3 Simple Steps to Increase Your Resilience

Resilience is a key attribute in a variety of important areas in life. Discipline, focus, our ability to navigate through difficult emotions all require resilience, which is also a critical ingredient in helping us to achieve our goals and manage through setbacks, failures, challenging times, and adversity in general.

Without resilience, we can quickly find ourselves feeling down, easily discouraged, and stuck in negative thinking spirals. It can also lead to giving up prematurely on things and struggling to find ways to extricate ourselves from the plethora of challenging moments we can find ourselves wading through on a daily basis.  

Life is already hard at times, and it can be overwhelming when we aren’t feeling mentally and emotionally strong and capable. Here are 3 simple mental tools to help you develop more resilience so that you can more easily manage life’s daily ups and downs, persevere through challenging times, and improve your ability to focus and achieve your goals.

 Mental tool #1 – Expect Challenges

 It may sound negative, but by anticipating that there will be challenging moments along the way, we mentally prepare ourselves and become more resilient when things do go wrong—because they don’t take us by surprise. By anticipating that there will be difficulties along the way, we are mentally prepared if they do come along to deal with whatever it is and get back on track. Instead of getting discouraged and quitting prematurely, we instead say to ourselves, “Oh yeah, something hard like this was likely to happen on the way to achieving this goal, now what can I do to get back on track.” The old adage, hope for the best, plan for the worst encapsulates this well.

 Mental tool #2 – Breathe and Stay Present

It’s easy to let our thoughts spiral out of control and to focus on all the things that have gone wrong or could go wrong when challenging times come along. By consciously paying attention to our breathing, it helps draw our minds into the present moment, and away from unhelpful negative thinking when it becomes excessive. This helps us to stay calmer and more focused on the solutions instead of all the problems.

Mental tool #3 – Remember Hard Times Will Pass Too

 When we’re in the middle of a setback, failure, or challenging period, it is easy to feel overwhelmed and that there’s no end in sight. By remembering that this hard moment or period of your life is temporary, even when it doesn’t feel that way, it can help us to weather through and to again, focus on the concrete steps we can take to improve our circumstances.

When you are resilient, you feel stronger and more capable and life feels more manageable. Trying any of these mental tools will improve your resilience and ability to cope through adversity, while keeping you on track to making the improvements you need to achieve your goals and live a more enjoyable life. Change is rarely easy, and it may take focusing on one of these mental tools at a time—for an extended period of time—for it to become a new approach or mindset in your life. By sticking with it, it won't be long before you see results and more importantly, you’ll have more mental strength when you need it most!

Andrew D. Thompson

High-Performance Coach

Author of A High-Performing Mind