Back to: How to Build your Resilience and Mental Fitness
Building Resilience
As you read through this lesson challenge yourself, be honest with yourself and explore how your reactions in situations are supporting you or not supporting you be the person you want to be.
Normal does not equal helpful
People with strong resilience have the ability to bounce from tough situations, and use the experience as a learning – to move forward to the next way of being. They don’t allow the tough situations to get the better of them; they don’t excuse their behaviour as being “perfectly normal”. As Jon Lavelle says in “Water off a Duck’s Back” that this “perfectly normal reaction” is not “perfect” and nor is it helpful. It is in fact you justifying your behaviour to yourself or to others.
Normal does not equal helpful
Research shows a predictable relationship between stress and performance. Neither the complete absence of stress, which can be experienced as boredom, nor too much stress, which can be experienced as overwhelm, leads to optimal performance. The diagram on the attached slide shows how our performance increases the stronger our resilience is.
- How can building your resilience support you?
- Can you identify areas where your stress-response curve can be positively influenced?
Reacting in unhelpful ways causes us to loose control. When you loose control you give control or power away to someone else. You are allowing someone else to influence you. It is the presence of challenges, difficulties, resistance that helps you to develop your resilience. So, see each challenging situation as your trainer – your trainer to develop and strengthen your resilience and your mental fitness. These challenges help you to get stronger if you choose to let them train you. Some people don’t. They say “there is no point”, “they are no good”, “they will never be able to…” and therefore they stay the same or get weaker. Others see the resistance as a means to get stronger. Just as in a gym as you increase the resistance or weight you increase your physical strength.
Success is not luck. It is worked and managed
There are many approaches to build your resilience. Don’t try to use them all at once. Work through them and select where you will start and create a plan to practice and master them. To master them you need to deliberately practice them, reflect and learn so that they become natural and easy.
The techniques we will explore are:
- Understanding our Saboteurs
- Recognising our Sage
- The power of positivity
- Mindfulness techniques
- Emotional intelligence
- Reframing
- Being pro-active and the stimulus -gap-response
- Creative and building options
- Optimism
- Vulnerbalility
- Internal dialogue
- Gratitude
- Energy management
- Purpose and meaning
- Managing your networks
- Steps to decrease negativity
- and more
Exercise: When you have faced a significant challenge in the past, what have you done to effectively address that challenge?
Collect your thoughts, describe the situation, what assumptions, beliefs played a role in your actions? How did they help you? How did they not help you? What can you draw from this? How can you use this insight?