Resilience

The ability to be happy, successful, etc. again after something difficult or bad has happened. Cambridge Dictionary

In other words: resilience is how to get better at coping with all the bad things that happen in your life. And the only way that you can acquire resilience is by actually being in bad situations and having to get out of them for which in my opinion it’s one of the hardest mental skills to acquire. 

There are kids who have been protected by their parents their entire lives and through this, they have become extremely naïve to the world and how bad life can actually be. The problem with that is that no one could ever protect you from everything your entire life and as soon as those kids grow older and move out they’ll make their first experiences with bad situations that are going to completely tear them apart because they have no idea how to deal with anything. That’s the reason why, in some ways, it’s necessary to be in pain or get hurt because otherwise, you wouldn’t develop any mental strength to fight through such things. And after a certain point of going through all those bad situations and actually surviving them you start to become closer and closer to invincible. There was this quote on Instagram I saw the other day and it said something along the lines of: “Someday someone will break you so hard that you’ll become unbreakable” and I think that illustrates it very well. If something or someone causes you so much pain that you don’t think you’ll ever be happy again and after some time you actually get out of it and feel happy again, next time something smaller and not as bad happens to you, you know that you have gotten out of something worse. Your attitude has changed and you’ll be able to just shrug it off as if it was nothing and that is an extremely powerful tool that can be used in all kinds of situations.

“Resilience is all about being able to overcome the unexpected. Sustainability is about survival. The goal of resilience is to thrive.” –Jamais Cascio

There is always going to be something that hits your life in the face with a brick. That is “the unexpected.” In this metaphor, resilience would be dodging the brick so that instead of it hitting your face, it only hits your arm which obviously doesn’t hurt as much. And as the quote says, the goal of resilience is to thrive, so the more often you get hit and stand back up the stronger you are going to get. And through this, resilience thrives and makes you stronger and stronger. 

“Resilience is accepting your new reality even if it is less good than the one you had before.” – Elizabeth Edwards

I don’t want to talk long about this but I’ll continue with the “get hit in the face by a brick” metaphor. Your arm hurts now. How you deal with it makes the difference.

“Develop resilience and be brave. There are days when it is very discouraging. You have to develop personal resilience to environmental things that come along. If you let every single environmental change knock you out of your game it’s going to be very, very hard.” – Renee James

An example of an environmental change could be somebody on the bus where it seems like the person’s sole purpose in life is to mess up your day, or your laptop breaks down, or you lose your phone, etc.

Resilience means having to learn to cope with all the bad things that are going to happen to you. You just have to make sure that every time that something like that happens you are able to stay calm and not let yourself get knocked off your game. I know, it’s extremely discouraging when people are trying to hurt you or trying to bring you down but you must stay resilient and strong, otherwise, it’s going to be very, very hard for you to achieve your goals.

“I think there are things that we can all do to build resilience in ourselves but also to build resilience in each other.” – Sheryl Sandberg

The way that we build resilience in ourselves is that we have to put ourselves in difficult and challenging situations. This is something a lot of self-improvement books tell you to do and I totally agree with it. For example, if you feel like you’re being too attached to your phone, leave it at home for a day and start building resilience against that feeling of discomfort when walking around without it. Or randomly talk to someone in the street, for absolutely no other reason than to wish them a good day.

And how do you build resilience in other people? Actually, as soon as I read this, it reminded me of an interview that I saw with Dr. Michael Gerves and he said: “The worst thing we can do for our loved ones is to try and reduce their pain.” This is similar to what I said at the beginning when I gave the example of the parents overprotecting their children: If you try to always protect your loved ones, they are never going to learn how to become better by themselves and one day they leave home and won’t know what to do in any situation. You should rather focus on helping them to learn how to deal with bad situations and by doing that, indirectly build their resilience. Give them emotional support but don’t solve their problems for them.

I hope this helps you become stronger and motivates you to overcome your fears.