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Resilience for Every Day: Simple Tips and Inspiring Quotes to Help You Find Inner Strength (...For Every Day series)

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Resilience for Every Day: Simple Tips and Inspiring Quotes to Help You Find Inner Strength (...For Every Day series) - Kindle edition by Publishers, Summersdale. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Use features like bookmarks, note taking and highlighting while…

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What Trauma Taught Me About Resilience | Charles Hunt | TEDxCharlotte

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How to be a Resilient Student When it Feels Like the World is Falling Apart

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By Leehi Yona (link is external)
JD/PhD Student, Law/Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources
Lead Learning Consultant and Peer Academic Coach

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The Driven app is an AI-powered resilience program that can help individuals manage stress and build resilience. Download the app on iOS and Android today.

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Ever wonder what makes people resilient? How some can manage tough times with a great perspective and strong mindset?

RESILIENT PEOPLE is an original podcast hosted by Janet Fanaki. A self-described Resilience Explorer, Janet speaks with regular people from around the world who are admired for their resilience as well as experts in fields like sleep, fitness, education and nutrition.

RESILIENT PEOPLE guests have lived through a major life challenge and found a purpose from it to help others. From forming a charity to writing a book, starting a fundraiser and becoming popular public speakers.

It's the way that they took a negative experience and turned it into something positive that Janet is drawn to and wants to share their journey with listeners.

For season 3 of the podcast, Janet is shifting her focus to stories from midlife women. Counting herself in this group, she is learning from the women who have turned this sometimes scary and lonely time in their lives, to one that is bringing them joy and fulfillment.

Listen to the RESILIENT PEOPLE podcast to get introduced to the people you wish you always knew, and now do.

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Ever wonder what makes people resilient? How some can manage tough times with a great perspective and strong mindset? RESILIENT PEOPLE is an original podcast hosted by Janet Fanaki. A self-described Resilience Explorer, Janet speaks with regular people from around the world who are admired for their resilience as well as experts in fields like sleep, fitness, education and nutrition.

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The Resilience Journal: A 2-Minute Commitment to Lift Your Entire Day

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Resilience is the core strength you use to lift the load of life. Resilience skills upgrade and strengthen your neuronal networks by leveraging your brain's ability to change itself with experience. Just as you can learn math, music, and language, you can learn resilience. Enhancing resilience li...

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Learn more

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The Resilient Teen: 10 Key Skills to Bounce Back from Setbacks and Turn Stress into Success (The Instant Help Solutions Series)

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Amazon.com: The Resilient Teen: 10 Key Skills to Bounce Back from Setbacks and Turn Stress into Success (The Instant Help Solutions Series): 9781684035786: Raja PhD, Sheela: Books

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From stress to resilience  | Raphael Rose | TEDxManhattanBeach

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How to Become More Resilient, According to Research

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How to Become More Resilient, According to Research

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How to become more resilient, according to the research | CNN

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People who bounce back from life’s adversities often have similar traits and methods of coping. You can learn to become more resilient by following these top research-based tips.

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This podcast is dedicated to stressing less and living more. Stories of being human... development and growth and lessons learned. All of this with a bit of science for perspective.

With this podcast I hope to share stories that let you know you're not alone through sharing my intimate relationship with stress, anxiety, insecurity and the growth that has brought me here.

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This podcast is dedicated to stressing less and living more. Stories of being human... development and growth and lessons learned. All of this with a bit of science for perspective. With this podcast I hope to share stories that let you know you're not alone through sharing my intimate relationship with stress, anxiety, insecurity and the growth that has brought me here.

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Happify: Science-Based Activities and Games

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Build skills for lasting happiness: Happify turns the latest innovations in positive psychology, CBT, and mindfulness into activities and games that help you lead a more fulfilling life.

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As parents, we want to protect our children from harm.

But we know we can't shelter them from every threat or challenge that may come their way, now or in the future.
So, we want our children to be able to cope with stress and change - to bounce back from whatever life throws at them.
In short, we want to raise resilient children.

Fortunately, resilience isn't some elusive innate quality - it's not a "you've either got it or you don't" proposition.

Instead, it is built and strengthened through specific life experiences.

@parentingforbrain How to raise #resilientkids #parentingtips #parentingforbrain ♬ Filter transition

What Is Resilience?

Resilience is handling different types of stress and recovering from trauma or adversity in tough times.

From early life hardship or abuse to the loss of a parent, fractured relationships, loss of a loved one, job loss, health problems, or natural disasters - trauma can come in any number of packages.

A resilient person can keep functioning and even thrive afterward.

Resilient individuals recover faster and more completely from adverse experiences and may even emerge relatively unscathed from severe hardship.

Developmental psychologists have long been fascinated that some children who have faced trauma can come out mostly unharmed while others crumble.

They wanted to know why.

For more help on calming tantrums, check out this step-by-step guide

At first, researchers focused on identifying individual characteristics that are potential risks, such as personality traits and vulnerabilities that could contribute to adverse outcomes in children.​

But later researchers turned this approach on its head:

They started looking into factors that contributed to positive outcomes in at-risk children instead.

They call these factors "resilience factors" or "protective factors."

These are the variables that, when present in a child's life, correspond to being more resilient and better health outcomes.

Not only that, but they also seem to add up: The more protective factors are present, the better the chance a child can adapt positively to difficult circumstances.

However, the risk factors add up, too.

Children exposed to six or more risk factors are 2.5 times more likely to develop externalizing disorders, such as conduct disorder, violent crime, and substance abuse.

They are also 1.8 times more likely to develop internalizing disorders that affect children's mental health, such as depression and anxiety disorders.

The concept of resilience for kids is essentially the accumulation of protective factors vs. risk factors.

Think of it like a scale: Stack the protective factors on one side and the risk factors on the other.

Children become resilient when the effect of the protective factors outweighs the risk factors.

This means that children with a history of significant adversity may require many more positives to tip the scale and become resilient.

Resilience Factors That Can Help Children Adapt

So, what are the protective factors that can help children cope with hardship?

Protective factors can be grouped into three general categories: family, community, and individual.

They touch on various issues, but a recurrent theme runs through many protective factors: connection with supportive people.

Indeed, six decades of research indicate that a child's resilience mostly depends on their connections to other people rather than their inherent qualities.

Examples of resilience factors that can help kids adapt.

1. Family Factors:

Good parenting.

Low family stress.

Sound parental mental health.

Absence of alcoholism, drug abuse, etc.

Sense of safety.

2. Community Factors:

Support and engagement from extended family members.

A supportive relationship with a mentor.

Positive school experiences.

Safe neighborhood.

Close community.

Social support.

Part of a religious or faith community.

Extracurricular activities.

3. Individual Factors:

Adaptive emotional skills.

Perception of control and the child's ability to impact one's own life.

Self-esteem and self-efficacy.

Having the ability to dream and a sense of purpose in life.

Social skills and communication skills.

Empathy.

Sense of humor.

Physical health.

Higher intellectual capacity and cognitive competencies.

Gender: Girls tend to be more resilient than boys.

Easy temperament.

Favorable genes.

Advantaged socioeconomic status.

How to Build Resilience In Children

Given this understanding of protective factors, we can form specific strategies to help build children's resilience.

Some of these factors cannot be changed, such as a child's genetic makeup or gender, but many others can be actively provided for or supported.

Here are four proven strategies for raising resilient kids:

1. Warm, Responsive, Supportive Parenting is The Best Way
The most common protective factor for youth resilience is having at least one close, positive relationship with a warm, responsive, and supportive parent or adult caretaker.
When parents build a positive parent-child relationship, they can further teach or instill in them other protective factors.

Parents can build strong relationships through what child development experts call authoritative parenting.

This parenting style is characterized by high responsiveness coupled with high expectations.

Authoritative parents are warm and responsive to their children's emotions.

They facilitate the development of emotional regulation, which is a key protective factor.

They also allow autonomy and encourage independence, helping their children gain a sense of control of their own lives - another significant resilient factor.

Authoritative parenting is also associated with other valuable factors like self-esteem, social competence, and communication skills.

Tough love parenting, in contrast, does not support these protective factors.

This style of parenting is less likely to produce strongly resilient kids.

2. Teach Problem-Solving and Coping Skills

Directly teaching coping skills can help raise resilient children.

Coping mechanisms are not only useful for dealing with severe hardship - but they're also helpful for handling everyday challenges and transitions.

So, parents can treat changes or difficult times as opportunities to instill these skills.

Through learning to cope with changes in their everyday lives positively, children build a sense of self-efficacy and perceived control that will carry them through future challenges.

Positive coping skills include:

Problem-solving skills

Ability to make realistic plans

Positive reappraisal of stressful situations

Volunteering

Regular exercise

Extracurricular activities and group activities

3. Work Towards a Healthy, Stable Environment

Parents can also help their children become resilient by working to ensure they have positive home, school, and social environments.

Parents can improve their home environment by seeking help for any mental health or marital issues, finding ways to become more resilient themselves, and modeling coping strategies.

At the same time, parents can get involved in their children's schooling and work with teachers to ensure a positive school experience.

And finally, they can support their children in developing positive social networks and keep them away from peers who may have a harmful influence.

4. Don't Sweat the Small Stuff

Strive to create a positive and healthy environment for our children, but don't keep them in a bubble.

We can't maintain a perfect home or protect our children from all possible school and social stressors.

And the good news is that we don't need to.

That's because not all stress is harmful to children.

Children need stress to build up a tolerance.

Gradual exposure to stressful times - at manageable levels - can help them develop coping strategies to become resilient.

Psychologists call this eustress or positive stress because it can promote growth in coping skills.

But there's one key caveat: The help of a supportive adult is critical in managing stress and turning stress exposure into a resilience builder.

Resilience Theory

It's a simple process

Stories abound of young people who've overcome adversity or recovered from horrific experiences only to thrive and prosper.

It might have been easy to imagine that something extraordinary is required to thrive against the odds.

It might have been convenient to believe children can develop these abilities through play or activities.

But in reality, all we need to develop resilience is everyday connections and support. It's that simple.

Resilience expert Ann Masten has found that resilience, far from exceptional, is quite common.

She called this the "ordinary magic".

Start early

Human brains are malleable.

This malleability or "plasticity" is greatest in early childhood. Therefore, the formative years are the optimal windows of opportunity.

The earlier we start strengthening our children's capacity to cope with times of stress, the better.

It's much harder, although possible, to rewire our brains as we grow older.

Healthy development of resilience is an ongoing process, not a fixed point or end goal.

From Resilience Theory, the conceptual framework psychologists use to understand how resilience works; we know that it fluctuates over time and circumstances.

A child may struggle in one domain but adapt well in another.

The child may also be more or less resilient at different times.

Final Thoughts on Resilience in Children

Strengthening the protective factors to help children build resilience is a process.

Parents play a significant role in helping their children learn to adapt to whatever's coming their way so they will thrive in the face of adversity.

References

Pamela Li is an author, Founder, and Editor-in-Chief of Parenting For Brain. Her educational background is in Electrical Engineering (MS, Stanford University) and Business Management (MBA, Harvard University). Learn more

View all posts by Pamela Li | Website

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Resilience in Children, Resilience Factors and Examples

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Building resilience in children is not just teaching life skills. Discover what it is and how to foster its development according to science.

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How Exercise Can Help Build Physical and Mental  Resilience

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How Exercise Can Help Build Physical and Mental  Resilience

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The most memorable moment of the Tokyo Olympics may have been a star athlete's decision to withdraw from competition. When Simone Biles then returned to win bronze on the beam, news coverage centered on one word: " resilience." "Simone Biles Gives Lesson in Resilience," proclaimed one headline. "Resilience Is the Most Important Trait of a Champion," read another.

Winning medals is well and good. But resilience? That's the hallmark of the grit, strength, and seriousness of purpose that transcend sport and time: Naomi Osaka returning to tennis after stepping away to prioritize her mental health. Michael Phelps and Kevin Love fighting their way back from depression. Billie Jean King standing up to unequal treatment of female athletes. Muhammad Ali rebounding after banishment from boxing. Tom Brady silencing the naysayers, again and again and again.

In these athletes' stories - and in the everyday efforts of people who overcome adversity - we see a trait to which we can all relate and aspire.

"Resilience is the ability to recover from stress quickly and efficiently, and secondly to have a higher threshold for stress so you can successfully deal with a lot more."

"Resilience is the ability to recover from stress quickly and efficiently, and secondly to have a higher threshold for stress so you can successfully deal with a lot more," says Jenny Evans, author of The Resiliency rEvolution.

Resilience isn't reserved for a select few who naturally adapt well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats, or other significant sources of stress. Everyone can become more resilient to stress of all kinds. (Listen to Jen Elmquist, MA, LMFT, director and co-creator of Life Time Mind, share simple mental exercises you can do if you feel overwhelmed at " How to Build Mental Resilience During Difficult Times ".)

That's because this remarkable capacity is trainable: You can learn not only to survive and manage stress but also to grow and improve in response to it.

"It is not a personality flaw to feel really stressed or feel like you're not very resilient," says Evans. "That is not a personal shortcoming. That is 100 percent straight-up chemistry and biology, and that is what your brain and body are hardwired to do. In a way, if you're struggling with stress, good. It means your brain is actually doing its job. Now let's find a way for you to handle it before the physiological stress response gets triggered."

It's a common misconception that resilient people are unbreakable. In that regard, "Tupperware is resilient. Drop it on the floor, it's not going to break," says human-performance expert Mike T. Nelson, PhD. Human resilience, however, looks different. "Breaking" is inevitable, a guaranteed part of being alive. But the physical and psychological effects of acute and chronic stress don't have to mean indefinite suffering. "It's possible to get stronger, to learn, and to grow from the experience," says Nelson.

Evans, Nelson, and other experts agree that one of the best ways to build resilience in all its forms is through the body: It plays a key role in absorbing, processing, remembering, holding, and releasing stress. If you've ever used a run, a yoga session, dancing, or even blowing raspberries with your mouth to shake off a tough day or stressful event, you've experienced how physical activity can reduce your stress level. (See " This Is Your Brain on Exercise " for more on how moving your body makes you smarter, happier, and more resilient.)

A longer-term example might involve following a strength-building routine. Stick with it and your muscles will strengthen; over time, this allows you to lift more weight without injury.

And successfully enduring one type of physical stress may make you better at enduring another, says Nelson. For example, he notes, " cold-water immersion may allow you to perform better with exhaustive exercise."

Physical training builds more than just physical resilience. Thanks to a phenomenon known as cross-adaptation, resilience in one context can transfer to another.

In the psychologist's model, physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual resilience form overlapping circles in a four-way Venn diagram, each with the capacity to enhance - or undermine - another. Physical and psychological resilience are symbiotic: Increase your capacity to resist or recover from physical injury and you'll likely beef up some forms of psychological resilience as well.

So, what does training for resilience look like? In short, you need to get a little bit uncomfortable.

"Humans evolved in a high-contrast environment," says ancestral-health expert Frank Forencich, author of Beware False Tigers and The Sapience Curriculum. Early humans dealt with all sorts of hazards and threats. "Modern life is totally out of sync with these cycles," he explains. Instead of being adaptable, poised to thrive in a variety of environments, we've become overly adapted, capable of performing only a narrow set of tasks in specific and controlled settings.

This sameness may be harming us: Forencich and other ancestral researchers believe that the loss of variety in our lives has eroded our resilience, leaving us more vulnerable to disease, including depression and anxiety.

Part of the remedy, then, lies in increasing our exposure to a broader range of stimulation and temporary physical discomfort through intentional exercise and recovery habits.

"Our adaptability is a big part of what makes us human," says Forencich. "It's allowed us to survive and make good in all kinds of environments all around the world."

By embracing our adaptability and training for resilience, then, we are effectively training ourselves to be more robust and functional humans.

Resilience training is a big ask. It suggests pushing your physical limits, in some way, almost daily. You could sum it up in one phrase: " Do the stuff you don't feel like doing."

That probably doesn't sound like much fun - but that's exactly the point. If our attachment to creature comforts has done a number on our resilience, it makes sense that the way back is to occasionally detach deliberately from them.

The way out may not be easy, says Nelson, but in principle, it's fairly simple: "Practice doing hard stuff."

Ready to get uncomfortable? These ideas can help you get started.

Find Your Strength

Lifting weights can be a powerful way to foster resilience because it involves believing in oneself, says clinical social worker and trauma specialist Mariah Rooney, MSW, LICSW, the cofounder of Trauma Informed Weight Lifting, a program that teaches fitness professionals how to use resistance exercise as a tool for overcoming mental-health challenges. (See " How Movement Therapy Can Heal Traumatic Stress " by offering accessible, thoughtful approaches to exercise.)

"For some folks who have experienced trauma, the body can be a scary place to be and connect with," she says. "Weightlifting can be one way of engaging our bodies that allows us to expand our window of tolerance and have powerful experiences of agency and strength when perhaps our bodies have been the holders of our painful experiences."

"Every time you approach the barbell, there's a question mark: Can I do this? Will it feel good? Do I feel safe? And every rep becomes an opportunity to learn to listen to and respond to ourselves in more attuned ways."

At the same time, the progress many lifters experience offers encouraging evidence that growth is possible and that effort yields results - in the gym as well as in other areas of life. "Weightlifting fosters self-trust," says Rooney. "Every time you approach the barbell, there's a question mark: Can I do this? Will it feel good? Do I feel safe? And every rep becomes an opportunity to learn to listen to and respond to ourselves in more attuned ways."

As we accrue more successful lifts, our capacity to grow from stress is reinforced.

Rooney has discovered that those little weightlifting triumphs can be an empowering metaphor for people struggling with psychological burdens. "The physical strength they build translates into a greater sense of efficacy in their relationships and other aspects of their lives," she says.

Building resilience in the weight room takes some finesse, however. The wrong workout - too much weight, too many reps - can break you down physically rather than build you up. Similarly, the wrong environment can stress you out rather than calm you down.

A key to training for resilience is to stay flexible and tuned in. "It can be helpful to adjust a routine - even throw it out altogether - when necessary," Rooney says, "particularly when our bodies are letting us know that we need something different." She suggests that people seeking resilience take one step beyond the fitness axiom "Listen to your body": "Pay attention to your emotional and psychological state, too."

(Learn more about trauma-informed movement at " How Movement Therapy Can Heal Traumatic Stress ".)

Find Your Breath

Resistance training isn't the only physical path to greater resilience. The "instructive discomfort" of an asana practice can also help you get there, says yoga and martial-arts instructor Stephen Schilling.

"You can confront that discomfort in one of two ways: Draw away from it, or breathe through it and accept it. That's what allows you to endure," Schilling explains. "The discomfort doesn't necessarily go away. But you learn that it won't break you. You discover you can live with it to a greater extent than you thought."

Contained within that simple process - breathing through discomfort - is a powerful life lesson: Practice yoga long enough and you can learn to manage your response to life's disappointments and worries. "Your time on the mat gives you a reference point," he says. "You can say, 'I got through my workout this morning; I can get through this.'"

Cardiovascular exercise can produce a similar effect: In addition to improving circulation and strengthening your heart and lungs, steady-state cardio - think jogging, cycling, vigorous hiking - encourages deep, steady breathing, which helps stimulate the stress-relieving, parasympathetic, rest-and-digest system.

(For six exercises backed by ancient wisdom and modern research to help you find your breath, visit " 6 Breathing Techniques ".)

Find Your Intensity

High-intensity interval training (HIIT) is yet another potent physical approach to building resilience.

HIIT - which describes a style of exercise rather than a specific activity, sport, or movement style - can include strength and cardio moves. And by design, HIIT workouts are brief, making them accessible to those who are short on time or who lack the motivation for a longer session.

"It takes just 30 to 60 seconds of high-intensity physical activity to produce endorphins, so HIIT is your in-the-moment resiliency solution. Like, boom! You just hit the reset button," says Evans.

"Then, when you string together these short bursts of activity for 10 or 20 minutes, and over time string together these short workouts, you increase your level of fitness and raise your threshold for stress," she explains.

It takes just 30 to 60 seconds of high-intensity physical activity to produce endorphins.

Another advantage to HIIT: It's a key component in helping you develop what exercise physiologists call metabolic flexibility, which refers to the body's ability to burn both carbohydrates and fat as fuel, and to switch easily between them. Because HIIT depends primarily on carbohydrates for fuel, it greases the wheels of your carb-burning metabolism, so that your body can clear starches from your bloodstream quickly and easily.

A 2017 study showed that just six workouts - each consisting of four to six 30-second bike-sprint intervals separated by four minutes of recovery - over a two-week period improved glucose metabolism in diabetic and prediabetic men and women by 25 percent. That's a big result for such a small time investment.

Nelson recommends performing your HIIT workouts and strength-training workouts on alternating days, doing each about three times a week. This doesn't have to be complicated to be effective, he notes. "Get on a piece of cardio equipment and go more or less all-out for short periods."

If you prefer body-weight moves to traditional cardio, Evans suggests making a list of five to 10 exercises, grabbing a deck of cards, and pulling cards every round to dictate how many reps to perform. (Evans, who is also a certified personal trainer, has developed a training tool called Hit the Deck, a set of 35 exercise cards along with a programmable interval timer.)

"Whether it's cardio or strength - as long as it's making you uncomfortable, it's making you more resilient," Nelson says.

And if high-intensity work simply isn't for you, don't stress about it. The same 2017 study showed that steady-state training (longer workouts performed at lower intensity) could also improve glucose metabolism - suggesting that either approach is effective when your goal is tuning up your carb-burning engine.

(For a strength-based, low-impact HIIT workout, visit " The Low Impact HIIT Workout ".)

Movement for Body and Mind

Exercise is probably the most widely practiced strategy for boosting physical resilience. When you work out, you subject your muscles to stress; work hard enough and some of the muscle fibers fray and break. In the hours and days after your workout, your body repairs those broken fibers, laying down extra reinforcement to protect your muscles against similar stress in the future.

Repeat the same exercise session a few days later, and continue that process for weeks or months, and you'll be measurably stronger, faster, and more muscular. Your muscles are now better able to handle challenging loads.

"If there is a fountain of youth, it is regular exercise."

Your bones are stronger and less likely to break. Your body is better able to clear waste products from your muscles, so that burning feeling doesn't come on as quickly or acutely. Your heart pumps more blood more easily, so you don't get as winded. Your nervous system is more efficient, so the movement is smoother and easier.

That is resilience at work, and it's woven so completely into our physiology that it continues to function into old age. Research has shown that nonagenarians get predictably stronger and fitter from a consistent exercise routine.

"If there is a fountain of youth, it is regular exercise," says geriatrician Edmund Lew, MD. "It enhances the function of the cellular, metabolic, and organ systems of the body." This includes the immune, vascular, and nervous systems, translating into better movement, cognition, and emotional stability.

The Resilience Workout

Bad news first: You can't entirely prevent injuries. The inevitability of the odd ankle twist or lower-back torque when you're working out or just living life makes complete prevention a pipe dream.

What is possible, says strength coach Dan John, is to gain an edge over the slower forces that threaten to erode your resilience in the long term - things like muscle loss, joint instability, and weakness in the core. "Those are the things that get you down as you age," he says.

John designed the following four-week workout routine to help ward off the age-related decline and frailty that many consider inevitable. These five moves can help preserve - and even increase - muscle mass; teach you to stabilize your core, keeping your spine safe; and fire up your glutes, build grip strength, and address other neglected areas that directly affect longevity.

Commit to holding the line on those things, and you'll have a better chance of emerging unscathed from life's bigger mishaps.

The Workout

Perform the workout up to four times a week on nonconsecutive days. Always choose a weight - or variation - that makes the move challenging on your final few reps. For example, you'll use more weight in week 2 when you're doing sets of five reps than you used in week 1 with sets of eight.

1. Half-Kneeling Press

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How Exercise Can Help Build Physical - and Mental - Resilience

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The most memorable moment of the Tokyo Olympics may have been a star athlete's decision to withdraw from competition. When Simone Biles then returned to win bronze on the beam, news coverage centered on one word: " resilience." ­"Simone Biles Gives Lesson in Resilience," proclaimed one headline.

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One thing is for certain, education and the starting points in which our children approach their learning are changing and becoming all the more diverse. With the disruptions created in the face of the pandemic still reverberating across classrooms around the country, building resilience in children is becoming increasingly more important when closing attainment gaps.

Firstly, What is resilience for kids?

Resilience requires a sense of adaptability and confidence to overcome challenges, and requires children to have the ability to recover quickly from tough challenges, in order to succeed.

What does a resilient learner look like?

Flexibility and durability plays a significant role across the curriculum, and it is significant that we are able to recognise what resilience in children looks like and how to teach resilience in the classroom.

Students, who are resilient learners, are more likely to be able to successfully adapt to the changes they come across along their learning journey each and every day. This could relate to something as simple as moving on to a new topic, or coping with a new teacher for a specific lesson or new term.

Although from an adult perspective, these changes can appear at first rather minor, from the perspective of children, these changes can have a huge impact upon their progress and outcomes. Therefore, it is critical that we consider how to teach resilience in the classroom and that students are explicitly taught coping strategies that enable them to perform at their very best, regardless of breaks in their learning routines.

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A focus on a positive growth mindset is one way that you can effectively approach building resilience in children and ensure that your students have the skills and ability to persist and persevere when approaching learning challenges. By encouraging this as a learning culture within the classroom, you can effectively encourage children to become stronger, independent learners and less reliant on routines to succeed.

There are a huge number of ways that this can be achieved, and here at Twinkl, we understand that teaching and learning isn't simply confined to the realms of the classroom. There are a range of things that can be done at home to bolster resilience in children, too.

This Pupil Resilience Toolkit Resilience Information Booklet can be used to support you and other teaching staff in your school with recognising the role that you play in supporting this skill development in the children you work with.

A resilient learner will consistently demonstrate these traits:

How does resilience for students play a key role in closing attainment gaps?

The way in which a child approaches their learning and the confidence they have within their own ability plays a significant role in how schools will be able to close attainment gaps. It is especially important now that students are having to draw upon prior knowledge that has or hasn't been retained over a much longer period.

With changes to educational routines, the task of rebuilding confidence when approaching new topics and learning content can be challenging. Therefore, it is safe to say that the majority of students will find it more difficult to persevere and persist when approaching learning challenges, making it all the more important when it comes to building resilience in children.

Included in this lovely Resilience PowerPoint is a range of slides featuring Twinkl original illustrations and informative content. The perfect way to introduce young children to the concept of resilience, while encouraging them to reflect on their own approaches to difficulties and challenges. With a range of questions included, you can encourage your class to communicate openly, and explore what makes someone resilient.

By implementing a positive learning culture across the board, and reducing the fear of failure within the classroom, we can effectively build resilience in children and enable them to aspire to be their very best, and achieve their target outcomes and goals.

It is crucial that we approach learning with a supportive classroom environment from the outset, and treating failure as an opportunity for learning and development. This way, our emergent learners can feel safer and more confident to tackle increasingly challenging topics.

How to teach resilience in the classroom?

So, how do we teach resilience? The foundations for creating resilient young learners not only begins with a provision that provides safety and security. There are a broad number of ways that you can achieve this by implementing spaces in the day for them to focus on self-awareness and be present in their learning.
Here, we take a look at some amazing things you can do within the classroom, with unique insights from education professionals.
Bringing Mindfulness to the Classroom
Sally at Tender Hearted Teacher

Zoe Enser is an Education and English specialist at Education People
Encouraging independent approaches to learning.

In my experience, being resilient is very much context driven and related to the tools we have developed via the experiences we have had and learning we already hold within a specific area.

For example, that means as an English specialist, I have lots of resilience when it comes to tackling ideas in English. My experience and knowledge of science is more limited, so I am more likely to be less resilient when I encounter a challenge in that discipline. However, because, as adults, a lot of that has become tacit, that is so embedded it has automated, and we no longer have to think about it, we often forget that young people are in a very different position.

This means my approach has changed over the years as I have become more aware of this. Now, I support them to make connections to their prior knowledge and experiences of the task and get them to begin to think about it in a metacognitive way. This approach means they are less dependent on me and are able to work with increasing independence, even when doing something extremely challenging.
Talya is a parenting expert at Motherhood: The Real Deal
Practice Gratitude for Emotional Resilience.

Gratitude enhances our emotional resilience and, therefore, is a powerful tool for building resilience in children. One really easy way of fostering this, is by weaving in a gratitude practice into classroom routines, or when the family comes together at home. That could be breakfast, dinner, or when you are all out in the car or for a walk together. These times are a great opportunity to carve out a little gratitude practice. All you need to do, is simply ask that everyone shares three things that they are grateful for. By doing this, you'll create an instant boost to emotional wellbeing by bringing positive emotions like satisfaction, happiness and presence to the learning.
Be an effective model of resilience in your own practice. Grace Martin is an experienced teacher at Wellness Potential Teacher.

Create a Classroom Culture that embraces challenges. Sam is a resilience expert at Resilience for Kids
"You cannot teach what you are not aware of yourself. The first act of teaching is to establish a safe environment where meaningful relationships can be built. If you want to be able to teach resilience overtly, you must have an understanding with your students. One method of setting the stage is to establish rapport. You can say, 'When I was your age, sitting right where you are' to create a sense of familiarity. This helps students understand that you get them and have experiences, too."

"Creating a classroom culture where children realise that everybody faces challenges every day, is the first step to building resilience. Teachers have a key role in referencing their own mistakes, fears and vulnerabilities while emphasising the benefits of being open. The moment children feel they are in a safe environment free of judgment and criticism, they will find the courage to share their failings with others as a joint of learning experience rather than hide in the shadows where no self-growth can be achieved.

The challenge for us all is to make openness and self-development as desirable as high test scores and this can be achieved through the reference of whole school values in assemblies and by giving weekly awards. In the classroom, frequent journaling, the development of quality whole-class discussion and the teaching of practical skills can further build our children's resilience."

Celebrate Mistakes

For even more ways to build resilience in children, one key thing to remember here, is that although things may not go to plan at times, mistakes should be celebrated rather than punished. By changing a child's perspective, we are able to see failings as opportunities for learning and development.

With this in mind, encourage your students to use their mistakes as an opportunity to develop knowledge, skills and understanding. Many children and students have external pressures beyond the realms of learning, so it is important that we communicate that mistakes are a fundamental part of the learning process.

10 take away tips to help you build resilience in children, and close attainment gaps

Make connections and develop relationships with your students.

Create consistent routines that encourage children to adapt their approaches.

Give space for your students to detach from learning challenges.

Give students adequate time to recover.

Encourage students to support one another.

Give students the chance to approach difficult learning challenges from an independent perspective.

Model what resilience looks like.

Maintain a positive outlook when approaching new topics.

Enable them to accept change and embrace it.

Promote opportunities for self-discovery and awareness.

Other activities that you can use to build resilience in children.

Here at Twinkl, we understand that sourcing and generating inspirational teaching and learning ideas can be challenging from time to time. That is why, we have a broad range of resources designed with building resilience in mind, so you can save essential time on planning and direct your attention where it is most needed.

Building resilience is difficult for some children (and some adults). Like most skills, it takes practice and we can learn from experience. This Problem-Solving Resilience Activity provides a range of everyday problems for children to discuss and suggest solutions to.

Whenever there is a difficult situation and your child or student needs to find a positive solution or coping strategy, they can take this wonderful wheel of resilience tool out of their pocket or their bag and choose which strategy to use.

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Building resilience in children | What is resilience for kids?

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Here at Twinkl, we understand that resilience is key to closing attainment gaps, and it has never been more important to build resilient children and learners. Discover practical ways on how to teach resilience in the classroom to engage and transform attainment gaps.

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Apps for Mindfulness and Personal Resiliency

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If you are an existing Resilience App user, please click here to login.

If you require support, please email [email protected] .

After registering online, you're welcome to download the smartphone app to your device. Search "Resilience App" in the app store or click the buttons below.

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If you are an existing Resilience App user, please click here to login. If you require support, please email [email protected] . After registering online, you're welcome to download the smartphone app to your device. Search "Resilience App" in the app store or click the buttons below.

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Resilience is the ability to overcome the various challenges in life while becoming a more personally powerful individual. It is the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats or stress. It's about "bouncing back" from the difficult experiences we all experience from time to time. Resilience is ordinary, not extraordinary, and it can be learned and strengthened. We all have the ability to learn and grow from the stress and difficulties we face in our lives, and improve how we approach life's most challenging situations.

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Resilience is the ability to overcome the various challenges in life while becoming a more personally powerful individual. It is the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats or stress. It's about "bouncing back" from the difficult experiences we all experience from time to time.

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Being Well Podcast: Introducing Resilience

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Timestamps: 0:30: Why resilience is important 2:05: The HOW of growing key strengths 5:00: Dealing with challenges/What's in your backpack? 6:30: Resources, challenges, and vulnerabilites 7:40: Changing the brain for the better 9:45: How is this different from just "positive thinking"?

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Books that build resilience in children can give them a preview of the wisdom they will gain from life experience. As parents, we can let our kids learn to get back up when they fall and we can also read them stories about characters who fall and fail and who find the courage, the strength, the resilience, and the bravery to bounce back.
One thing that really sticks out in my mind from being a mom of a toddler is how amazing they are at bouncing back from the things life throws at them.

One minute they can be screaming like the world has ended just because the toast was cut in squares and not triangles, and the next moment all is right again with the world. They are resilient.

I remember that quick turn around in emotions could leave me spinning - my son had already bounced back, but I was left with the residual emotions and reminding myself a bad moment does not make a bad day.

Image from: When You Are Brave by Pat Zietlow Miller
*This post may contain affiliate or referral links for your convenience. Clicking on these links directs you to a website to purchase the product. Nurture and Thrive receives a small fee for this service. Thank you for your support!

Find the whole (most) list for purchase here: Nurture and Thrive Bookshop: Books that Build Resilience in Children
As our kids grow, they too have a harder time shrugging off emotions. Yet, they also have less life experience to draw from when things get tough.

And even with younger children, there are times when emotions overwhelm and your child believes that how they feel right now is how they will feel forever.

Lately, I've been saying some form or another of this sentiment to my son:
It isn't about what happens to you, hard things happen to everyone. It's how you respond to those hard things. How you get up again, when you have fallen down. How you try again when you have failed.
Books are a great way to show kids that emotions come and go, that bad days turn around, that they can find ways to bounce back, and to build our children's resilience. To give them the wisdom that they will get from life experience, but until then, they can learn from relatable characters in books that find they can not only have the courage to stand up for themselves but for others too.

These books are some of my favorites for those times when your kids are learning to navigate the stormy seas of life.

Because when you really boil it down - bravery, resilience, and bouncing back are the skills kids need to be able to have the courage to be true to themselves, to be kind to others, and to truly be able to connect with others. Above all things, isn't this what we want most for our kids? And even ourselves?

14 Books that Build Resilience in Children

This is the story about a little tree that makes it through challenging conditions and thrives. "The moon gazed down and softly said, "Sometimes we lose our way. But with some help, we start again. That's how life is you know."

A little boy helps the tree and the tree learns to thrive. Compassion, resilience, and overcoming stress and strain, this book is a great one to have in your library for when kids face stress and challenging times.

This book is suitable for both preschoolers and school-aged kids.

Betty wants to be a fast runner and wants nothing more than to win a race. But there is one problem, she just isn't very fast. Instead of giving up, Betty learns to try new things and find out what other gifts she might have. This is an upbeat and inspirational story about self-love, resilience, and trying new things!

This book shows a young boy overcome his fears and challenges that he faces through play. With the help of his stuffed animal, Captain Storm, this little boy is able to find courage to do hard things! A great story about trying your best, finding your strength, and overcoming everyday challenges. The author takes the abstract concept of persistence and resilience and made is approachable for kids.

This is a more literal book that shows how kids can learn to handle difficult feelings and solve their own problems. It is helpful for kids to see a character feel some of the things that they feel and see how the character works through it.

Children often don't realize that their fears and doubts are normal ..."I'm learning to be the very best me. When something is hard for me, it may be just what I need to grow. Or can decide to bounce back."

Good for 4 -8-year-olds, but more helpful for the younger side of that age-span.

Written by Wendy Moss, Ph.D. this book includes stories about kids who have a faced a tough situation and have learned to bounce back. There are many vignettes and concrete examples of how to develop resilience in different kinds of situations.
"Resilience is like a bouncing ball. When the ball hits the ground, we expect it to bounce back. Resilience means you can bounce back from, or deal with, difficult times, new situations, unexpected changes, or other experiences that cause you stress."
Kids may think that some people are just born with the ability to bounce-back, Dr. Moss makes it clear that it is something to practice.

This is a guide for older kids aged 8 -13.

This is the story of a girl named Kate who learns to overcome some of her fears. She learns that "...everyone has their own brain and can make up their own mind what to do so it can tackle any challenge with a positive attitude."

This book shows Kate learning to regulate her behavior and her emotions by having strong positive affirmations she said in her strong mind.

For preschoolers and early elementary-aged kids.

I love this book about how a girl finds a spark of courage deep inside her that helps her overcome hard or scary situations. She not only overcomes, but she also nurtures that courage until she glows inside and out.

The use of a "spark of courage" inner light is a metaphor that will resonate well with preschool and school-aged children.

This is a book about courageous and brave people who worked hard to make the world a better place. Quotes from eight historical figures are included: Abraham Lincoln, Rosa Parks, Susan B. Anthony, Malala Yousafzai, Harriet Tubman, William Wilberforce, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr. This is a picture book for younger kids with cute illustrations and is a great way to introduce the stories of these brave people from history.

This is a great book for illustrating how courage comes in all kinds of forms - how being the first to apologize takes courage and how being a police officer takes courage... "There are many kinds of courage. Awesome kinds. And everyday kinds. Still, courage is courage - whatever kind."

This is a great book for children in preschool and early elementary.

This book goes through all the ways a kid can be a "Brave kid."

"A Brave kid speaks for truth. And stands for justice. A brave kid gets back up."

There is very little text on well-illustrated pages, perfect for toddlers and preschoolers.

This is a beautifully illustrated and hand-lettered book that is perfect for bedtime. You have to click over to the preview to see the beauty of this book.

" Tomorrow I'll be all the things I tried to be today:
Adventurous, Strong, Smart, Curious, Creative, Confident, & Brave.
And if I wasn't one of them, I know that it's OK. "

Good for toddlers, preschoolers, and early-elementary aged kids.

This book is perfect for back to school. In it, a girl is teased for being different. But she has the courage to be herself and stay true to herself. And she even finds the courage to be kind to the child who was teasing her.

Kindness takes courage and this picture book shows how to be true to yourself and kind to others - with courage. This is a story of resilience.

A must for every school-aged child's library.

This is similar to Spaghetti in a Hot Dog Bun, it's about feeling different and having the courage to reach out and connect even when you're scared to do so.

There are many reasons to feel different. Maybe it's how you look or talk, or where you're from; maybe it's what you eat, or something just as random. It's not easy to take those first steps into a place where nobody really knows you yet, but somehow you do it

Great for elementary school-aged kids.

This a book about kids learning to express themselves.

To "say something" when you see something beautiful, when you are angry and want to be understood, and much more.

It takes courage to express yourself, to speak up, to be heard, and ultimately to reach out and connect with your voice.

" If you see someone lonely... Say Something... by just being there with them."

Another must for school-aged kids.
Find the whole (most) list for purchase here: Nurture and Thrive Bookshop: Books that Build Resilience in Children

About Ashley Soderlund Ph.D.

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Books that Help Kids to Be Brave, Bounce Back, and Build Resilience

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Read your kids stories about characters who find the courage, the strength, the resilience, and the bravery to bounce back when life gets tough.

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43 Resilience & Adversity Quotes That Will Inspire and Empower You

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43 Resilience & Adversity Quotes That Will Inspire and Empower You

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Insightful quotes on resilience can inspire and motivate you to dig deeper and find your more resilient self while encouraging you to explore the vast literature on this exciting topic.

Here is a list of 43 quotes drawn from a broad and in-depth literature review of research studies and review papers that examine the fascinating and valuable concept of resilience.

Before you continue, you might like to download our three Resilience Exercises for free. These engaging, science-based exercises will help you to effectively deal with difficult circumstances and give you the tools to improve the resilience of your clients, students, or employees.

Introducing Resilience

We begin with quotes from psychiatrist Michael Rutter, sometimes described as the father of child psychology, to introduce you to the concept of resilience. Rutter is one of the seminal figures in recognizing the importance of resilience to wellbeing and has inspired a great deal of the research that followed.

Resilience is our ability to bounce back from life's challenges and unforeseen difficulties, providing mental protection from emotional and mental disorders.

Michael Rutter (1985)

Resilience is an inference based on evidence that some individuals have a better outcome than others who have experienced a comparable level of adversity.

Michael Rutter (2012)

Resilience results from having the encounter at a time, and in a way, that the body can cope successfully with the noxious challenge to its system.

Michael Rutter (1993)

[R]esilience can be defined as reduced vulnerability to environmental risk experiences, the overcoming of a stress or adversity, or a relatively good outcome despite risk experiences.

Michael Rutter (2012)

Resilience is a dynamic concept in which successful coping may involve a complicated mixture of psychological habituation, changes in mental set, alterations in perceived and actual self-efficacy, hormonal changes ... and neural alterations.

Michael Rutter (2012)

[R]esilience needs to be judged, not in terms of superior overall functioning as judged in relation to the population as a whole, but rather in terms of functioning that is relatively better than that shown by others experiencing the same level of adversity.

Michael Rutter (2012)

What Is Resilience?

The following quotes provide an insight into what resilience is and the human ability to withstand pressure and overcome difficulty.

[P]sychological resilience refers to the ability to use personal qualities to withstand pressure.

David Fletcher and Mustafa Sarkar (2016)

[R]esilience represents a constellation of characteristics that protect individuals from the potential negative effect of stressors.

Ivan Robertson et al. (2015)

Definitions have evolved over time but fundamentally resilience is understood as referring to positive adaptation, or the ability to maintain or regain mental health, despite experiencing adversity.

Helen Herrman et al. (2011)

Resilience has been described as the capacity for positive outcomes despite challenging or threatening circumstances.

Byron Egeland et al. (1993)

The behavioral component of resilience enables people to remain effective at home and work, able to focus on relevant tasks and goals and carry them out.

Ivan Robertson and Cary Cooper (2013)

[I]t is possible to define the property of resilience as a complex repertoire of behavioral tendencies that may be evoked or activated by environmental demands.

Christine Agaibi and John Wilson (2005)

Resilience is seen as more than simple recovery from insult, rather it can be defined as positive growth or adaptation following periods of homeostatic disruption.

Laura Campbell-Sills (2006)

Resilience embodies the personal qualities that enable one to thrive in the face of adversity.

Kathryn Connor and Jonathan Davidson (2003)

Resilience can be viewed as a defence mechanism, which enables people to thrive in the face of adversity and improving resilience may be an important target for treatment and prophylaxis.

Dmitry Davydov et al. (2010)

When resilience is conceived as a trait, it has been suggested that it represents a constellation of characteristics that enable individuals to adapt to the circumstances they encounter.

David Fletcher and Mustafa Sarkar (2012)

[R]esilience arises out of a belief in one's own self-efficacy, the ability to deal with change, and use of a repertoire of problem-solving skills.

Brigid Gillespie et al. (2007)

Resilience can refer to positive adjustment in the face of adversity. Resilience has also been defined as the capacity of individuals to cope successfully with significant change, adversity or risk.

Hyun Lee and James Cranford (2008)

Resilience in the Broader Context

Like all psychological concepts, resilience does not stand alone but instead exists within both a physical and mental context, on which it both depends and impacts:

Internal locus of control influences responses to stressful events by improving coping strategies and reducing anxiety. Thus, perceived control is a key marker of stress resilience.

Tonya Jacobs et al. (2011)

[A]ny psychological resilience training program should, as much as practically possible, consider the broader environment within which individuals operate.

David Fletcher and Mustafa Sarkar (2016)

Resilience is fundamentally underpinned by the concept that it is not so much the hard times we face that determine our success or failure as the way in which we respond to those hard times.

Rachel Jackson and Chris Watkin (2004)

If we want to help vulnerable youngsters become more resilient, we need to decrease their exposure to potent risk factors and increase their competencies and self-esteem, as well as the sources of support they can draw upon.

Emmy Werner (1995)

Increasingly, researchers focused on identifying the characteristics of individuals, particularly young people, who thrived while living in difficult circumstances, such as poverty and parental mental illness.

David Fletcher and Mustafa Sarkar (2013)

[T]he concept of mental resilience is crucial to our understanding of how risks may be modified and disorders prevented.

Dmitry Davydov et al. (2010)

Resilience to the unsettling effects of interpersonal loss is not rare but relatively common, does not appear to indicate pathology but rather healthy adjustment, and does not lead to delayed grief reactions.

George Bonanno (2004)

Stable, healthy, and resilient physicians are also better equipped for the emotionally and physically demanding tasks of providing care, comfort and hope to patients.

Laura Dunn et al. (2008)

Mental toughness can, therefore, be conceived as an individual's propensity to manage the demands of environmental stressors, ranging from an absolute resilience to extreme vulnerability.

David Fletcher and Jim Fletcher (2005)

Resilience is viewed as a vital attribute for nurses because it augments adaptation in demanding and volatile clinical environments such as operating rooms.

Brigid Gillespie et al. (2007)

Firstly, it is unrealistic to expect pupils to be resilient if their teachers, who constitute a primary source of their role models, do not demonstrate resilient qualities.

Qing Gu and Christopher Day (2007)

All mentally tough individuals are resilient, but not all resilient individuals are mentally tough.

Peter Clough and Doug Strycharczyk (2015)

Being able to move on despite negative stressors does not demonstrate luck on the part of those successful individuals but demonstrates a concept known as resilience.

Michele Tugade and Barbara Fredrickson (2004)

Resilience is a process and a staircase. You might be on step four of the staircase, and I might be on step one, but we can both keep moving up the staircase so that our resilience levels will hopefully exceed the rising tide of stress.

Glenn Schiraldi (2017)

Resilience is experienced as a global process relating to psychological, social and behavioral qualities involving genetic, developmental and neurochemical mechanisms.

Meetu Khosla (2017)

Resilience is believed to be a process rather than a single event and a continuum rather than a binary outcome.

Meetu Khosla (2017)

Family environments characterized by stability, cohesion, organization, and preservation of routines and rituals may be most conducive to resilience among adolescents.

Hyun Lee and James Cranford (2008)

Resilience research has substantial potential to guide the development of effective interventions for diverse at-risk populations ... to forces that are protective in nature as well as to those that exacerbate vulnerability, and to the mechanisms that underlie their effects.

Suniya Luthar and Dante Cicchetti (2000)

[I]ndividuals who are exposed to moderately stressful experiences and who have the initial resources necessary to overcome those stressors may develop a resilience to the deleterious effects of later stress.

Lisa Neff and Elizabeth Broady (2011)

Resilience is a multidimensional and not a unitary concept. There is no one characteristic or trait identified as resilience. Rather, there are many behaviors and actions associated with resilience.

Russ Newman (2005)

In terms of fostering resiliency prior to the development of symptoms, current research suggests that certain aspects of military life, such as field training exercises, unit cohesiveness, physical fitness, and leadership may be beneficial as part of preparedness interventions.

Cale Palmer (2008)

[I]t also appears that coping and parenting skills and parent-child relations may be an important focus of resilience-based interventions following mass violence and disaster.

Cale Palmer (2008)

The study of resilience represents a special subclass of research on positive functioning as it applies to risk populations under adversity... one limitation of resilience research is the neglect of a large range of positive functioning beyond the absence of problems.

Joseph Mahoney and Lars Bergman (2002)

The conclusion that resilience is made of ordinary rather than extraordinary processes offers a more positive outlook on human development and adaptation, as well as direction for policy and practice aimed at enhancing the development of children at risk for problems and psychopathology.

Ann Masten (2001)

[P]ositive psychology poses important questions for resilience investigators about the differentiation of challenging experiences that undermine development versus those that promote development.

Ann Masten (2001)

What is Your Favorite Positive Psychology Quote?

The above quotes are taken from a sample of the vast amount of resilience research available. They represent the diversity of past research and the wealth of studies underway in the vital concept of resilience.

We would love to hear more of your thoughts and invite you to comment below.

We hope you enjoyed reading this article. Don't forget to download our 3 Resilience Exercises for free.

Also, our own Hugo Alberts (Ph.D.) presents an exemplary Realizing Resilience Masterclass©. This masterclass not only teaches you resilience but will enable you to train others in mastering resilience.

The course includes workbooks, exercises, presentations, videos, and much more, and to top it off, you will also earn a certificate of completion once finished with this intense and in-depth course.

Updated Jan 2021 - Ed.

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43 Resilience & Adversity Quotes That Will Inspire and Empower You

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Insightful quotes on resilience can inspire and motivate you to dig deeper and find your more resilient self while encouraging you to explore the vast literature on this exciting topic. Here is a list of 43 quotes drawn from a broad and in-depth literature review of research studies and review papers that examine the fascinating and valuable concept of resilience.

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36 Ways to Find a Silver Lining During Challenging Times

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36 Ways to Find a Silver Lining During Challenging Times

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We've all been there.

Whether it's a bad day or a truly terrible situation, life will try to knock us down.

Fortunately, many coping strategies have been found to be effective at minimizing the effects of hardship. One simple but powerful way to enhance resilience is to find silver linings within painful or arduous situations.

This article provides numerous tips, techniques, and resources to guide readers in discovering the silver linings that will enhance perseverance during dark times.

Before you continue, we thought you might like to download our three Resilience Exercises for free. These engaging, science-based exercises will help you effectively deal with difficult circumstances and give you the tools to improve the resilience of your clients, students, or employees.

What Is a Silver Lining?

Silver linings are simply the good aspects of challenging or painful situations. The ability to perceive silver linings is an optimistic mindset that promotes emotional resilience and the ability to adapt to future challenges (Seery, 2011).

This hopeful approach enables people to view situations through a cognitive filter in which they perceive themselves as able to cope with stressors effectively.

Keep your face to the sunshine, and you cannot see a shadow.

Helen Keller

The ability to find a silver lining and the construct of optimism go hand in hand, and there is clear evidence that the latter is related to many positive outcomes. For example, Forgeard and Seligman (2012) noted numerous studies linking optimism to desirable outcomes such as positive emotional wellbeing, good health, and even lower mortality.

Here is a list of some additional studies:

An association between optimism and higher pain tolerance among cancer patients (Goodin & Bulls, 2013)

Healthy aging (Wrosch, Jobin, & Scheier, 2016)

The ability to adapt to stressful life events (Kivimäki et al., 2005)

Lower levels of depression (Chang, Yu, & Hirsch, 2013)

Better occupational outcomes (Kluemper, Little, & DeGroot, 2009)

These studies, along with many more, indicate that an optimistic perspective has a buffering effect on the impact of stress by enhancing adaptive mechanisms such as problem solving coping, emotion regulation, healthy lifestyle, and flexibility (Conversano et al., 2010; Wrosch et al., 2016).

22 Practical Tips for Finding a Silver Lining

There are many ways for each of us to find a silver lining in the most taxing of circumstances.

Here are 22 examples.

1. Be optimistic

Learned optimism is a skill linked to motivation. Those who are optimistic tend to engage in constructive effort; whereas, disengagement from effort is more typical of pessimists (Carver & Scheier, 2014).

Given the numerous benefits of optimism, increasing this powerful construct is worth the effort.

2. Practice compassion

Compassion toward others is not only moral and kind, but its benefits extend to both the giver and the recipient. Or, as noted by the Dalai Lama:

If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.

Compassion is like an elixir that promotes gratitude, wellbeing, and, of course, the ability to see a silver lining.

3. Do service work

Helping others is a practical way to put one's compassion to work. In doing so, people tend to think less about themselves while interacting with those who are less fortunate. Service work is a great way to enhance gratitude and a positive outlook while supporting one's community.

Here are 20 more reasons why compassion is important.

4. Be grateful

Gratitude has an amazing ability to energize coping and positivity during the bleakest of times.

When facing challenges, appreciating valued aspects of life has a way of putting things into a more manageable perspective.

5. Recognize self-fulfilling prophecies

Be wary of the story you tell yourself, as you may find yourself acting it out. For example, a man who repeatedly tells himself that he is unathletic will end up avoiding healthy behaviors such as exercising. Such a mindset obscures the man's ability to see the many good things about himself and that he has been physically fit in the past.

6. Question your thinking

It is common for people to get caught up in the maladaptive cycle of believing their own thoughts, no matter how unrealistic or unfounded they may be. Individuals have to question their beliefs and thoughts and make these lose their power if they are false.

Read this article on Living With Your Inner Critic if you find maladaptive thoughts to be a particular challenge.

7. Learn when to approach a situation with acceptance, courage, and wisdom

This idea is beautifully articulated by the Serenity Prayer (Sifton, 2003), as follows:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change the things I can,
and wisdom to know the difference.

Although often associated with 12-step groups, the Serenity Prayer applies to all parts of life.

Consider, for example, someone having a tough time during a pandemic. In this case, a person may find relief in acceptance (e.g., this pandemic will be here for some time), courage (e.g., doing the necessary things to stay safe), and wisdom (e.g., having a good understanding of what is controllable and what is not).

Knowing when to let go versus take action promotes both empowerment and hope in many different situations.

8. Find things to look forward to

If you are looking toward the future and are not excited about anything, then it's time to find something to look forward to.

It doesn't need to be elaborate or expensive; it should just be something that will make you feel happy (e.g., dinner with a special friend, a new book, a weekend getaway, etc.). Looking forward to something meaningful provides hope in the face of gloom.

9. Consider it a challenge

Perspective is everything. If a person is given a big task at work for which they feel woefully under-qualified, seeing the assignment as an exciting opportunity to learn makes it feel less like a burden and more like an opportunity for growth.

10. Remember your prior successes

When we get bogged down by a situation, it may be easy to forget our capabilities. Finding a silver lining is aided by remembering prior successes, which enhances confidence and self-efficacy.

Along these lines, remembering that you have found silver linings in the past is yet another reminder of your inner resilience.

11. Find good role models

Fortunately, optimism is contagious. By surrounding yourself with people who inspire you and see the glass as half full, this perspective is likely to rub off on you as well.

12. Be a socially responsible leader

The ability to find silver linings is essential in all aspects of life, including work. For example, researchers have indicated that CEOs who are high in social responsibility are higher in ethical responsibility, which is related to greater optimism among subordinates (De Hoogh & Den Hartog, 2008).

Moreover, moderate optimism among CEOs is related to reduced staff turnover (Campbell, Gallmeyer, Johnson, Rutherford, & Stanley, 2011). Therefore, applying optimism at work makes a world of difference in terms of many important occupational outcomes.

13. Model a positive attitude for your children

Given that optimism is learned, parents are responsible for showing their children how to see the good side of things. By modeling such positivity, parents better equip their kids with important coping tools.

14. Practice authoritative parenting

An authoritative parenting style is assertive, but not intrusive; demanding, but responsive; and supportive in terms of discipline, but not punitive (Baumrind, 1991).

This approach is linked to numerous positive youth outcomes, such as higher optimism levels among adolescents (Sarı Cenk, 2008). Consequently, authoritative parenting provides kids with the ability to better persevere through enhanced optimism and other protective qualities.

15. Watch out for 'What If' thinking

A chronic case of the "What Ifs" never did anyone much good. When we always think about what might have happened, we often find ourselves overcome with regret as we ruminate over perceived mistakes.

This is a counterproductive endeavor, as we can't change the past. Instead of getting bogged down by What Ifs, try to instead reflect upon what you might do now to make things better.

16. Avoid catastrophizing

Catastrophizing is a cognitive distortion in which a situation is overblown or future expectations are considered bleak.

It is similar to the What Ifs in terms of worrying over hypothetical situations, although it is directed toward the future. This pessimistic attitude is associated with various negative outcomes (e.g., affective distress, poorer treatment results, increased pain sensitivity, etc.; Edwards, Bingham, Bathon, & Haythornthwaite, 2006).

Of course, we can't know the future, and expecting the worst only diminishes a person's self-efficacy and likelihood of experiencing joy.

17. Know your triggers

We all have triggers for a variety of emotions. If you consistently feel hopeless and pessimistic in particular situations (e.g., after watching the news or in certain social situations), recognize these triggers and find ways to avoid or manage them in the future.

18. Use positive mantras

Mantras consist of sounds or phrases that when repeated, are useful in guiding thoughts in a desired direction. For example, a person who is having difficulty with self-confidence might repeat the mantra "I am fully capable and competent" each morning.

Using mantras is a simple technique that has been found to be beneficial for both physical and emotional health (Deekshitulu, 2015).

19. Practice forgiveness

When a person is preoccupied with feelings of anger at others, they are less open to experiencing a sense of optimism. Not only does letting go through forgiveness free a person from resentment, but it is also associated with better psychological and health-related outcomes (Rasmussen, Stackhouse, Boon, Comstock, & Ross, 2019).

Interestingly, the benefits of forgiveness have been found to be particularly evident for self-forgiveness relative to forgiveness of others (Wilson, Milosevic, Carroll, Hart, & Hibbard, 2008).

20. Do the things that bring you joy

Even during the most difficult times, the ability to get involved in activities that make you happy is essential for enhancing wellbeing. Such activities need not be costly, and even by watching a sunset, a person is reminded of the beauty that exists in nature.

21. Practice healthy life habits

Persistent negativity is exacerbated by unpleasant physical sensations such as fatigue or feeling run down.

By eating a healthy diet and getting adequate sleep, it is easier to feel positive when facing a challenge.

22. Start each day with positivity

Everyone is familiar with the expression: "w oke up on the wrong side of the bed." However, starting the day with a deep breath and peaceful, optimistic thoughts may shift a day's trajectory into a more encouraging direction.

11 Techniques for Helping Your Clients

Many therapeutic activities designed to increase positivity occur within the context of positive Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT).

With CBT, "emotional disorders are maintained by cognitive factors, and psychological treatment leads to changes in these factors through cognitive and behavioral techniques " (Hofmann & Smits, 2008).

In other words, by combining both cognitive and behavioral approaches, CBT focuses on how thoughts and behaviors dictate a person's feelings in a given situation. While any type of therapist may use the techniques below, they are especially common tools among cognitive-behavioral therapists.

1. Teach mindfulness

A mindfulness-based approach follows Buddhist philosophy by teaching clients how to pay attention to their feelings and thoughts in the moment and without judgment (Kabat-Zinn, 2005).

This open-minded approach promotes acceptance and openness, which aids clients in focusing their attention in peaceful and positive directions.

2. Teach relaxation

Relaxation techniques are commonly used as part of mindfulness approaches.

When a person is uptight and anxious, silver linings are easily concealed. However, by helping clients increase relaxation while removing negative or stressful judgments, practitioners can help clients get to a better place to deal with emotional stressors reflectively instead of reflexively (Hofmann, Sawyer, Witt, & Oh, 2010).

Relaxation may be enhanced with the use of positive visualization, wherein clients visualize themselves responding to a situation in an optimal way.

3. Use cognitive restructuring

Nonadaptive cognitive schemas serve as barriers to positive thinking. Ruminating over a situation generally leaves a person feeling hopeless and unable to cope.

With cognitive restructuring, therapists work with clients to identify dysfunctional automatic thoughts and cognitive distortions, dispute automatic thoughts, and create rational rebuttals to such thoughts (Hope, Burns, Hayes, & Warner, 2010). In doing so, clients are able to replace dysfunctional appraisals of situations with those that are more positive and manageable.

4. Promote positive self-talk

Self-talk consists of the voice we all hear in the back of our minds. This inner dialogue, which is often so automatic as to feel unconscious, has the potential to guide us in various directions.

When the dialogue is consistently negative, it becomes deleterious to feelings of self-worth and happiness. After all, imagine if someone followed you around all day repeating a nasty phrase about you. You probably wouldn't tolerate it. However, a mean voice in one's mind may be far more damaging.

Fortunately, mantras, cognitive restructuring, and other CBT techniques are beneficial for helping clients notice their self-talk and work toward more positive inner dialogues.

5. Help clients identify and challenge irrational beliefs

Noted cognitive psychologist Albert Ellis has been helping people modify irrational thinking through his Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy approach. This strategy enables clients to discover the irrational beliefs that bring them down and get in the way of happiness (Ellis, 1994). By challenging such beliefs, clients are better able to face tough situations with confidence.

6. Teach self-love

Helping clients learn self-love enables them to avoid self-recrimination, which only serves to erode self-esteem and happiness.

Instead, self-love is a comforting perspective that enables people to see the positive qualities in themselves, along with the silver linings in various circumstances.

7. Teach self-reflective practices

Some clients benefit from journaling or other types of self-reflective approaches.

Doing so is useful for reminding people of situations that trigger negative or self-deprecating thinking, as well as those that promote contentment, gratitude, and other desirable feelings.

8. Help clients to identify realistic goals

Grasping toward unrealistic goals is a recipe for disaster. By guiding clients toward achievable goals, counselors place them in a position where they are more likely to succeed and feel good about their achievements.

9. Teach social and emotional learning (SEL) to children

For clinicians who work with young people, SEL approaches are useful ways to foster the self-awareness and interpersonal skills needed to promote positive youth development.

SEL techniques have been found to be effective at placing kids on healthy trajectories characterized by empathy, peer acceptance, and optimism (Schonert-Reichl et al., 2015).

10. Teach positive reinforcement

Positive reinforcement, which was developed as part of Skinner's (1938) operant learning theory, basically entails rewarding desired behaviors so that the behavior becomes reinforced and is more likely to occur again.

Teaching clients to identify meaningful rewards for positive behaviors is a highly motivating way to enhance desired outcomes and the positive emotions associated with them. This approach may be supplemented with self-monitoring techniques, in which the client keeps track of their goal-directed behaviors.

11. Take a humanistic approach

Humanistic counselors believe that their clients possess the qualities necessary to flourish. This approach encourages clients to reach their full potential as human beings while fostering curiosity, intuition, creativity, humility, empathy, and altruism (Giorgi, 2005; Robbins, 2008).

As such, a humanistic perspective supports individuals in discovering and embracing the goodness within themselves.

3 Recommend Books That Teach Optimism

Many people find informative books useful for learning how to be more positive and optimistic, but they aren't sure which ones to choose. Providing clients with reading suggestions empowers them with useful resources that may be applied at home.

Here are three examples:

1. The Hope Circuit: A Psychologist's Journey from Helplessness to Optimism (2018) - Martin E. P. Seligman

This book is written by a renowned positive psychology professor and optimism expert.

It provides personal examples and science-based explanations for the invaluable benefits of optimism, gratitude, and many other positive constructs.

Available on Amazon.

2. Incorrigible Optimist: 9 Easy Steps with Self-Help Book to Make Your Life More Positive & Happy (2018) - Mark Allen

This easy-to-follow book provides readers with nine habits shown to promote an optimistic mindset.

The book is specifically designed to equip readers with the necessary tools for finding silver linings in seemingly bleak situations.

Available on Amazon.

3. Positive Thinking: Change Your Attitude, Change Your Life! (2015) - Theo Gold

This motivating book describes the way in which positive thinking enhances a person's life.

The author teaches readers how to quiet negative thinking while providing relatable,
real-life examples.

Available on Amazon.

PositivePsychology.com's Resources

Many clients are responsive to homework in the form of worksheets and activities. Fortunately, PositivePsychology.com has many such resources.

Our Toolkit contains numerous tools aimed at promoting optimism, resilience, confidence, and other qualities that better enable individuals to find those often elusive silver linings.

Here are three excellent examples:

1. The Best Possible Resilient Self

The goal of the Best Possible Resilient Self tool is to help clients develop optimism and confidence in their ability to overcome a personal challenge.

It consists of the following five steps:

Describing a challenging situation

Visualizing the most resilient version of themselves

Describing their most resilient self

Interviewing their most resilient self

Reflecting on the above steps (e.g., noting feelings regarding their future self, identifying key takeaways from the self-interviews, etc.).

By using this exercise, readers are better able to overcome future challenges.

2. Benefit Finding

The Benefit Finding exercise is designed to enhance awareness of the potential benefits of negative life events in order to boost resilience.

The tool contains the following two steps:

Discussing a traumatic event along with emotions and thoughts associated with it

Focusing on the possible benefits of this situation. This step also contains several questions to use as guidance (e.g., "What has the experience taught you?")

By following these steps, individuals will find themselves more resilient and confident in their ability to find benefits in the difficult situations they may encounter.

3. The Energy Audit

The goal of the Energy Audit exercise is to help clients manage their energy levels throughout the day in order to enhance health and productivity.

The tool contains the following four steps:

Tracking daily energy levels with the use of a Track Energy Log, noting their energy level and what they were doing during each hour of the day

Plotting hourly energy levels on a graph in order to notice how energy waxes and wanes over the course of the day

Evaluating energy patterns by answering a series of questions

Considering the times when energy was the lowest and coming up with ways to replenish energy resources during such moments

In managing their changing energy levels, clients can use this activity to increase strength and resilience when it is most needed.

A Take-Home Message

Hard times are an inevitable part of life. This statement is particularly evident today as we face significant global challenges.

Everyone's challenges are unique, and finding silver linings is not easy; but when we can focus on the positive, we tend to fare much better.

Sometimes you may have to dig deep and change your perspective to see the positive. At times, challenges are so deep and mind numbing that the silver lining is only noted later, but it is there.

We hope that this article may help you start your search for a silver lining. Sometimes all you need to do to see the silver lining is lift up your head.

We hope you enjoyed reading this article and that it encouraged you. Please don't forget to download our three Resilience Exercises for free.

If you wish to offer your clients even more, our Realizing Resilience Masterclass© is a complete, science-based, six-module resilience training template for practitioners that contains all the materials you'll need to help your clients overcome adversity in a more resilient way.

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Resilience interviews, practical tips and thought leadership on-demandWelcome to the Resilience Institute's podcast, dedicated to helping you bounce, grow, connect and flow.If you'd like to listen to the latest episode, it is available right here. To listen on your mobile device, we recomme

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Rev. Audrey A. Williamson of Harlem’s historic Mother AME Zion Church estimates that up to 15 percent of her congregation succumbed to COVID-19, a burden of grief that weighs heavily on the community. Eager to help, Rev. Williamson recently teamed up with Mount Sinai’s Center for Stress, Resilience,…

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Onward tackles the problem of educator stress, and provides a practical framework for taking the burnout out of teaching. Stress is part of the job, but when 70 percent of teachers quit within their first five years because the stress is making them physically and mentally ill, things have gone too far. Unsurprisingly, these effects are highest in difficult-to-fill positions such as math, science, and foreign languages, and in urban areas and secondary classrooms―places where we need our teachers to be especially motivated and engaged. This book offers a path to resiliency to help teachers weather the storms and bounce back―and work toward banishing the rain for good.

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Tips for Building Resilience in Children

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Tips for Building Resilience in Children

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Most of us are familiar with the expression " that which doesn't kill you makes you stronger." It turns out that this is only partially true - not everyone possesses the ability to persevere following trauma.

Indeed, while some people crumble in the face of adversity, others are somehow able to adapt successfully. Given its emphasis on human capacity, fulfillment, and healthy development; Positive Psychology is particularly invested in understanding the emotional quality that not only manages to shield some people from the impact of adversity - but actually enables them to thrive.

This protective emotional armor is called resilience.

When it comes to building resilience in children, the earlier the better. Not only are young people more amenable to change because their brains and personalities are still developing; but, because young children are often exposed to stressors, it certainly makes sense to empower them with resilience-promoting tools early enough to curtail negative outcomes (see positive parenting tools).

In this article, we will shed some light on the intangible, yet invaluable, quality of child resilience - such as what it means, why it's important, and how to encourage as much of it as possible - as early as possible.

The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall

Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1900

What is the Definition of Child Resilience?

Historically, the concept of resilience is actually nothing new.

Humans have a long history of fascination with stories about people overcoming great adversity. Multiple labels have been proposed to identify emotionally hardy kids, such as "stress-resistant," "successful high-risk kids," and "invulnerable," (Masten, 2012).

However, George Vaillant, an early pioneer of the resilience-focused literature, was dissatisfied with the notion of " invulnerability," feeling that it was unempathetic to the child's experience of trauma. Vaillant thus instead proposed the term "resilience" (Hauser, Allen & Golden, 2006) - a term which has stuck with social scientists and practitioners ever since.

While several definitions of resilience have been proposed by researchers, the following definition is among the most accepted and utilized for both adults and children:

Resilience is "the process of, capacity for, or outcome of successful adaptation despite challenging or threatening circumstances" (Masten, Best & Garmezy, 1990). Along these lines, children are considered resilient when they experience prosocial development despite adversity ( Masten, 2013).

Importantly, resilience is not a magic bullet or special power; it has in fact been conceptualized as a type of Ordinary Magic (Masten, 2014); given that, although powerful, some level of resilience is attainable to everyone.

Resilience is not automatic, but is instead a learned behavior that becomes internalized and applied during stressful times (Greenberg, 2007), thus enabling resilient individuals to survive and rebound following extreme challenges.

And like all things psychological, the concept of resilience isn't exactly simple. Resilience is a multi-dimensional process, consisting of a cluster of skills that vary depending upon a particular situation.

Why is Resilience so Important?

If there's one thing we can always be sure of, it's that adversity is inevitable. Moreover, while every generation has had its own unique challenges; it also can be argued that the demands, anxieties, and pressures faced by young people today present an exceptional challenge to healthy development.

But here's the good news:

When bad things happen, there is something we can control - our response. Individuals can either crumble or, as Dr. Gregg Steinberg describes in his Ted Talk, they can "'fall up' by using their "painful experience as a chisel to free their authentic self, to become the person they're meant to be" (Steinberg, 2015).

Fortunately, there are a number of invaluable psychosocial and environmental qualities that safeguard against or minimize the impact of serious issues on young people today.

These are the qualities the make-up resilience; qualities that a guide published by the Center on the Developing Child describes as influences that "Stack the scale with positive weight and optimize resilience across multiple contexts" (Harvard University, 2019).

Because resilient children have the emotional buoyancy to thrive in the face of adversity, the concept of resilience is of paramount importance to parents, practitioners, and teachers for whom positive youth development is a priority.

Resilience-Promoting Qualities

Resiliency research most often focuses on identifying the protective mechanisms associated with positive adaption in children.

In this vein, an extensive look at the substantive literature (e.g., Blaustein & Kinniburgh, 2018; Gavidia-Payne, Denny, & Davis et al., 2015; Grotberg, 1995; Petty, 2014) reveals the following domain-specific qualities that promote child resilience:

Individual/Internal to the Child Domain: Intelligence, agreeable temperament, optimistic outlook, problem-solving skills, self-esteem, self-efficacy, emotional flexibility, active lifestyle, emotional regulation, humor, autonomy, empathy.

Social/Family Domain: Secure infant attachment to a caregiver, warm and supportive parents, parental harmony, prosocial bonding to a supportive adult, meaningful peer friendships, healthy sibling relationships, social competence, cooperative learning skills, ability to solicit help, parental supervision, effective parenting skills.

Contextual/Environmental Domain: Safe neighborhoods, high-quality schools, community closeness, access to after-school programs, supportive extended family, successful school experiences, valued social role (e.g., job), positive mentors, faith-based or other meaningful community membership.

Relevant: How To Build Resilience With Resilience Training

The Child Resilience Theory

In order to develop programs aimed at promoting child resilience, researchers have proposed several explanations of how child resiliency actually works. In their review of the resilience literature, Yates and Masten (2012) describe three such theories as follows:

The compensatory model: This model suggests that protective factors function as neutralizers of risks by having an independent opposite effect on the development of risks (e.g., increased parental supervision may have a compensatory effect on children from dangerous neighborhoods by predicting better school achievement independent of the increased neighborhood risks).

See: Positive Reinforcement in the Classroom

The protective factor model: This model suggests that the risk for particular outcomes is moderated by protective mechanisms. This model is further delineated by two sub-models: 1) The risk-protective process, which operates by minimizing links between either risk and undesirable outcomes; and 2) the protective-protective process, which operates by increasing the impact of promotive factors.

As an example of the former protective factor model, a group of kids from high poverty families might achieve academic success due to the protective effect of effective schools/teaching.

The challenge model: This model is described as an inoculating process in which children exposed to early risks may actually be better equipped to cope with future stressors. In other words, by surviving early stress or trauma, the child becomes steeled against future deleterious outcomes.

This idea clearly circles back to the notion that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. As such, it is a tricky concept to apply because whether or not early exposure is protective or actually damaging is dependent upon the nature and degree of early risk. For example, a child from a military family who experiences a lot of school transitions might actually become really good at making new friends.

On the other hand, if the child is exposed to so many moves in and out of schools that his/her ability to make friends becomes compromised, the child may not be able to successfully cope and become socially isolated.

Of course, both of these examples are also influenced by a number of covariates; such as child temperament, intelligence, social support, etc. (e.g., it might be predicted that an outgoing child with a mellow temperament will experience frequent moves far differently than a more introverted, anxious child).

While each of these theories provides a useful model for broadening knowledge of the theoretical processes involved in building resilience, such discussions are more meaningful when augmented with real-life examples of what resilience might look like.

But first, let's consider the following question: How do you know if you have Resilience?

Although people may store-up large amounts of resiliency, one doesn't really know if they have it until they actually need it. As such, resilience can be conceptualized as a sort of emotional insurance. Masten (2012) describes two ways in which child resilience is often gauged:

Meeting Age-Related Developmental Goals: In this example, a child would be considered resilient if he/she was on target with meeting important developmental milestones such as learning to walk or using language.

Attaining Adaptive Psychosocial and/or Behavioral Outcomes: In this example, a child would be considered resilient if he/she experienced positive prosocial outcomes such as quality peer relationships, emotional well-being, and academic and/or career-related achievement.

But let's go a step further and think about how a resilient child might look.

3 Examples of Resilient Child Development

You probably know of or have read about someone who has overcome enormous odds. One such example from the late 1990s is that of Romanian children in orphanages who were revealed by reporters as suffering from the consequences of extreme neglect, deprivation, and gross developmental delays.

Despite these atrocious conditions, many of the Romanian children who were adopted into nurturing homes developed normally - meeting key developmental milestones (Alvord & Grados, 2005). As these children thrived in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds, they certainly represent a profound example of the ability to overcome formidable obstacles.

Child survivors of natural disasters represent another example of the power of resilience. For example, the 2004 tsunami in Sri Lanka that devastated everything in its path and killed nearly 31,000 people, exposed millions of children to unprecedented trauma. Despite the unimaginable losses the children of Sri Lanka suffered, a subset of them experienced healthy development.

Researchers examining the tsunami's impact on adolescents identified positive mother-child relationships as a key protective influence that was associated with resilience among the disaster's surviving youth (Wickrama & Kaspar, 2007).

Finally, in his deeply moving Ted Talk, Michael Kalous (2017) provides several heart-wrenching examples of children who've overcome and sometimes even thrived following severe trauma.

Kalous shares a very personal example of his own traumatic childhood, which was characterized by extreme instability and abuse. Yet, Kalous also describes how he was able to grow into a healthy, successful adult (e.g., college graduate, intact marriage, stable employment, etc.).

Considering his miserable childhood, many people often asked Kalous why he was so well-adjusted despite his background. In response, Kalous notes the following five protective mechanisms as instrumental in promoting his resilience:

Having a Hero: For example, a spiritual or human moral compass that is accepting and forgiving.

Having a Refuge: For example, somewhere such as a school where a child can escape stress.

Having a Place of Solitude: For example, a peaceful place of serenity such as the outdoors.

Having a Voice: For example, Kalous literally describes how participation in the choir enabled him to be heard and helped him to externalize his internal feelings.

Having a Purpose: For example, serving others as a way to provide perspective and to foster a sense of purpose.

How to Build Resilience in Children

Based on data from the International Resilience Project, which is a large-scale study of child resilience with participants drawn from 11 countries (Yates and Masten, 2012); it may be useful to consider the following three sources from which kids draw resilience:

I HAVE Sources: These refer to resilience-promoting external supports and resources.

I AM Sources: These refer to internal resilience-promoting qualities, such as feelings, attitudes, and beliefs.

I CAN Sources: These refer to resilience-promoting social and interpersonal skills.

Framing resilience in this way is helpful for identifying the nature and degree of a child's key sources of strength. For example, does the child have a caring adult he/she can talk to? Is the child optimistic about the future and confident in his/her skills? And can the child establish quality peer friendships?

Of course, identifying the most powerful predictors of child resilience (e.g., internal locus of control, self-esteem, self-regulation, social competence, social support, etc.) is essential; but how do we, as parents and teachers, provide the type of environment that will most reinforce these valuable qualities?

School-based Approaches for Building Resilience

Not only do children spend a significant amount of time in school, but the school context also provides an opportunity for establishing meaningful peer relationships and building self-efficacy.

By taking advantage of the educational setting to build resilience, multiple key protective mechanisms can be developed in kids; such as meaningful participation, social competence, achievement, and high expectations, prosocial relationships with teachers and students, etc. (Johnson, 2008).

Beyond the positive impact of school itself, elementary school-based interventions that enhance teacher effectiveness, parenting skills, and children's social skills; also have been found to increase adaptive behaviors and to promote positive youth development (Catalano, Berglund & Ryan et al., 2004; Catalano, Oesterle & Fleming et al., 2004; Lonczak, Abbott & Hawkins et al., 2002).

Similarly, the Alvord-Baker cognitive-behavioral curriculum, which is a systems model involving 12-14 social skills group sessions per semester, draws on multiple resources (school, family and community) to provide an integrated approach to enhancing youth resilience (Alvord & Grados, 2005).

Child resilience development in the school setting also has been enhanced using relaxation exercises and visualization in order to promote self-regulation. Relaxation techniques can be tailored to fit with each child's particular needs, with the child ultimately learning how to apply these techniques confidently and independently (Alvord & Grados, 2005).

Finally, the online publication " Dimensions of Early Childhood " provides several articles that suggest evidence-based methods for enhancing resilience in a school setting (e.g., peer mentoring, inclusive classrooms, etc.), as well as a specific list of ways adults can help students to "bounce back" (Southern Early Childhood Association, 2014).

Similarly, the American Psychological Association's website offers a resilience guide for teachers and parents.

Raising Resilient Kids

Family is undoubtedly the most important system affecting child resilience.

By providing a supportive environment with open communication and effective parenting practices, children are given a huge head start in terms of building resilience (Newman & Blackburn, 2002). By practicing prosocial parenting, parents hold a highly influential position when it comes to cultivating a child's capacity for resilience.

Along these lines, research suggests that child resiliency is supported by an authoritative parenting style, which is warm and supportive; yet also appropriately demanding in terms of expectations (Baumrind, 1991). In other words, authoritative parents provide consistent limits in a loving way.

Similarly, in her highly recommended parenting podcast: Respectful Parenting Unruffled, Janet Lansbury (2018) describes numerous relatable examples where resilience and positive youth development are enhanced by the use of respectful parenting (e.g., supporting a child who has differences, raising self-directed children, promoting confident leadership, etc.).

Along with these effective parenting styles, the following list contains a number of more concrete and specific ways in which parents and caregivers can promote resilience in children (Brooks and Goldstein (2003):

Build Empathy: Help your child develop empathy by teaching him/her how to really consider and visualize the struggles faced by others.

Identify a Go-To Person: Make sure your child has a close and supportive adult he/she feels comfortable confiding in.

Listen: Ensure that your child feels like you aren't simply hearing, but are truly tuned-in to what he/she has to say.

Accept Children for Who They Are: Avoid pushing your child in a direction he/she doesn't want to go; but instead, celebrate the person he/she is.

Identify Strengths: Find-out what your child is really good at and offer encouragement and support.

Do-Overs: Make sure your child knows that mistakes along the way are okay; present them as learning experiences and areas where he/she can try to do better next time.

Develop Responsibility: Give your child opportunities for developing mastery and responsibility, this will encourage self-esteem and -efficacy.

Offer Meaningful Participation: Offer your child opportunities to engage in activities he/she really cares about.

Teach Problem-Solving: Show your child ways to deal with problems, providing both role modeling and encouragement.

As an additional tool for parents, there are ten specific phrases connected to the desired goal that can be used to help kids to learn and internalize resilience when faced with a problem (Grose, 2013). These phrases are presented in a useful chart for parents and teachers, but here are a few examples:

For the Goal of Humor: "Come on, laugh it off." Helping your child to see the humor in a situation, as this is a powerful tool he/she will be able to apply in many difficult situations in life.

For the Goal of Providing Hope: "I know it looks bad now, but you will get through this." There is really no doubt that fostering a sense of optimism gives children a big advantage when it comes to many prosocial outcomes.

For the Goal of Positive Reframing: "What can you learn from this so it doesn't happen next time?" Reframing helps children to have a more realistic and healthy perspective of a situation. Children with emotional flexibility benefit from a good repertoire of coping solutions to draw from when needed.

Parental Resilience

I would like to be known as an intelligent woman, a courageous woman, a loving woman, a woman who teaches by being.

Maya Angelou (2013)

Developmental psychologists are well aware that having expectations for child behaviors in the absence of parental modeling (i.e., "do as I say, but not as I do") is not an effective way to achieve parenting goals.

Children will model after what they see - perhaps regardless of what they hear. Thus, parents are more likely to raise resilient kids if their children see them as strong and competent role models who do not crumble under pressure.

To model resilience, it is instructive for parents to consider how we tell our own stories - do we frame obstacles with optimism and apply effective strategies? Do we recognize and communicate challenges only as negative, or do we also recognize areas where they may be advantageous (Grotberg, 1995)?

Do we communicate with our children about areas where we have been resilient in our lives? Allowing your child to see you as a competent and strong survivor provides an invaluable lesson in resilience that he/she can emulate in times of adversity.

How to Teach Resilience to Teens

Adolescence can be a highly challenging period, as teens try to navigate social, peer and school pressures; while experiencing major emotional and physical changes of their own. As they attempt to distinguish their own identities, adolescents are often involved in increased risk-taking; and teens exposed to early trauma or social isolation are even more likely to get into trouble (Blaustein & Kinniburgh, 2018).

Thus, the importance of teaching resilience to adolescents as a way of fostering a healthy developmental trajectory cannot be understated. But where to begin?

The Enduring Influence of Parents

While some may assume that, as teenagers increasing rely on peers for support, the influence of parents becomes minimal. This is not true. Just as with younger kids, parental figures are absolutely essential for helping adolescents to overcome difficult struggles (Wolin, Desetta & Hefner, 2016).

Indeed, by fostering a sense of mastery and internal locus of control, adults help to empower a teen's sense of personal responsibility and control over the future (Blaustein & Kinniburgh, 2018). In fact, the presence of nurturing adults who truly listen has been reported among emotionally resilient teens (Wolin et al., 2016).

Parents, teachers and other adult role models play a key role in helping teens to draw on their own natural resilience as a way of promoting hope, faith, optimism, and strength in the face of adversity.

A Structured Approach to Teaching Teen Resilience

Drawing from the results of Project Resilience, Wolin and colleagues (2016) provide a structured format for promoting resilience among teens which can be implemented by parents, teachers or therapists.

The authors suggest group sessions in which teens are able to discuss and build upon their own strengths. In doing so, the goal is to reframe painful events from the past as situations in which the teens were able to draw upon their strengths to survive. The following seven resiliencies are described as a sort of "mental map" that can help adolescents cope effectively with adversity (Wolin et al., 2015):

Insight: Help your teen develop resilience by asking him/herself questions that reveal personal truths.

Independence: Help your teen develop resilience by teaching autonomy and self-reliance.

Relationships: Help your teen develop resilience by establishing meaningful connections with others.

Initiative: Help your teen develop resilience by taking charge of his/her life.

Creativity: Help your teen develop resilience by using his/her imagination to deal with feelings.

Humor: Help your teen develop resilience by finding the humor in difficult situations.

Morality: Help your teen develop resilience by encouraging him/her to do the right thing.

Realizing Resilience Masterclass

For educators and counselors, the Realizing Resilience Masterclass© provides the exact tools you need to teach resilience. You will be armed with presentations, textbooks, recordings, and videos you can use when you help others become more resilient. Highly recommended by other teachers and career coaches, this online course is invaluable for teaching kids and teens resilience.

How Can Young People Develop Resilience Themselves?

Considering what we know about resilience-promoting qualities, young people can most definitely take an active part in increasing their own stores of resilience.

Based on a comprehensive review of the child resilience literature (e.g., American Psychological Association, 2019; Blaustein & Kinniburgh, 2018; Gavidia-Payne et al., 2015; Oliver, Collin & Burns et al., 2006; Petty, 2014; Sanders, Munford, Thimasarn-Anwar et al., 2015., Wolin et al., 2012), there are a number of important resilience-promoting activities that kids and teens can implement themselves. These activities are summarized below.

16 Resilience Activities for Kids

Find your Passion! Adults and adolescents alike enjoy more fulfilling lives when they participate in meaningful activities. It is by discovering these underlying passions that a life of resilience and joy becomes possible.

A Take-Home Message

The following idea represents the primary message for readers to take away from this article:

Resilience is a powerful protective construct that is also malleable; it is a learned behavior. In other words, if you or your children are not particularly resilient today - there is still plenty of hope! You cannot always control what happens, but how you respond is up to you. In fact, it is empowering to know that there are MANY things that can be done to minimize risk and to promote healthy youth development and well-being.

This article provides numerous evidence-based qualities and activities that support the goal of building-up resilience in kids and teens. Promoting these resilience-enhancing tools among young people is instrumental for helping them to build invaluable emotional armor - armor that will enable them to actually thrive in the face of major obstacles.

Best wishes on your journey toward a life of optimism, meaning, and resilience!

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30+ Tips for Building Resilience in Children - PositivePsychology.com

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Most of us are familiar with the expression " that which doesn't kill you makes you stronger." It turns out that this is only partially true - not everyone possesses the ability to persevere following trauma. Indeed, while some people crumble in the face of adversity, others are somehow able to adapt successfully.

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Emotional Resilience and How to Build It

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Emotional Resilience and How to Build It

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What Is Emotional Resilience? (+6 Proven Ways to Build It)

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Emotional resilience is the intrinsic ability to calm your mind.

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Allan Schwartz, LCSW, Ph.D. was in private practice for more than thirty years. He is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker in the states...Read More

I was quite impressed when neighbors of ours recently described how they dealt with Hurrican Charlie that hit the western coast of Florida a few years ago. It had a devestating impact on that area of the state and was the first hurricane to hit the area in 40 years.

What was impressive about their story was not only how they rode out the storm in their home, which they had shuttered against the, but went out the very next day, volunteered with the Red Cross and began helping far less fortunate people in a town nearby. What impressed me was the fact that they did not panic, did not become hysterical, did not desperately try to flee, prepared as best they could, remained calm, thought through their strategy for the next day and then helped others and resumed their lives.

If you believe this was a small feat, I want to tell you that they were without electricity for two weeks but managed despite the intense heat and humidity and shortage of drinking water.

We hear of economic recession and even depression. We know people who have lost their houses to foreclosure or are near to that ourselves. We have neighbors who have lost sons and daughters to the in Iraq or we have experienced that loss in a way that is real and personal. We heard of the 9/11 terrorist attack or were in and escaped from the towers of the World Trade Center or we lost loved one's in that attack. How do we deal with these things? The ability to cope with these and other things is called "emotional resilience."

We hear the term "emotional resilience" but few people really know what it means and, even then, often make errors in their definition. So, what is it, what is it not and what to do to increase yours?

Emotional resilience is really the ability to cope with many aspect of life without becoming overwhelmed or becoming paralyzed. Inevitably, life poses certain types of challenges in addition to "taxes and death" as the saying goes.

Life brings with it change. In fact, change is an inevitable aspects of life and is, therefore, important to embrace. Today, change is occurring in the world at ever faster rates of speed. For example, the Soviet Union is gone, the United States is no longer the sole powerful country in the world, Arab nations and peoples have risen to great prominence, China is continuing to emerge as an economic power house, the people who make up the population of the United States has changed and is continuing to change as more peoples immigrate into the nation. Today the percent of the population with Hispanic roots has risen gigantically, changing the voting and cultural patterns.

Resilience means that people are aware of these changes, accept them without bemoaning and romanticizing the past. It means that the resilient person adjusts to even welcomes change as a challenge and as something that makes life interesting.

In fact, it has been speculated by many gerontologists, that the reason some individuals are able to reach extremely old ages of 90 more is that these old elderly are able to accept loss and change.

Think about it. As we age, we all lose more people. Grandparents and parents die. Younger people die as a result of everything from accidents to diseases. As these losses mount due to the inevitable cycle of life, the resilient person adjusts and continues to live on.

How is this so? The resilient person is able to:

1. Acknowledge their grief when the loss of a loved one occurs without becoming paralyzed by death.

2. Have a real sense of optimism about life, viewing the proverbial glass as half full rather than half empty. In other words, while accepting the death of loved ones, they welcome, embrace and are themselves renewed by the new and young life around them.

3. Remained involved in their lives in ways that are active and vital. It is like the 80 year old neighbor of mine who not only rides his bicycle for miles each day but has formed a bicycle club consisting of people far younger than himself.

4. Have, maintain or create support groups around them. These support groups give them a sense of aliveness and participation in life.

5. Maintain what psychologist call an "internal locus of control." That means that they have an inner sense of confidence in their abilities to problem solve and cope.

6. Possess a sense of humor about life and much that happens during a life time. In particular, they are able to laugh at themselves.

7. Admit their mistakes and learn from them when this occurs.

8. Accept adversity when it happens and meet it as a challenge. This is instead of viewing themselves as a victim. These are people from whom you do not hear, "why me," or "woe is me."

These types of characteristics allow people to cope with earth quakes, storms, terrorist attacks, and all forms of disaster.

While some of this is inborn, it is possible to develop and nurture a sense of resilience. Some of the ways to do this is through psychotherapy, particularly the cognitive behavioral type, reaching out to people and participating in activities, outside of work, such as volunteer organizations, being involved in spirituality and continuing to learn new things rather than allowing stagnation.

As the old saying goes: "If you keep on doing things the same way, you will keep on getting what you got." If you want something different, learn to do things differently and learn to do different things. All of this is regardless of your age, young or old. If you are young and want to learn skiing or mountain biking, do it. If you are fifty years of age and want to ride a motorcycle, do it. If your house is washed away, as in hurricane Katrina, build a new one. I do not say this lightly or blithely because I know a number of people who did just that, from Louisiana to Florida. One man calmly told me how he rebuilt his house after it was completely

Life is filled with stress. It is how we view it and cope with it that makes the difference.

Your comments are welcome and encouraged including answers to the question: "Are you resilient?"

Allan N. Schwartz, PhD

Keep Reading By Author Allan Schwartz, LCSW, Ph.D.

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Allan Schwartz, LCSW, Ph.D. was in private practice for more than thirty years. He is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker in the states ...Read More I was quite impressed when neighbors of ours recently described how they dealt with Hurrican Charlie that hit the western coast of Florida a few years ago.

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Resilient: How to Grow an Unshakable Core of Calm, Strength, and Happiness

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Resilient: How to Grow an Unshakable Core of Calm, Strength, and Happiness [Hanson PhD, Rick, Hanson, Forrest] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Resilient: How to Grow an Unshakable Core of Calm, Strength, and Happiness

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resilience: hard-won wisdom for living a better life

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Resilience: Hard-Won Wisdom for Living a Better Life

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Three invaluable tools to boost your resilience | BBC Ideas

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Last time we developed a more modern definition of resilience as " advancing despite adversity", but what does this mean on a more detailed level? What groups of behaviours, skills and beliefs contribute to resilience? What can we actually measure resilience against? To answer these questions, we investigated many existing models of resilience and combined them with neurological models to better explain resilience.

We are complex beings. Therefore, it makes sense that there are a great many different factors that contribute to resilience including: beliefs we hold of the world, of ourselves and others; information we have access to; biases, skills, and education; mental processes and behaviours. To make sense of all of these, it's useful to group related components into domains. Through our research we've grouped these components into six distinct domains that explain the specific factors that makes a person resilient.

These six domains have functions on their own, but they also influence each other. Just as strengths in some domains can compensate for weaker domains, so too can weakness in one drag down others. It is worthwhile for us to pursue personal development so that we are strong in all areas and effectively well-rounded. Let's look at the six domains.

Vision

The most important of the domains, Vision is about your sense of purpose, goals, and personal vision for yourself. The reason this is the most important domain is that all other domains are guided by what it is you want to achieve. Having clarity in this domain allows you to be decisive when facing tough choices, and to maintain perspective when facing challenges. Whether your goals relate to family, to work, or a side project, what's important is being specific and clear.

Clarity keeps you focused. It's easy to get distracted by unimportant details and events if you don't have anything specific you're working towards. After all, it's not like you had anything else planned, so why not binge on the new season of House of Cards? Vision is about having clarity so that when things get tough, you know what's important and what isn't so you stay focused and achieve your goals.

Congruence is the name of the game. Congruence means all your actions are working together across your larger vision of yourself and sense of purpose, through medium and short terms goals. When you don't have clarity on these, it's likely that some of your goals may conflict with each other, resulting in frustration as moving towards one goal moves you further from the other. Instead, if your actions are aligned, everything you do slowly moves you towards your ultimate goals, helping you achieve feats that others deemed impossible.

Composure

It's about regulating emotions. The fight-or-flight response of the brain loves to flare up when facing conflict or hearing about a sudden change at work. But being able to overcome that instinctive emotional response and maintain your composure often means being able to recognise hidden opportunities and solve problems in novel ways. This is because becoming emotional prevents you from properly accessing your ability to think critically.

It's also the little things. Composure is not just the big crises that we face, but also the little everyday things. Getting emotional in a traffic jam is never useful, so why bother getting worked up? Maintaining composure means keeping calm so you can save your energy for what is important.

Interpretation bias is important. Your boss walks up to you and says, "I need to talk to you. Come see me later". Do you panic? Do you worry about getting into trouble for something or getting fired? The statement from your boss in this example is actually neutral with no direct implied negativity. It could just as easily be good news! Research shows that a natural inclination to negatively interpret ambiguous situations makes people six times more likely to show symptoms of depression, while a positive interpretation bias results in higher resilience.

You also need to be proactive. Composure is not just about being able to return to a state of poise, but also about considering your own beliefs and expectations that produce emotions in the first place. For example, if you expect that nothing will ever go wrong with your project, then you're likely in for a big shock. Compare that with a healthier belief that, most likely, something will go wrong, and when it does, you'll manage it. It's easy - just expect that everything will be harder than you expect!

Reasoning

Creativity and innovative problem solving is incredibly useful when facing challenges along the way. This is what the Reasoning domain is all about. This domain needs Composure for you to keep your cool, as well as Vision so you know what goals to direct your actions toward.

Anticipate and plan. Like Composure, it's not just about applying critical thinking during a crisis, but also about taking action ahead of time to prevent things from going wrong in the first place. In fact, it's mostly about proactive action. This is like going to the dentist regularly so you won't need a root canal later. Think proactively through how things may go wrong and take action ahead of time to prevent or minimise impact, and think through how you'll deal with different scenarios.

Be resourceful. Having the right information, tools, techniques and people available to you will help you solve problems more effectively and find more efficient ways to reach your goals. Resourcefulness is a skill we need to actively build, and the more resourceful we are, the easier it becomes to make unusual connections and find innovative ways forward.

See opportunity in change. A high Reasoning ability means that a changing environment is welcome since it always brings hidden opportunities. By maintaining your composure and knowing what you want to achieve, change is no longer a threat and you can look for things that others might have missed, helping you to succeed.

Tenacity

Persistence is the key. Einstein pointed out the importance of persistence for success when he said that "It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer". In a globalised world, success is no longer a given. We need to be willing to work hard and smart and stay with a problem if we hope to achieve something, especially if you want to achieve something that no one else has.

Learn from mistakes. Rarely will we do things right the first time. And even when doing something we know well, eventually we will make mistakes. At home, with friends, at work. Mistakes creep in everywhere, so what is important is how we react to mistakes. Admonishing ourselves doesn't help. Instead, it's important to be able to objectively look at our mistakes, find lessons in them, and not define ourselves by them. The past is there learn from, not to dwell on.

Don't be naïve, have realistic optimism. Research shows that people who are overly optimistic about succeeding are less likely to, since they tend to give up at the first sign of trouble. What is more useful for success is to have a sense of 'realistic optimism', meaning that you are hopeful about your ability to succeed, but you realise that the road will be tough and full of challenges. This realisation combined with the willingness to be persistent is what ultimately leads to success for individuals, teams and organisations.

Collaboration

We are social beings. The brain has a deep fundamental need for connection with others to be able to thrive. The brain has dedicated neural structures to recognise facial expressions, while mirror neurons fire within the brain to help us empathise with others. We are, after all, in this together, so what we do and focus on is not just for us, but to help our communities together and improve our world. This connection is what the Collaboration domain is about.

Support and be supported. In a complex world, few of us can achieve anything meaningful alone, so it's crucial for us to build support networks so we can both have a safety net and also be that safety net for others. Interestingly, research shows that when it comes to peace of mind, it's not actual available support that matters, but instead it is the perception of available support that's important. So even if you have 100 people ready to support you, if you don't realise this, you will not feel supported. Keep this in mind for others as well, and show the people you care for that you are there to support them whenever they need you.

Get the context right. A key part of Collaboration is understanding the context of your interaction with people. Having a meeting with people at work and spending time with friends on the weekend are two very different contexts. For example, at work it's more important to focus on facts than on emotion, keep things professional and don't take anything personally. At home, it's not always about the facts, but very important to address emotions as it's a vital part of maintaining healthy relationships. Scoring high in Collaboration means being able to know what behaviour is best in different contexts so you can keep things constructive and build positive relationships.

Health

The foundational domain. Good health means looking after your body through what you eat, doing exercise, and getting quality sleep. A healthy body provides a strong foundation for your own resilience so you can focus on your sense of purpose and goals. Good health is not the ultimate goal itself, but instead is an enabler to achieve your larger personal vision.

Healthy nutrition. It's not just about keeping lean, as nutrition also affects your brain health and mental performance. Regularly eating foods with a high combination of fats and sugars (like chocolate, ice cream, cookies, baked goods, burgers...) actually reduces the chemical in the brain that produces more brain cells. This makes the brain less plastic and reduces your mental adaptability.

Quality sleep. Lack of sleep results in more mistakes, reduced attention span, and a decreased ability to deal with stress. It also increases cortisol, the brain's stress hormone. The affects add up over time, compounding the toll on your body, brain, and performance. Sleep makes a big difference, but it's not just about quantity, it's about getting enough quality sleep.

Regular exercise. Also not just about being fit, regular exercise is proven to increase mental performance and increasing your ability to learn. It also protects against neurodegenerative diseases in the long term. So even if you are happy with your body, exercise is still crucial!

What's great about these domains is we absolutely have the capacity to build and improve every domain, and therefore develop our own resilience. Resilience is a life-long and ongoing journey for us and our effort here improves quality of life and directly contributes to the achievement of personal and organisational goals.

As the speed of business increases and gets more competitive, resilience is becoming more important than ever. At Driven we measure resilience of people and teams across these domains, provide comprehensive training and track results. Get in touch if you'd like to know more - info@hellodriven.com

All the best,
Jurie

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Last time we developed a more modern definition of resilience as " advancing despite adversity", but what does this mean on a more detailed level? What groups of behaviours, skills and beliefs contribute to resilience? What can we actually measure resilience against?