failure by undertaking smaller tasks and goals, taking little risks rather than massive ones. Don’t book to do half a marathon when you haven’t done any training and you don’t enjoy running. And if we do fail because our goal was too optimistic then we need to sit with our challenging emotions in that moment of failure rather than pushing them away.
4 quick tips:
Distract yourself
Make time for self-care
Talk about what happened
Ask yourself what helped in similar situations
Remember:
ANGER, SADNESS, EMBARASSMENT ETC ARE OKAY AND NORMAL.
Here is a cycle representing how we can be more resilient, it goes round and round:
Connect > Play > Practice > Success > Recognition
The more we complete this cycle the more resilient we’ll be.
Fun facts: archery can build resilience in people with ADHD since archery requires precise concentration and allows for repetition and practice. Talking and drawing helps others begin to express the hidden parts of themselves. With young people do activities where they don’t realise they’re working on their resilience then talk about resilience in terms of that activity e.g. football.
Build on your strengths. Build up your support system. Build up a greater sense of you.
Counselling provides a holding space to talk through your moments of failure and self deprecation; get in touch if you’d like to begin building up your inner strength and resilience through convenient online sessions.
