Resilience

It is not what happens to us, but how we interpret and respond to what happens to us that determines the outcome of our life

Resilience is the ability to adapt to adversities in our life and to persevere despite the challenges we face. Or more simply put, it is the ability to bounce back when life throws us a curveball.

You may have noticed that some difficult situations you encountered were easy for you to handle, while others seem impossible to overcome. That is because our levels of resilience vary depending on our resources and on how we interpret the challenges we face.

The good news is that resilience can be learned!

When we are faced with a stressful situation, our autonomic nervous system engages its sympathetic branch – also known as the fight or flight response – and with it comes a flow of stress hormones as well as a whole array of mental and emotional reactions that have been wired into our brains from an early age.

This physiological and neurological cocktail then influences our behaviour and how we cope (or not) with the situation at hand.

So how do we build more resilience? There are four paths to resilience:

  1. By increasing our overall wellbeing to have more resources when times get tough.
  2. By becoming more mindful of the mental, emotional and physical processes that happen inside of us when we are faced with a challenge. This helps to build self-awareness and gives us a map of our beliefs, feelings, and behaviours and how they are interconnected.
  3. By learning to regulate our emotions and to control our impulses (regulating your nervous system).
  4. By learning ‘accurate thinking’. A word of caution here, accurate thinking is not positive thinking. It is a series of seven skills that need to be used regularly to build new neural pathways, in order to be able to overcome obstacles and to tap into our inner strength.

If you are interested in learning to build more resilience, we invite you to:

For information on or to book a corporate workshop, please send us an email to welcome@makelifegr8.com