How do individuals become resilient? What makes somebody regulate and live through life’s stresses? Resilient people owe their resilience to past challenges. However, someone copes with challenges builds their resilience for future ones. Each resilient person ought to say thank you to their past challenges, because as a result of they have become the person they are today. Each time you face a challenge, you’re provided with the chance to learn, grow, and change. Psychologists believe that after you overcome a challenge, you build resilience to face another challenge later on. Even failure will build resilience if you learn from it. Here are the gifts that past challenges supply which can help to build resilience:·
· Control
· Goals
· Commitment
· Action
· Past Success
· Support System
· Humor
Control
Past challenges help us to understand control. To succeed, it is important to learn what can be controlled and what cannot. Once we learn that we control our actions and reactions, we begin to set the foundations for building resilience. Knowing what we can control helps us to come up with ways of coping with life challenges.
Goals
Goals provide a sense of purpose and a reason to be resilient. To reach goals we have to plan. We have to organise our time, workspace etc. Plans can help us to stay on track when faced with life’s challenges, allowing us to deal with changing circumstances while still working towards set goals. Planning can help us to be more resilient when challenges occur.
Commitment
Staying committed to a goal and finding ways to cope with challenges demonstrates resilience. As we commit to our goals, we become more resilient when faced with different challenges. Individuals who are not resilient give up when presented with a challenge, those who are resilient do their best problem solve.
Action
Action is what helps us to overcome challenges. Every challenge in life pushes us to figure out the best ways to overcome. While taking action, we discover new and more effective ways to cope with challenges. Our growth in knowledge and understanding causes us to become more resilient with every new challenge we face.
Past Successes
There’s nothing better than reaching a goal that you’ve worked hard to achieve. Past successes build our confidence and resilience ready for future challenges. Our past successes provide us with the skills and experience needed to cope with new challenges, helping us to become more resilient.
Support System
To move through challenges, it is good to have a strong support network. If the challenge is personal, we need the support of those we trust. If the challenge is professional, we tend to look for the support of colleagues. Having a reliable support network provides endless gifts for future challenges. We identify who we can trust and reach out for help and support when we need it.
Humour
Humour can be a great coping mechanism for some of us. Rather than battling a challenge, we use humour to reduce stress and roll with incidents of failure. Having an honest sense of humour provides an outlet for stress and disappointment, making us more resilient when facing new and different challenges.
2020 has been a challenging year, but one which has demonstrated strength in character and enabled us to develop new and different strategies to cope, while discovering new skills we never knew we had. Therefore, we can be more than hopeful as we move into the year 2021 as 2020 has gifted us the knowledge, wisdom and understanding to move through challenging times.
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