Resiliency is the ability to bounce back—to get knocked down and get back up again—to get back on the horse that just kicked you off.
If you have high resiliency, you are able to handle a wider variety of situations and adversities. You’re able to try more things, fail at more things, and keep going.
This usually leads to success in life.
How To Build Resiliency
A young man who successfully completed college despite a childhood of living in one foster home after another told me, “The people who helped me the most were the ones who told me ‘what is right with you is more powerful than anything that is wrong with you.’“
Focusing not only on your strengths, but focusing on HOW you have overcome the obstacles in your life will start providing evidence for yourself that you ARE capable of overcoming difficult situations.
Ask yourself, “How have I done as well as I have done? What are the two or three biggest challenges (including crises or traumas) I have overcome in my life? What did I use to overcome them? What do I use every day to effectively cope with the typical stresses in my life?”
Your Top Three Resiliency Builders
There are several ingredients that go into resiliency. Knowing which ones you use will help you be able to turn to them when feeling overwhelmed or stuck.
Go through the list below and decide which are the top three resiliency builders you use.
- Relationships — Sociability/ability to be a friend/ability to form positive relationships
- Humor — Has a good sense of humor
- Inner Direction — Bases choices/decisions on internal evaluation (internal locus of control)
- Perceptiveness — Insightful understanding of people and situations
- Independence — “Adaptive” distancing from unhealthy people and situations/autonomy
- Positive View of Personal Future — Optimism; expects a positive future
- Flexibility — Can adjust to change; can bend as necessary to positively cope with situations
- Love of Learning — Capacity for and connection to learning
- Self-motivation — Internal initiative and positive motivation from within
- Competence — Is “good at something”/personal competence
- Self-Worth — Feelings of self-worth and self-confidence
- Spirituality — Personal faith in something greater
- Perseverance — Keeps on despite difficulty; doesn’t give up
- Creativity — Expresses self through artistic endeavor
Developing Your Strength
According to The Gallup Organization (which has spent the last 30 + years trying to find the best ways to maximize a person’s potential), “Each person’s greatest room for growth is in the areas of his or her greatest strength.”
“The real tragedy of life is not that each of us doesn’t have enough strengths, it’s that we fail to use the ones we have”
Now that you know what areas you’re naturally strong in, continue to focus on ways to use those areas. Develop them and learn how to depend upon them.
Resources
All of the quotes in this post came from Nan Henderson, M.S.W at Resiliency.com where you can find other great resources and articles on resiliency.