Strategies for building Resilience!

Who doesn’t love skill building? I know, right, not all that exciting. However, I have seen with my own therapist eyes how powerful some of the following strategies can be for building your resilience to navigate through life’s stressors, or to be flexible when things don’t go as planned. Over the next 10 posts, I will be outlining some tangible strategies for practicing building resilience.

  • Focus on the positive and keep things in perspective.

  • Recognize and use your skills and abilities with confidence.

  • Pay attention to what’s most important and move towards your goals.

  • Creativity 

  • Make and nurture connections

  • Structure/Routines

  • Trying new things, even then they are scary

  • Feel your feelings

  • Patience and a positive self-view

  • Get comfortable with ambiguity and change

  • Practice self-care (this turns into resilience)

Let’s start with:

Focus on the positive and keep things in perspective

The first strategy is Positivity.  This one is a big one! This helps you see hope, possibility, and opportunities.  And gives us a reason to engage in the challenges of life, it helps us to see the path that we are navigating.   

Some strategies for building this

-One is to change the story.   What do tell yourself specifically about why bad things happen.  Are you blaming yourself, telling yourself that you could have/should have done something different or better?.  Can you reframe that into: “I did the best I could”, “Sometimes bad things happen”, etc.  You can also work to identify and challenging where you got the initial message about why a stressful event happened.  Is there a systemic or larger force of oppression at work in the messaging?  When identifying these, you can work towards owning that these might not be your own thoughts.         

 

-Make a list of Gratitudes-write down positive thoughts, things you are grateful for, things that made you laugh.  And take one step further and give yourself credit for your role in them.  For example, something on my list might be: “It was really sunny outside today, and I made the choice to take a walk at lunch”.  A lot of people chose to make a list like this at the end of the day, as a way to end your day on a positive note.

-Another strategy is to Reflect on what happened and try to find alternate ways of viewing it.  Maybe trying to find a silver lining.  

  • It feels important to add with this exercise that it is essential not to minimize that something bad has happened, and many times an event might not have a positive spin to the actual event itself.  

  • But maybe there is a positive way to view how you respond to the event.  

  • A lot of folks I work with who have experienced trauma tell me things like: “I didn’t realize I was this strong”, or “I now realize that I have wonderful friends”.  Statements like these do not minimize the event itself, rather they shift focus to something positive within the individual.  You can also use reflection to think you might feel about the situation in a few days, weeks, months, or years from now.  This can help change your perspective on the situation.        

References:

Hoopes, L. ( 2017). Prosilience: Building Your Resilience for a Turbulent World, Dara Press

Developing Personal Resilience (by Linda Hoopes)- http://www.reply-mc.com/2011/05/29/developing-personal-resilience-by-linda-hoopes/

Kristine Reynolds