What is Resilience

What is resilience?

Large or small, chronic or crisis, adversity happens. Part of life is to manage the demands of stressful events. We differ in the way in which we deal with difficult situations. In general, we can differentiate between helpful and unhelpful ways of dealing with situations. While some people give up and succumb to their despair, others persist and face life’s biggest challenges with hope and resilience.

Resilience is associated with inner strength, competence, optimism, flexibility, and the ability to cope effectively when faced with a challenge, bounce back and thrive in the face of adversity.

Resilience is not something that you have or that you don’t have. It involves behaviours, thoughts, and actions that can be learned and developed in anyone.

So, what increases our ability to deal with life’s challenges, is minimizing the impact of risk factors, such as stressful life events, and on the other hand enhancing the protective factors, such as optimism, social support, and active coping.

How to develop resilience?

So, resilience is about bouncing back from adversity. How to develop resilience? Well, there are different ways to develop resilience, different tools but what you may want to do FIRST is to become aware of the coping style you are using to handle a current challenge and second of all, learn a more adaptive way of coping, if needed.

Learn more about the coping styles here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=al8FRjA14Jo