How resilient are you? Have you contemplated this lately? Resilience is part of our well-being; those who have high emotional intelligence tend to be more emotionally resilient. So, is there anything you can do to build resilience in yourself?
Most of us accept that life is full of challenges and stress. As our emotional intelligence improves, we learn to cope and manage our problems. And then, as we do, we become more resilient.
Hopefully, each time we work through an encounter, we also learn from it, so the next time we face that situation or something similar, we find it more manageable.
Practise makes us more resilient
Strengthening self-awareness and self-reflection skills deepens our knowledge and ability to practice what we do.
I've personally experienced this. I also observe this in my clients. As they work through difficulties, they become more resilient and strengthen their emotional intelligence. By developing their emotional intelligence, they are better able to manage themselves under pressure and stress.
For this reason, the majority of our clients invest in emotional intelligence training programs.
They see the value of providing professional development opportunities to their team to improve skills and developing resilience and a continual adjustment of behaviour through experiences as they happen.
Read more about my own experience with becoming more resilient in this post: How to Reduce Stress and Build Your Resilience.
How to cultivate and build resilience
Before we talk about exactly how to build resilience, we should talk about precisely what it means. So, what is resilience? It is our ability to recover from or adapt to adversity.
But as you can imagine, the year 2020 has brought out an entirely new meaning to the term resilience. Now, more people than ever are faced with the job and food insecurity, increased health risks, social isolation, and many other incredible challenges.
(Click here to read about some of the powerful lessons we can learn from COVID)
Throughout our lives, most of us witness examples of resilience weekly, if not daily. Today, you can't turn on the news without hearing a powerful story about someone's own experience with adversity and how they overcome it. It is incredible how well some people handle tremendous life challenges and bounce back. Their resilience not only helps them endure these circumstances, but they also become stronger and more resilient by overcoming them.
Naturally, we want to build these skills in ourselves. After all, there are so many benefits to being more resilient. Improved mental health, overall well-being, and a longer lifespan, to name a few.
Luckily, we can learn to be more resilient and cultivate this skill daily while simultaneously improving our emotional intelligence. When we accept and grow from our errors and failures, we become more resilient.
Yes, we can consciously build our resilience to support us during minor and significant challenges.
Here's how.
Three ways to train resilience
Author Chade-Meng Tan shares in his book, Search Inside Yourself, that resilience is the ability to overcome obstacles along the way. Here, he shares how we can train resilience on three levels:
- Inner calm: Once we can consistently access the inner calm in the mind, it becomes the foundation of all optimism and resilience. (Visit this link for more on the power of optimism and how to harness it.)
- Emotional resilience: Success and failure are emotional experiences. By working at this level, we can increase our capacity for them.
- Cognitive resilience: Understanding how we explain our setbacks to ourselves and creating useful mental habits help us develop optimism.
As we learn and practice the above three levels of resilience, we will be better prepared to manage difficulties and bounce back from setbacks quickly while building our emotional intelligence. If you would like to become more resilient and improve your emotional intelligence, consider taking a self-assessment to provide a personal analysis of your perception of your behaviour.
Did you like reading about how to build resilience? Here are three similar posts you won't want to miss:
- Why You Need to Get to Know Yourself Under Stress
- Can Practising Mindfulness Really Change My Life?
- The Revolutionary Benefits of Strong Emotional Intelligence
