Strengthening resilience

Strengthening resilience is not only about employing strategies to manage stressful situations. It is rather about building a character of certain qualities. Some key qualities of a resilient person are:

Autonomy: Being autonomous requires a capacity to make your own decisions and pursuing relevant actions. This means that you are internally oriented, driven by your values and beliefs.

Responsibility: Being responsible means having the courage and ability to face the consequences of your actions and it often involves taking responsibility for things others did, especially when leading a team.

Diversity awareness: As a member of the academic community, working with people from different fields, cultures and backgrounds within a very competitive community, requires recognizing and respecting the unique value of every individual.

Emotional strength: Being emotionally strong is about honoring your emotions and appraising them as a way of understanding better and connecting to yourself and to others. This ability allows you to remain calm and maintain a positive outlook even in stressful situations.

Mental strength: Learning to deal with challenging situations can help you develop mental strength along the way. Mental strength can involve using creative and flexible thinking to adopt healthy coping mechanisms and commit to persevering towards your desired outcome over time.

Growth mindset: A growth mind-set motivates you to make an effort towards moving closer to your potential. Being open to learning and viewing failures as steppingstones to personal development allows you to transform challenges into opportunities for personal improvement.

In the same way you can build your physical strength with regular exercise, you can also build resilience by nurturing the following 12 personal characteristics.

1. Self-awareness: Expanding your self-awareness can help you develop qualities that are protective of life stressors, such as personal integrity, mental clarity, and stability. Knowing what you stand for, understanding your core values and beliefs can help you make decisions and take actions that are consistent with what is important to you.
2. Wide perspective: Our perspective influences the way we respond to a challenge, our plans and actions. Sometimes it is wise to try and change a stressful situation and other times little can be done to directly change the source of our distress. First, recognize the things you are called to accept and then practice reappraising the challenge. In how many ways can you interpretit? Widening your perspective will allow you to be flexible, which is key to successful adaptation.
3. Adjusting priorities: An unexpected situation may require putting aside something very important to you and give priority to something that is typically less important. Responding to such situation requires re-evaluating what the situation is calling for. The recent pandemic is a very good example showing that we can overcome challenges by adjusting our priorities. We all had to prioritize our health, something most of us took for granted previously, and find new ways of doing things.
4. Self-care: Looking after yourself requires knowing your limitations. Accepting that there is a limit to what you can do helps you set clear boundaries. Giving yourself time to process difficult emotions, whether alone or by sharing with people you trust, can help you recharge your energy and function effectively. Balance your daily routine by combining activities that stimulate you and others that encourage you to pause and reflect (e.g., hobbies, keeping a gratitude journal, mindfulness meditation).
5. Self-compassion: Being compassionate to yourself during moments of failure or self-doubt is a powerful source of resilience. Having self-compassion means being kind to yourself, encouraging and forgiving when making mistakes. Self-compassion requires accepting your weaknesses without being judgmental and with a willingness to understand your behavior.
6. Staying connected: Nurturing loving and respectful relationships plays a vital role in dealing with challenges and maintaining wellbeing. Healthy relationships can provide comfort, emotional support, and companionship. Engaging in shared activities can be a source of encouragement and can significantly enhance your resilience.
7. Meaning and purpose: Making a list of the things you find meaningful in your work, in your relationships, or life in general can help you set goals you can commit to. Regardless of the field of your interest, your goals need to be clear and realistic. Breaking big goals into small milestones that are possible to achieve in a short space of time can motivate you and give you a sense of direction and progress.
8. Building competence: Doing things you are good at can make you feel effective. However, strengthening your sense of competence may involve creating opportunities that allow you to use the skills you already possess to acquire new ones. Making the effort to become better at what you do will build trust in your ability to respond effectively to current and future challenges.
9. Tolerance: Tolerating facing your fears is necessary to leaving your comfort zone to try new things. Feeling uncomfortable is a step toward overcoming self-imposed limitations and moving closer to your potential. Every step outside your comfort zone contributes to your resilience, whether taking on a challenge or simply learning something new.
10. Self-reflection: Regular self-reflection raises your self-awareness and can help you gain clarity and a sense of control. Self-reflection means taking time to have a conversation with yourself to evaluate the challenge. Ask yourself to identify all the possible factors that contribute to what you find stressful, including your contribution to it. Then think of the possible solutions and reflect upon whether and how those are helpful to yourself and to others.
11. Conscious action: Act from a place where you considered both the benefits and the risks that your decisions involve. Pay attention to whether or not negative emotions, such as fear or anger, are getting in the way of your plans and ensure that you address such emotions before you take any action.
12. Nurturing trust: Reminding yourself that you are capable of overcoming any challenges can make you feel safe and emotionally strong. Building self-trust can also contribute to trusting others and to getting others to trust you.

Each day offers opportunities to strengthen your resilience. Although it requires effort, strengthening your resilience is highly rewarding and can help you discover your potential.

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