Mental Fitness Mondays: Building Resilience
When the going gets tough….?
This Mental Fitness Monday focuses on a skillset that is often misunderstood: Resilience.
Resilience has been a hot topic in recent years. With high costs of living, the climate crisis and ongoing conflicts in the world, there's a huge amount of stuff that can knock us down. That’s before we even get started on health issues, difficulties in the workplace, and challenging relationships… the list goes on.
“They need to be more resilient!”
As you’ll already know, resilience is your ability to keep getting back up when life knocks you down. But my guess is that you probably don't want to have to be resilient all the time – it’s exhausting. Resilience is a skill set we draw on when times are hard, but it would be nice to have fewer hard times.
We've all got a degree of resilience, but some people are better at handling tough times than others. The good news is you can grow your ability to be resilient and a big key to this is working on your self-care.
The Power of Habit
How do we grow resilience? By building up good healthy habits. People who take good care of themselves have more physical resilience. They’re less likely to catch the bug that's going around, but if they do catch it, they’ll likely recover more quickly.
The same is true of mental resilience. Having good habits that create more positive experiences can lift you up and recharge you so that can be more resilient in darker times, but you’re also less likely to have as many dark times.
Build me up Buttercup
You can build your resilience levels up by doing things like:
- Eating healthy food
- Getting enough sleep
- Developing good routines
- Having a dependable support network
- Cultivating a positive mindset
- Appreciating the good things in your life
- Planning ahead for life’s inevitable challenges
Tough guy or girl?
Resilience doesn't mean going it alone or toughing it out. Truly resilient people are self-aware and know how to reach out for help when needed. As I write this, one of my best friends has cancer. I think she’s showing resilience when she talks to me tearfully about her worries; she’s making good use of her supporters to help build her resilience.
Love is all you need
So, if resilience is not about being tough, what is it about? I think it’s about nurturing and loving ourselves through difficult times. It’s about looking after ourselves as best we can, as much as we can, so that when times are hard we deal with them so much better.
A coaching question to get you thinking: What are you going to do today that might build your resilience?
