10 Ways to Build Resilience

When we’re resilient, it’s not that we’re just “grinning and bearing it”... we’re truly thriving on the other side of adversity. It’s active, not passive. Forward motion, not complacency. And the good news is that resilience can be built. We’ll dive into greater detail in the coming days, but today, let’s check into Resilience Bootcamp.

Looking for ways to build your resilience? Here are 10 ways to build resilience:

1. Acquire new skills: more skills = more ways to problem solve. This helps us build a sense of competency, something that helps us remember this is not the end when something bad happens.

2. Regular and realistic goal setting: the act of setting reasonable, attainable goals, executing a plan to achieve them, and then seeing them through to completion, all contribute to our feeling of self-efficacy and ability to overcome challenges.

3. Connect: connections with friends, family, peers, and community are integral to getting back up when we’ve been knocked down. Strengthen a small number of your connections or expand your network more broadly—deepening our quality and volume of connections helps us overcome.

4. Adopt the “Everything is figure-out-able” mindset: taking more of a global view of our life, rather than a day-by-day snapshot, helps us zoom out and remember this is temporary. Understanding that everything works its way out eventually helps us remember that this too shall pass when we’re faced with adversity.

5. Step outside your comfort zone: consider this like exposure therapy. Every time you do something that makes you uncomfortable, but you survive, you’re building resilience.