Paul Brian
Resilience is the ability to adapt and survive when life changes and gets hard.
No matter what happens, the resilient individual finds a way to continue and even learn from failure and disappointment.
If you want to learn to be more resilient, there are a number of things to keep in mind.
The following things never faze a resilient person.
1) Life changes and new situations
Resilient people don’t let life changes and new situations faze them.
The only option to life not changing and throwing us into new scenarios is a static situation or stagnancy.
Change isn’t always pleasant, but we certainly grow a lot more from it than we do from staying in a set routine.
When you are flexible, you let life’s changes happen as they will and then do your best to react to them reasonably and in line with your goals.
2) Unfair obstacles and challenges
Life’s changes won’t always be pleasant, like I noted, and it will often throw unfair obstacles our way.
The resilient individual doesn’t like it any more than the rest of us.
But he or she accepts it and doesn’t take it personally.
If you want to become more resilient it’s crucial to recognize that the roadblocks coming your way in life are not against you specifically.
While there are undoubtedly things you can improve about yourself, it’s not your fault that there was a sudden thunderstorm that led to your car sliding off the road and being damaged last week.
That’s unfair and upsetting, but it’s just life. You find a way to move on and thank God it wasn’t even worse.
3) Difficult and painful emotions
Resilient folks aren’t fazed by difficult and painful emotions.
Just as the tide ebbs and flows, our emotions go through cycles and there are times in life that feel like you just won’t survive them.
But you find help, seek solace in faith or spirituality and find a speck of light to keep going.
To be more resilient, it’s crucial to see that hard emotions are just as much a part of life as happy and enjoyable emotions.
You can’t base your deeper sense of well-being or purpose on enjoyable or difficult emotions: both come and go.
4) Loneliness and being overlooked
Some of the most difficult emotions to accept are loneliness and feeling overlooked.
Having felt this way myself many times, I know how excruciating it is:
It’s like your abilities and desire to be seen aren’t met and you’re seen in a way that’s not really you or that unfairly excludes you.
You feel totally alone.
But a resilient person takes this feeling of isolation and uses it.
They understand that millions of others feel exactly the same way and that we can use our understanding of that pain to reach out to others and connect with them any way possible, too.
We can also accept that a certain amount of loneliness is part of the human experience and can’t be avoided.
5) Working at jobs that aren’t ideal
Resilient people have high standards and are always striving to be better.
But they don’t bury their heads in the sand.
This means that they fully grasp that work is often a pain in the a**.
If you have a job and you don’t really like it, there’s every reason to look for another one that treats you better, pays more, has more schedule flexibility and so on.
However, allowing a less-than-ideal job to become the bane of your existence or complaining about it often when you don’t have the means to change it is a mistake.
Resilient people don’t bother with complaining about something. They work to change it if possible.
6) Stress and having many responsibilities
Life includes stress, and hard work comes with the job.
No matter what path you choose in life, it’s going to include some suffering and some responsibilities you’d rather not have.
Trying to find a shortcut around this or blaming God or the universe doesn’t do any good.
Life is about hard work and responsibilities in many ways, and that’s something they not only accept but also embrace.
7) Accidents, unforeseen mistakes and setbacks
When it comes to work (and people’s personal lives), accidents, mistakes and unexpected setbacks are the rule, not the exception.
Something always goes wrong, and you can’t let it faze you.
You may be angry, frustrated, sad or bewildered, but you have to get yourself back up, dust off your britches and get back to work.
There’s just no way to go through life and weather its storms if you expect it to cooperate.
This ties into the next point as well…
8) Sudden interruptions of plans and schedules
Even if you’re pursuing your goals and the big things are working in your favor, sudden interruptions and schedule changes always happen.
Those who are resilient don’t allow this to faze them.
They try their best to practice patience and allow things to happen in their own time.
Sometimes you need to delay your plans a few days or reshuffle a priority.
Sometimes you need to change a plan after something else falls through.
That’s just the nature of life and it’s nothing to take personally or get too stressed about.
9) Critical and negative colleagues and peers
There will always be critical and negative people who rain on your parade.
As a resilient person, you can’t let these people faze you.
Maybe they’re insecure, maybe they’re just bored and feel like being a jerk:
It’s really not your problem.
Don’t read too much into the commentary and snippy attitude of certain people.
It is what it is, and it doesn’t have to become part of your story.
If they’re bitter, let them stay bitter: don’t join them.
10) Failure and sudden dashing of hopes
Failure is another of those inevitable things that happens in life.
Your hopes get dashed and you don’t know what to do next.
But that’s when the resilient person does their best to learn lessons from what went wrong and to find the will and courage to keep on.
Sometimes that means changing course, sometimes it means trying again twice as hard.
But whatever the case may be, it requires doing what the Count of Monte Cristo advises in Alexandre Dumas’ classic:
“Life is a storm, my young friend. You will bask in the sunlight one moment, be shattered on the rocks the next. What makes you a man is what you do when that storm comes.”
Becoming resilient
All of us have the potential to become more resilient.
It’s just a matter of learning to accept what we can’t control in life and focusing our energy and attention on what we can control.
Resilience and adaptability requires strength, discipline and patience.
Find that part of yourself that knows your value and won’t settle for any less than your value and hold on to it.
Life is going to throw all sorts of curveballs, but it doesn’t mean you have to swing for it.
