Are you travelling the long path to resilience?

Resilience is hard won, but it’s worth winning

Resilience is something that you often don’t know you have until you go through something difficult. Many people worry about what could happen in their lives. Losing their job, having an injury, losing their home, failing an exam, losing a friend.

You don’t really know you have resilience or can build it until some of the worst things happen. Sometimes in those situations you will need the help of others. If you have put a lot of energy into doing hard things before bad things happen you will be better prepared for building yourself up on the other side.

For example, if you strive early in life to learn difficult things, then when you hit a road-block you’ll have something someone can’t take away on the other side of it. You might forget the difficult things that you learned, but you’ll know you were capable of it. You may lose confidence, but with each challenge you overcome and see through you will gain experience and insight.

Keep going

If you hit a problem and give up you will never become resilient. You will likely become weaker. Simply because you will become increasingly afraid of trying and through trying you learn what works and what doesn’t, whether you can really do it or not.

Often the encouragement of others helps to overcome obstacles, but if you find yourself without it you need to be disciplined and persistent. There won’t always be someone to cheer you on, you need to find it in yourself to keep going through failure and difficulty. You won’t always be the best, but you can find strengths and challenge your weaknesses.

It helps to remember not to be too harsh on others and yourself when you are struggling, because true resilience doesn’t come from stepping on everyone else. It comes from facing the challenge and trying to conquer it, the challenge isn’t necessarily the fault of the person standing in front of you. You have to recover from the challenge, ultimately that is on you, it isn’t on anyone else.

Inner strength

Other people can ease the way by being supportive, but ultimately to recover you have to find strength in yourself to keep going. There are always people and circumstances to blame, but if all you ever do is blame you will lose sight of what you can achieve despite it. The more you have learnt before a challenge hits, the more potential options you have when you come out the other side to keep going.