The importance of resilience in life
I’ve recently been participating in resilience training as part of my activities to stretch my comfort zone and learn more about myself. I’d view myself as fairly resilient, although like everyone, it’s easy to suffer life’s small setbacks, so given the opportunity to learn more about resilience, I of course said yes!
Resilience in this context can be defined as “the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties”, and it is something that is really coming to prominence now if you are going to be successful in navigating your way through a career in the modern world. I also strongly believe that resilience helps you to boost your own levels of confidence and emotional wellbeing and gives you a brighter outlook on life.
Lots of you will be familiar with the techniques from yoga, taking the time out to focus on your inner wellbeing and breathing to instil a sense of calm and physical wellbeing to your body.
But what about your mind, what are you doing to take care of your mental health and happiness?
This is where resilience training can help! By introducing positive emotions and challenging negative emotions, you can, over time really make a change in your mental wellbeing and increase your personal ability to withstand shocks so that you can recover quickly from difficulties that arise. There are a few key techniques that you can start to practice to help you with this.
The first is a focussed breathing technique known as heart focussed breathing that can help you change your mood and stay calm. Sit somewhere quiet and focus on your heart, imagining your breath flowing in this area, breathing, slowly in over 5 seconds, slowly out over 5 seconds. As you settle into this rhythm, pull in a positive emotion and replay this in your mind, reliving the feelings and experience. You’ll be surprised at how much better you feel after a few minutes! With practice, you can quickly apply this to deal with stressful life situations.
Another great technique is “what went well” — this is a technique where every night you reflect on the day’s activities and ask yourself these questions:
- What went well today?
- What role did I play in this success?
I practice this technique daily with my partner, we share our experiences of our day with one another.
You may prefer to write this down instead. The successes can be small, for example, ‘I made someone laugh’, ‘I held a door open and they said thank you’, etc…
One other practice that I have developed is to smile and engage with people when I am out and about. A simple smile and hello can work wonders and will soon change your outlook on life — you’ll soon feel more positive and the responses you get from others will enlighten you. I wrote about this in one of my earlier articles.
I’ve been practicing these techniques (and others) as part of my resilience training and I certainly feel that my mental health has improved and that I have a higher level of resilience and a much more positive outlook on life.
If you have the chance to participate in resilience training, I would strongly recommend that you seize the opportunity with both hands!
