These days we hear a lot about resilience and how important it is. Here is a summary of the key facts.
What is resilience?
In essence, resilience is the ability to keep going after experiencing a setback or series of problems. It is recovering readily to still hold optimism about the future. It has been called mental toughness or the ability to bounce back.
Is it something you can learn?
Absolutely. The book “The resilience factor” by Karen Reivich and Andrew Shatte provides in-depth knowledge about resilience and even better, provides the skills to build resilience.
The authors talk about 7 keys to finding your inner strength and overcoming life’s hurdles. The 7 keys can be grouped into 2 categories: 3 know thyself skills, and 4 change skills.
Rather than going into each of the skills (which we teach at Change it), we encourage you to get the book from the library or bookshop. However it’s worth pointing out that the first step to being resilient is to know yourself well.
Part of this involves knowing what you are thinking (e.g., what you tell yourself throughout the day about yourself, others and the world).
Once you are proficient at noticing your thoughts and beliefs about the world, you can examine whether you fall into the common thinking traps below:
Thinking Traps
- Jumping to conclusions
- Tunnel vision – only seeing one side of the story
- Magnifying and minimising – (registering everything but overvalue/undervalue certain things)
- Personalising (making things personal)
- Over-generalising (I failed that test, therefore I’m stupid)
- Mindreading (e.g., they think I’m stupid)
- Emotional reasoning (e.g., I feel useless, therefore I must be useless)
If you identify your thoughts falling into any of the above thinking traps, there are a couple of suggestions below for you.
Try asking yourself:
- What’s another way of viewing this situation?
- What’s the evidence that this thought is true?
- What’s the most likely outcome? How can I deal with it?
If you need help with these skills, Change it psychology can help you – please get in touch!
