Stocking your RESILIENCY TOOL KIT

Resilience is an equal opportunity character trait. It’s not reserved only for those who’ve endured the most difficult, traumatic situations imaginable, nor is it a cinch to master resilience if you’ve met relatively few challenges in life. Constructing resiliency in your own life requires a Swiss Army Knife of instruments you can use every day to sharpen your skill and carve away the negativity that is stunting your personal growth.

    1. Thought Rescue: When you’re stuck with that heavy burden of death-spiral negativity, attempting to think your way out of it is futile. Take action that occupies mind and body simultaneously, even in short doses: exercise, deep breathing, using a meditation app or wearing a pendant, bracelet or ring that you can physically touch will force a pause in that wave that’s pulling you under.

    2. Fact-Check Your Imagined Doom: Step back from yourself to ask: What is the worst that can happen? Is the worst-case scenario the most likely outcome? What is true? Feelings are real, but they are not reality or a permanent state of being. You may feel like a total failure after the loss of a job or relationship, but if you take the time to detail other aspects of your life beyond that single situation, you will likely find a number of things you are doing right or have done right, debunking your “total failure” self-assessment. 

    3. Do Hard Things: Avoiding discomfort is natural, but failure and hard work are an opportunity to build your resilience resume. What you avoid will usually come back again and again until you’ve learned the lesson meant for you. Reframe your outlook by exchanging the term “hard” for “challenging.” This automatically set yourself up as a challenger who can rise to the occasion. Choose to challenge yourself even in small ways where success is likely to build your challenger resume. Even having a difficult conversation or tackling junk drawer organization can be chalked up as a challenge. Pursuing what makes us uncomfortable and overcoming it builds resilience.

    4. Resilience Journal: Make a list of challenges and failures you’ve previously experienced. How did you succeed? What did you learn? From a distant lens, can you see how you grew and developed from failures? Can you see how you may have benefited in the midst of hard times? Practice looking back as a dispassionate observer to assess the experiences of everyone involved in a particular conflict. How would you handle this situations differently now? Note your capacity to overcome and succeed or survive!

    5. Visualization: What does success look like? Imagining the specifics of who you will be, how you will feel and how you will look back on your current challenges is an important tool for getting out of a negative, defeatist headspace and equipping yourself with a triumphant view of your future self.

    6. Look for Silver Linings: A fancy word for this is “reappraisal ability,” but what it really means is the ability to find the positive (and generate positive emotions) in the midst of very grim situations. On the worst days, “I have oxygen to breathe” may be all you can muster, but it’s a start. If you can’t see any positives in your current state, can you look back to previous challenges to see what positives were hiding just behind the clouds? Can you identify opportunities that came from past difficulties or what opportunities could come from this one? If it’s tough to do in your own life, you can even practice this with fictional characters in movies or on TV. What advice would you give them? Could that same advice apply to you?