How to cultivate resilience
Resilience allows you to adapt to the more difficult or challenging experiences that crop up in life. While you cannot control everything happening in the world around you, having resilience provides you with the strength, courage and optimism to be able to face crises and obstacles head on when they occur. Resilience is something we acquire over time and can be enhanced or weakened by experience and circumstances. If it’s the latter, the good news is that resilience can be built up again. You just need to get creative!
There are four different kinds of resilience:
Physical resilience
Mental resilience
Emotional resilience
Social resilience
Physical resilience is the ability to adapt, recover and bounce back effectively after adversity or stressors. Mental resilience enables you to pay attention, not give up and preserve through the skills of determination and motivation, while emotional resilience is more about tapping into positive emotions like optimism and joy when you need them. With social resilience, you are able to support yourself and others by being able to ask for help when you need it and being there for others when they do. Combined, all four elements of resilience are as important as the other.
5 ways to cultivate resilience:
Try something that feels unnatural or tricky to you, like using your non-dominant hand to brush your teeth. You place all your focus on the task at hand and reap the benefits when you succeed at something that’s a little difficult.
Practise gratitude. Write down or say in your mind 3 things you are grateful for everyday for the next week. Think of something different each day and notice how it impacts you.
Improve your physical wellbeing through movement. A yoga sequence, pilates or walking in nature not only strengthens your body physically, it improves the mind-body connection to help you tackle stress better and recover faster from illness or fatigue.
Set realistic goals in the workplace and on your daily to-do list to avoid unnecessary stress.
Incorporate mindfulness, focused breathing and relaxation techniques into your routine. Self-care is crucial when it comes to building resilience.
More tools to cultivate resilience:
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