Have you been battling higher anxiety levels over the past year? Finding it hard to deal with the lack of social interaction? How have you been managing the change in workloads, working from home, and homeschooling your kids at the same time? Feeling overwhelmed at times I bet! With everything that has been thrown at us lately, there has never been a better time to practice building some resilience.
What’s so good about being resilient anyway?
Resilience enables us to be flexible, adapt to changes, face difficult scenarios, and bounce back when things don’t go as planned. Someone with high resilience overcomes challenges by finding a way to adapt, heal, and continue to grow. Lacking resilience results in overwhelm and sustained over a prolonged time can negatively affect mental and physical health.
Over time, we can build our capacity for resilience through dealing with day to day stressful experiences like facing a bully, resubmitting an assignment after failing it the first time around, or from struggling through times of hardship. Greater resilience can be developed through experiencing bereavement or environmental or social pressures.
Over the years I’ve developed a resilient mindset through growing through difficult circumstances and navigating lots of times of change. I consider myself to be pretty resilient but I have to admit 2020 has definitely pushed my resilience buttons.
I credit some of my resilience to a career in the arts. Spending 20 years creating shows and festivals meant I had to reinvent the wheel every day, constantly having to be innovative and change plans to reach the desired vision. I would often be living on location where the work was being produced, not always in a house, often without basic resources, and frequently outdoors battling the elements. To get the job done I had to develop a mindset that saw any barriers as opportunities. Perceiving situations this way helped me to be optimistic through change and to look for learning opportunities in any scenario.
“In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity.” Sun Tzu
Four Ways to Build Resilience
Luckily, resilience isn’t something you’re born with, it is learned, so can be developed and increased. There are many ways you can practice becoming more resilient to be more prepared in difficult times. These are just a few of the key thing’s that have helped me to bounce back through challenging times:
1. Make Acceptance Your Best Friend
When the shit hits the fan do you accept that life is a journey of both wins and losses? Or, do you expect to always be winning? And most importantly do you blame yourself if things don’t go as planned?
Letting go of the future you had envisioned or how things ‘should’ have happened and accepting the situation as it is, enables you to embrace change. By accepting the reality of what has happened you begin to see the circumstance as merely a setback. Setbacks are simply a challenge and they can be overcome.
2. Careful What you Try to Control
Focussing only on what you can control in life will make everything feel more manageable. Think of your challenging situation and write a list of what you can actually control about it, you will notice that your list will be small!
Mostly, what can be controlled about anything in any situation is your reaction to it. This includes thoughts, emotions, and then the actions that can be taken to make the situation better. Take the time to notice your thoughts, manage any strong feelings and impulses, and put your attention into making decisions and taking action. Start with meditation, it is a lifesaver when it comes to noticing thoughts.
“Your mind wants control. Life wants change.” – Maxime Lagacé
3. Create a Strong Vision
Seeing a setback as a deviation from the path, rather than the obliteration of the destination is key to developing resilience. Doing this means having a clear destination in the first place.
Having a clear vision and values informs who you are, what you want to do, where, and who you want to be. Your goals and action steps will get you there. If for some reason a setback means you have to rethink your goals and actions, you can still be true to your values and aim towards your vision. If you don’t have a vision and you’re not clear on your values then you will be lost even without any setbacks or challenging circumstances.
Get clear on your values by asking yourself what’s important to you in life? What are your beliefs? What do you stand for, and what are your guiding principles? Paint a clear vision by understanding what you aspire to. What’s your ambition? Where and who do you want to be in 3 years?
“Open your arms to change, but don’t let go of your values” — Dalai Lama
4. Self-Care
Let’s face it, practicing self-care is a good foundation to have no matter what life’s throwing at you. If you know how to listen to your body and give it what it needs you’re winning at managing your journey through life. These five self-care practices are scientifically proven tools that will help you build a resilient foundation:
- Sleeping – Tiredness causes highs and lows in energy and a roller-coaster of emotions. Prioritise a non-negotiable routine of 7-9 hours of shut-eye each night.
- Exercise – Feeling physically strong aids mental strength. If you’re having a bad day get away from it all and get your heart pumping, go for a walk (or a run, or a swim), it will rejuvenate you and best of all it will alleviate the stress.
- Eat Healthily – Sugary treats, despite feeling like they solve all problems in the moment, cause energy highs followed by energy lows. Avoid the rollercoaster by reaching for a high fiber or protein snack instead of chocolate.
- Meditate – Practice observing and then letting go of your thoughts. This is such a valuable practice to develop because your thoughts impact your emotions which impact your actions which impact your thoughts again. Only ten minutes every day will show you just how busy your mind is and how easily a thought can take over if you’re not observing it before it determines your actions.
- Gratitude – Even on the bad days there are things to be thankful for and an optimistic mindset will transform how you see any situation. At the end of each day write down three things you are grateful for and watch any negativity you feel melt away.
When it feels like everything is against you the number one thing that has helped me is to ask ‘what am I supposed to learn from this?’. Looking at difficult times as an opportunity to learn something and to make positive changes can turn them into an incredible period of growth. Turning lemons into lemonade is no easy feat but the work involved in doing so is absolutely worth it. You will cultivate a renewed sense of strength and confidence with the knowledge that any setback can be overcome.