6 Practical Ways To Strengthen Your Resilience And Bounce Back In Life
Struggles can come out of nowhere, even those who are relatively self-aware and emotionally adept. Resilience can help one cope better and recover more quickly, or at least start heading in that direction
Source | coachsrikanth.com | Coach Srikanth
A few years ago, I read two books by Dr. Srikumar Rao – Are You Ready To Succeed and Happiness At Work – and I watched a few of his talks. In one of them, he had mentioned a story that goes something like this:
“Civil engineers’ ability to build a road through a forest, a swamp and a mountain will be measured by how they overcome the obstacles. Will they go around them, go over them, go under them or through them?
“If the mountain is very hard to drill through and the forest is very dense and very difficult to cut through then they might consider doubling their effort. It has no bearing on their emotions.
“This is a metaphor for your life. You are the engineer designing your life. Your job is to build the road to a successful, purposeful, and joyful life.
“The toxic people in your life are like the rocky hard mountains, dense forests and swamps. Getting angry at them is futile. You just have to figure out a way to build the road regardless of the obstacles.”
How are YOU going to do it? That’s when your resilience matters the most. Resilience is your capacity to recover quickly from any hardships and bounce back to your feet.
Just like a Japanese Daruma Doll, you have to bounce back and stand tall no matter how many times you get knocked down.
Of course, it’s very easy to just say that you have to have resilience and bounce back irrespective of what life throws at you. The question is how you can build, or rather, strengthen your resilience.
Here are 6 practical ways to strengthen your resilience and bounce back in life:
1. Work On Your Overall Health & Fitness
Resilience is not just about your mental strength. It’s also about building your physical strength. A strong immune system will play a key role in building your fitness levels and vice versa. If you lead a sedentary life tied to your office desk, it’s going to make you fall sick often.
How You Can Work On Your Health To Bounce Back In Life
Be mindful of what you put in your mouth. Do one thing at a time. When you are eating, just focus on eating. Stop multi-tasking while eating, like watching TV or anything else that can interrupt your eating. Similarly, make time to exercise at least for 15 minutes everyday. Stay focused on that activity and avoid being on the phone talking to someone.
Why This Is Important In Order To Strengthen Your Resilience
What we do unconsciously can lead to psychosomatic diseases. A psychosomatic disorder is a disease which involves both mind (psyche) and body (soma). Some physical diseases are thought to be particularly prone to being made worse by mental factors such as stress and anxiety.
Your health & fitness plays a vital role in strengthening resilience. Be mindful about your eating and physical exercises. What you do unconsciously may impact your overall health and thus your resilience.
2. Work On Your Mental Agility
The second way to strengthen your resilience is by working on your mental agility.
Mental agility is your ability to switch gears in your mind from ‘reacting’ to stress to ‘responding’ to stress. Reacting, after all, is instinctive and emotionally-driven. Responding, however, is a more objective approach.
How You Can Work On Your Mental Agility To Bounce Back In Life
Invest your mental energy wisely. Avoid ruminating about things you can’t control. Stop brooding over the past. Invest your time and energy on finding solutions and making preparations. The more you practice being protective of your mental energy, the easier it will become.
Making a conscious effort to shift your focus will become easy over a period of time. When you direct yourself away from thinking about things you’ve deemed a waste of time, you’ll begin to form new and healthier habits.
Why This Is Important In Order To Strengthen Your Resilience
If you are mentally agile then you will be able to think on your feet, solve problems and be creative at work. Cultivating this ability will aid you in becoming more effective at your job, brainstorm better solutions to your teams’ problems and ultimately be more successful in your career.
Working on your mental agility is an important aspect of your resilience. Your ability to switch your focus from things you’ve deemed a waste of time to more important things shows that. Switching between unproductive activities can drain your mental energy.
3. Work On Your Emotional Intelligence
Emotional intelligence (EQ) is the ability to understand, use, and manage your own emotions in positive ways to relieve stress, communicate effectively, empathize with others, overcome challenges and defuse conflict. It is the ability to identify and manage your own emotions as well as the emotions of others.
How You Can Work On Your Emotional Intelligence To Bounce Back In Life
You will make mistakes. This is a fact.
