5 Ways to Build Resilience During Tough Times
Resiliency is your belief in yourself and your ability to achieve your goals.
The year 2020 is unique in so many ways. It is the year that the novel Covid-19 pandemic invaded the mother earth. It is the year that is characterized by such words as social distancing, self-isolation, aerosol, asymptomatic, herd immunity, droplet, incubation period, N95, face mask, ventilator, Coronavirus, and many more.
During this year, millions of people got laid off from their jobs, with millions on unemployment benefits. We experienced many protests and social unrest all around the world. Mother nature did not give us a break either, with wildfires on the west coast and multiple hurricanes in the United States’ gulf coast. Many companies declared bankruptcy, and many more had to close down because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Many hospitals reached their full capacities as millions of infected people got admitted for treatments. Sad still was the fact that Coronavirus became the third leading cause of death in the year 2020.
I don’t know your situation, but I know for sure that for most people, things have not worked out the exact way they planned at the beginning of the year. If you had told me around mid-January that I would spend most of the year working remotely, I would probably have argued with you. Right now, people are bored, fatigued, and depressed as a result of all the multiple events that we have all experienced during the year.
To keep your sanity and stay optimistic in tough times, you need to be resilient. Resiliency does not mean you do not have any challenges, but it is about the courage and conviction to keep pressing forward towards your goals despite the obstacles you may encounter. It is about your belief in yourself and your ability to achieve your goals. Now, much more than ever before, you need to stay resilient to get through the difficulties that the world is currently facing. You need to remain optimistic and believe that a better future is around the corner.
Here are five ways you can stay resilient during tough times.
1. Reach out and seek support
Whenever we face any difficult challenges beyond our understanding, it is always better to reach out and seek support from those who are more experienced than us. It may be tempting to want to figure out our issues all by ourselves; we can rationalize that we don’t want to be vulnerable or iron our dirty clothes in public, but I have found out that there is nothing new on earth. What you are currently experiencing, someone else somewhere must have successfully dealt with a similar situation in the past, and talking with someone may help you figure out your path forward.
Resiliency is indeed about your strength, but having a community of people to support, guide, and encourage you will surely help you deal with tough times. You may have applied for thousands of positions and got rejected in all; it is challenging to keep applying at this point because doubt will start setting in, and you may want to believe that you are a failure. The group of people around you at this critical point will go a long way to determine whether you stay resilient or not. If you can effectively lean in and tap into your network of mentors, they may be able to point you in the right direction. Sometimes, having someone to share your burden with can be the difference between giving up or keeping on. To stay resilient, you have to know when and how to reach out to others and ask for help.
2. Expect things to get better
The saying “As a man thinks in his heart, so is he” may sound cliché, but the statement holds true when it comes to staying resilient in a tough time. If within your mind, you are saying to yourself that you can’t make it, that you are not capable of turning your situation around, it means you are elevating your problem above your capability and thereby crushing your resiliency. You should anticipate better days ahead, and you should know that the difficult situation is only temporary, and things will turn around with time.
Maybe you are stuck in a job below your qualification, or you have recently lost your job; you should stay resilient and expect that you will get better job opportunities. Our ability to stay resilient means we must also be optimistic about the future. It is the combination of optimism and our resiliency that will provide us with the energy and the willpower to keep getting up to keep going when we fall into a rough patch.
3. Adapt and Stay tough
I like the saying, tough times don’t last, but tough people do. When you go through a difficult time, you have to say tough and quickly adapt to create a new experience from the situation you may have found yourself in. Being tough does not mean that you deny the problem; it just means that you are willing to do whatever is needed to conquer your temporary setback as you keep pressing forward towards your goals.
Assuming your business is not going in the right direction, or you find yourself in a career rut, to be resilient and get out of the burdensome situation. When you get knocked down in your tracks seven times, you have to be willing to get back up each time and keep pressing forward and work on your goals. When it seems you have your back against the wall, you have to stay tough and continue exploring ways to resolve your challenges. To get through any difficult time, you must be ready to remain tough and press on even when you do not see any outcome yet.
4. Motivate yourself
Not many people practice this idea, but I found it the most efficient. You have to be your best advocate; you’ve got to believe in yourself and your ability to achieve your goals before anyone else can believe you. If you don’t believe or have confidence that you will get through a difficult time, you will find it even more challenging to engage your mental capacity to find a solution that will help you in the difficult time. You must learn how to motivate yourself when you are in confronting challenges. You should seek to encourage yourself, talk to yourself, affirm yourself, and tell yourself that you believe in you.
Motivating yourself will help unleash your creativity and propel you to quickly find alternatives that will still help you achieve your goals. It is about believing that better and brighter days are ahead of you. So the next time you find yourself in a difficult situation, don’t just give up and abandon your plans; instead, you should seek to motivate yourself and figure out how to come out on top and achieve your goals.
5. Count your blessings
It’s all too easy to become fixated with those things that are not working in our lives and ignore those things that are going well. One of the best ways to stay resilient is to continually look back and appreciate your progress so far towards your goals. It is essential to take a minute and reflect on the positives in our lives to minimize the impact of negative things. You may not have accomplished everything you set out to do, but you should still acknowledge and appreciate the little progress you have made. By focusing on those small successes, you will become more energized to get up and keep pushing forward to achieve your ultimate goal.
So what’s your situation today? Are you going through a rough patch? Are you out of a job? Does it seem like nowhere you turn, things aren’t just working the way you planned? I want you to stay resilient and never give up on your important goals because resiliency can make your dreams come true.
