How to cultivate a more resilient you
Maybe you’ve had a rejection recently, or the opportunity that you expected to materialise didn’t. How resilient are you feeling? Are you feeling fragile or unbreakable? How’s your bounce back ability or your ability to bounce forward?
How do you set about becoming a more resilient you?
There is no doubt that we will all be down sometimes, but the length of time we stay down makes a difference. I think of it like a boxer in a ring, when a boxer is knocked down, the referee counts up to 10, as long as the boxer gets up by the time the referee has counted to 10, they are still in the game.
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So to stay in the game, here’s what you need:
1. A sense of purpose. Without a sense of your purpose in life, you lack a driving force. So, how do you know what your purpose is? 2. Ask yourself: What do I do that others value? In what ways and by whom am I needed every day? What in my life has the most meaning? The answers will reveal your purpose.
2. Perseverance. Giving up is always the easy way out. Resilient people demonstrate the ability to stick to things and get them done.
3. Stay balanced. Understand that regardless of the situation it is never entirely bleak nor entirely positive. There’s a middle ground that allows you to see all possibilities and will help to give you the optimism needed to make things better.
4. Self-reliance. Belief in yourself needs to be realistic to be helpful. Remember the challenges in the past that you have met successfully and those that were less successfully met. You can learn from both experiences and develop problem-solving skills that help to build self-reliance.
5. Be comfortable in your own skin. Truly resilient people need to have this ability. You need the sense that, if necessary, you can go it alone and take a course of action that may not be popular, but which you believe in.
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To maintain the above 5 characters, you must:
* Take care of yourself. Feeling good is an essential part of feeling able to be resilient. Eat right, exercise, and try to stay in good health. Be kind to you and don’t beat yourself up.
* Seek and give support. Giving back to others is a way to reinforce resilience in your life.
* Remain fully energised in life. Stay engaged, stay involved, keep doing the things that interest you.
* Balance work and life. Too much work or too much fun can throw off your balance.
Developing resilience is increasingly important, with rapid change both global and locally, our ability to get up, even after a killer punch is even more critical.
Originally posted on LinkedIn on October 26th 2016
