What is Resilience and Why is it Important?

· we can be our own hero ·

Date
Sep, 08, 2021

What is resilience and why is it so important? When there’s a lot of crap going on in the world and it feels like the world has gone stark raving mad, being able to overcome challenges is a must. But how do we navigate through what seems to be a cesspit of shite, get through daily challenges, while maintaining good physical and mental health? A coordinated approach to picking ourselves back up when times get tough, plus a whole heap of self-awareness, seems appropriate here.

What is Resilience?

Resilience is the ability to go through challenges, pop out the other side, learn from what we experienced, and use this knowledge to then navigate future difficulties. Life will never be without challenges. Whether they are big or small, they will always be there. But it’s our response, that defines us. Is resilience something we can learn? Yes, but it does take practice and is an ongoing process.

Gratitude plays a massive part in how resilient we are. Recognising the relationship between gratitude and resilience and has definitely become something we desperately need to teach the young people of today, and many adults. But the good news is, there are things we can do that can help us build our resilience. To not give up in the face of difficulty, but to instead, use it to improve our circumstance or situation. The trick is to never give up even when things seem really difficult.

So let’s break it down into what can help us develop resilience.

A Gratitude Attitude Helps Build Our Resilience

A gratitude attitude may sound a bit wan*y but in terms of it relating to our resilience, a bit of gratitude goes a long way. It can pick us up when we’re feeling hard done by or something. There’s always someone worse off than us but sometimes we can find it difficult to be grateful for what we have. It’s kinda human nature to just want more or want what we don’t have or to think the grass is greener over the fence. But if we can be truly grateful for what we have, it can help us keep our chin up quite literally. Like watering the grass in our own backyard, it will in turn grow – just like our response to adversity.

Related Post – Why Gratitude is So Important to Our Health

Here are a few other ways gratitude can have a positive impact on our health. This impact can help us physically, mentally and emotionally. Check it out.

How Gratitude Benefits Us All Gutidentity Emma Bailey

Practising gratitude helps us develop compassion. Compassion for other people and also ourselves. It’s a step above empathy because we move from getting swept up in emotions, to developing compassion for where other people are currently at, including even our own thoughts and behaviour. The compassion that we can develop from gratitude, can help us to really appreciate our own lives giving us more resilience when faced with our own problems.

An easy way to start practising gratitude is to start being thankful for 3 things each evening. This kind of practice, not only helps us feel better at the end of the day, it can actually help us sleep better. It’s difficult to go to sleep angry or sad if we are grateful for what we have. Give it a try and see if it starts to help you feel better about your own situation.

Control – Focus Our Energy

Too often, we can give our power away by placing our energy on things that don’t serve us. We can try focusing on the things we can control. If we constantly look at our failures, or things that didn’t go our way in the past, then we’ll get more of that.

One way to know where we’re placing our energy is to observe our thoughts. Where are they? Are they in the past or the present and what’s on repeat? If we can grasp this concept, we can then channel our energy into what matters. Learn from our mistakes or whatever, and use this to help us when we need to overcome future problems. Focus on what we can control.

Learning from Past Experiences

Find opportunity in failure. I don’t even see failure as failure now. All I see are learning opportunities. But I wasn’t always like this. It’s taken some pretty major life events to get to this point.

So now I ask myself the following: What am I learning from this? What can I take from this situation and how can I turn it into something that helps me? I purposely do things I suck at. I put myself in awkward situations that are really out of my comfort zone. I do this so I have to feel and think in different ways. Feel the awkwardness of slipping out of my comfort zone. It’s confronting, but that’s why I do it. If I don’t, the walls of the comfort zone close in making resilience more difficult.

Ease into the uneasy feeling

We usually try everything to avoid the uneasy feeling of failure but if we face things, each time we overcome it, we are stronger when something trips us up down the line. Because something will always trip us up. It’s how we respond to that trip that defines us. Dust yourself off, carry on, and be aware of how you handled something.

Awareness of Our Strengths & Weaknesses Helps us Overcome Challenges

Having a good awareness of ourselves helps us to be resilient. If we really know where our strengths and weaknesses lie, we can be better prepared as to how we might respond in a certain situation. Often our weaknesses show when we are faced with challenges. Be observant. Take note of how you respond when faced with a challenge.

Do you give in to vices to overcome something? Don’t be hard on yourself. Be observant, watch, understand, and then make a plan for what you might do when another challenge arises. Because challenges will always come. It’s how we respond to each challenge that helps build our resilience. Can we get back up, dust ourselves off, learn from the past, and then commit to positive adjustments for the future?

Get to know yourself better. Put yourself out there to examine yourself. Here are some ways that might help.

Ways we can Learn to Get to Know Ourselves - Gutidentity - Emma Bailey

Get comfortable with being uncomfortable

Probably the craziest, out of my comfort zone thing I’ve done which challenged my resilience, was buying a manual van and driving it by myself to the centre of Australia. I loath driving but I wanted to push myself to try different things, things I didn’t think I’d ever be able to do. Was it hard? It was bloody hard in all respects! What did I gain from that experience? I saw Uluru which was amazing. I met some amazing people. I also discovered that I still loathe driving – especially manuals. But it’s situations like this that give me the inspiration to make these infographics so I can share these experiences with others.

But what I learnt the most was about myself. I learned that no matter what, I could do anything I put my mind to even if it was scary and daunting, which despite the photos below, was at many times a daunting experience.

Commit to Being Resilient

I believe resilience can be learned. It takes the right set of strategies plus repetition. The more we practise getting back up and carrying on, the more resilience becomes a habit. Using a combination of going with the flow of life and having self-discipline can help us gain confidence in ourselves. By not letting things get to us and maintaining the belief that no matter what life throws at us (or what we throw at ourselves), we are capable of change and growth.

Keep your chin up! There’s definitely something in this saying. Physically hold your chin up, keep walking and carry on.

Positive Thinking, Resilience & Adversity as an Adventure

How we perceive things really determines the outcome. If we think positively, we tend to get more of that. The same is in reverse. Ever had a day that starts off crap and that shi*storm just continues throughout the day? Our mindset has a lot to do with it. Negative patterns of thinking can become ingrained which can affect how we then handle certain situations. Think of it like being stuck in a rut. It can be hard to get out of it. But things can change if we change our thoughts.

Think of it like this….. a thought appears “I’m no good at these things” – probably a common thought some of us may have. But if we follow this thought up with the following “I can learn things quickly”. If we continuously follow up negative thoughts with a positive one, those negative thoughts lose their ‘charge’ so to speak. Try it.

If we follow up problems with negative self-talk, we get more of it. Make a plan to change this way of thinking by seeing adversity as an adventure. If something goes wrong for me now, I just laugh it off and follow it up with ‘what is the universe trying to teach me?’. If I don’t, I only get my own knickers in a twist. So what’s the point? There isn’t so there’s no point being mad when things go tits up. Maintaining a positive mindset is essential even when things look bleak.

Related Post – Ways to Encourage Positive Thoughts

Ever struggled with encouraging positive thinking, try some of these ideas below.

Ways to Encourage Positive Thoughts by Gutidentity - Emma Bailey

Goals, Intentions – looking forwards

If we have a positive outlook for our future, we have a better chance of resiliency when things go South. So I guess we could say that we should be looking North. It’s so important to keep our sights focused on looking forward rather than looking at the past, but to use the past as a learning opportunity to help us plan for the future.

If you’ve ever heard of a thing called rumination, it means to go over things again and again. Does this help? Ask yourself this. Sure, it’s ok to go over things to work out what we could learn from it, but it’s not healthy to do this repetitively. Being aware of this kind of thinking is the first step in changing it. Observe. Be aware. Make a plan to look forward instead of backwards. It will get you moving in the right direction.

Challenges are Roadblocks – Find a way around that shi*

I like to think of challenges as roadblocks. I think this way because there’s always a way to go around a roadblock. Like a detour of such. There are always going to be roadblocks in life but they aren’t solid fixtures that are permanent. Perceiving them as ‘temporary’ helps us come up with solutions and to ‘find’ a way around them.

Everything in life is temporary. Temporary pain. Temporary joy. Temporary excitement. But that’s life. We are only here for a temporary time so why not learn how to enjoy every temporary moment, including the ups and the downs, and to learn to enjoy riding the waves however turbulent.

bottom line

Resilience is so important to every facet of our lives. It’s what helps us get back up when we get knocked down. When there’s a lot of things going on around us and it feels like the world is spinning out of control, being able to overcome even small challenges is essential. We can learn to navigate challenges when armed with some strategies and some commitment. A coordinated approach to picking ourselves back up when times get tough, and having good self-awareness, can help us deal with future problems as they crop up. Give it a go! You can do this!!!

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Gutidentity - Emma Bailey

Welcome to GutIdentity!  Following the sudden onset of Coeliac Disease and Microscopic Colitis, I attempt to discover if my Gut is in fact…. my first brain.  As strange as that may sound, it’s certainly not as strange as Autoimmune Disease!

This is my journey as I explore research, novel treatment ideas, and the unique makeup of the gut and how this affects my lifestyle.

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