CAN YOU BECOME RESILIENT?
Resilience is not a trait that people either have or do not have. It is an attribute or soft skill with which everyone was born but which we develop or regress in as we grow up. It involves behaviors, thoughts, and actions that can be developed by anyone.
Again, paradoxically, we were all born resilient – it is an obvious fact!
Have you ever seen a 1-year-old trying to walk? They try, and they fall and cry. They try again, and they fall again and cry. They try again, and in the process, they learn unique ways of keeping up. Yet, again, they fall and cry. This process goes on and on for weeks and even months. They try, fall, cry, and try again. This was the same process you and I took. And did we stop trying and give up? I guess the answer is quite clear. That’s resilience! If we had only tried once and stopped because we failed or just became depressed and tired, we might not be able to walk today.
As much as resilience was innately a part of us, there happened to be a disconnect between childhood and adulthood, where we lost that characteristic. This, psychologists say, is due primarily to the society we found ourselves in. We got criticized after trying once and failing, and sometimes, different options are immediately placed for us. This had two effects on our mentality.
i. It reduced our resilience threshold. We were made to believe that after a few trials and we didn’t get it right, you should just abandon the task. Hence, we only had to spend little time on things before discarding them and deeming them impossible to solve. Little challenges, therefore, have high chances of destabilizing the individual.
ii. It encouraged us to believe that challenges are insurmountable.
We are, however, not stuck with a low-resilient personality forever if we choose to develop it. Through deliberate and directed efforts, resilience can be built as a personal trait and even as an organizational value.
HOW TO BECOME RESILIENT
- Transform your mindset: The way you think about the problem, oftentimes, is the problem. We often see challenges as agents that are there to bring us down, when in fact, challenges come to make us stronger and better. Every successful person has the mindset that setbacks will come, but I’ll always rise from it stronger. This is the growth mindset. Unsuccessful people have the mindset that when I have setbacks, I have failed. This is a fixed mindset.
- See any crisis as being surmountable: You should never see any problem whatsoever as insurmountable or insoluble. Problems arise so humans can create solutions to them.
- Ensure you have Positive Emotions: One of the most helpful things to do is to ensure that one does not lose positivity. Negative self-talks, a lot of times, act as a catalyst that makes the challenge seem insurmountable. Avoid saying things like “I know I’m going to fail, after all” or “I can never overcome this challenge.” Instead, say things like “I will not quit until I solve this challenge” or “I can do this, I must do this, I will do this.”
- Keep working on things that keep you focused on your goals: when you keep your focus on doing things that will keep moving you towards your short and long term goals, it helps you to keep hope alive, and this
- Be proactive: Do not let things happen to you unexpectedly. Always try to anticipate future occurrences that have the potentials of destabilizing your plans. Being proactive will equip you to be aware of sudden events and thus, plan accordingly. With this, your resilience will increase, and you can confidently push through whatever the challenge is easily.
- Keep working on yourself for self-discovery: the more you know yourself the more you are likely to be more resilient. Concentrating on your strengths particularly during turbulent times will give you the optimism required to sail through the period. Try as much as possible to take your eyes off your weaknesses so that this won’t reduce your positivity.
- Learn new things: Resilience is easier to practice when you know how to get yourself out of the challenge. When challenges come, a lot of people get stuck and stop trying because they have no knowledge of how to solve the problem. Learning is a central part of self-development; it increases your circle of influence and exposes you to useful knowledge. Learning, unlearning, and relearning will help in building resilience, based on the ability to always navigate through life’s challenges.
- Be patient: Resilience may be said to be synonymous to patience. Your resilience threshold often is equivalent to your patience threshold. Be patient in the face of difficulty, knowing that the time of difficulty will pass. It always passes but the challenge is in remembering and remaining patient while the turbulent lasts.
- Some challenges require very little actions but huge amount of patience. It is however worthy to note that patience isn’t the act of waiting, but your feelings, attitude, and behavior while waiting.
- Understand that challenges will always come: Challenges, alongside change, are constant in the lives of humans and so will always occur. Anyone that understands this is likely to remain fairly emotionally stable in the face of change or challenges. We all will face challenges at one point in life or another. This may be self-created or created by others. Understanding that challenges are a part of life and our individual development process, will expose us to benefits that can be realized from them, and hence, make us more resilient.
- Mingle with people that seem resilient: just as it is with all other core or soft skills development where you can quickly develop whatever skill it is by hanging around people who already have developed the skill or habit, when you hang around people that are resilient, you can develop great resilience!
- Celebrate efforts and little wins: this implies that you should not be too aggressive or condemning of yourself if you are not able to achieve your set BIG goals but be happy when you are able to achieve every step you need to take towards your big goal. The little steps your need to take are called small wins, celebrate them!
- Practice gratitude and make it a culture: whatever you go through, be grateful for the good things in your life. Sometimes it may be really tough to practice gratitude when the times are extremely bad, but it becomes easier if one can make it a habit even when the times are not so turbulent so that when the very tough times come up, it will be exhibited with greater ease of practice.
Watch out next week for How To Develop Organizational Resilience.
