Building Resilience

Resiliency is the capacity to recover from difficult life events. Resilience can be compared to
climbing a mountain without a trail map. It takes time, strength, and help from people around you,
and you’ll likely experience setbacks along the way. But eventually you reach the top and look
back at how far you’ve come.

On the day Steve Jobs was fired from Apple in 1985, for example, his friend Mike Murray was so
concerned about Jobs’s reaction that he went over to Jobs’s house and sat with him for hours until
Murray was convinced that Jobs would not hurt himself upon being fired from the company, he
actually built.
Steve Jobs did not sit and self-pity in despair for long. A week after being fired from Apple, he flew
to Europe and, spent a few days in Paris, headed to northern Italy, where he bought a bicycle and a
sleeping bag and camped out under the stars, contemplating what he would do next. From Italy, he
went to Sweden and then to Russia before returning home.
Once back home in California, with his passion and ambition renewed, Jobs set about with new
energy and excitement, ready to create something new in the IT world. He went on to found
another computer company, NeXT, which later was purchased by Apple for $400 million. He also
founded a hugely successful computer-graphics studio Pixar, which produces computer animated
feature films.
When Apple started to become less popular in 1996, started to lost its market share, Jobs was
asked to returned to Apple. Once back at Apple, Jobs revived and reenergized the company with
breakthrough, high-design products, such as the iMac, iBook, and iPod, and took the company into
emerging businesses, such as iTunes.

Why is resilience important?

Resilience is important because it gives people the strength needed to process and overcome
hardship. Those lacking resilience get easily overwhelmed, and may turn to unhealthy coping
mechanisms. Resilient people tend to tap into their strengths and support systems to overcome
challenges and work through problems.

What does resilient people have;

Resilient people possess some of these characteristics.
1. Move from feelings to facts: When you are faced with a negative situation, we immediately
focus on how we feel. It is beneficial to us to focus on the facts, move your mind from who did,
what they did, how you feel. Instead think of the facts towards the facts; what has happened,
what to watch out for, how can it be fixed. This will right away take you from a helpless victim
state of mind towards a creative problem solver attitude.

2. Be realistic and accept the situation. Many times, when something unexpected or negative
happens, we tend to feel this is not true, nothing bad can happen to me. Sometimes we also feel
like blaming others for what has happened. These are all true and natural reactions. However, we
do not have to dwell on it. The sooner we pick ourselves up and get ready to accept the reality,
the closer we get to finding a solution.

3. A deep belief that life is meaningful and current feelings of negativity is just a passing phase.
Sometimes negative situations can give a feeling of devastation and may seem like nothing else is
important and what is important has turned negative. Always remember there is a lot more to
life, a deeper meaning. The negative feeling and dissatisfaction are a passing phase. Believe you
are only getting stronger and wiser by facing different situations and solving them.

4. Willingness to improvise and make it better than before. When faced with tough situation, people
who are brave and mentally strong not only find a way to get out of their current situation,
but also create a plan to make the future better for themselves and others around them. When
you create a plan, think of what else to do, how can you make it even better. The ideas can excite
you and give a new sense of meaning to take it forward.

How to build resilience?

1 Talk to yourself, positive affirmation: Try to look at the bright side of the situation. Give
yourself positive affirmative talk. Tell yourself you can get through this. Tell yourself there is a
better approach and you will just have to find it. If people are always successful and right, no one
will learn or invent anything in life. Treat every unsuccessful situation as a learning opportunity.
Tell yourself, “I may not have succeeded yet but I know how this works, I know the process, I
understand the mechanism, I know the people who I can approach for help”. optimistic attitude.
2 Retrain your brain: In extreme cases, you may have to start all over with a very different
approach. As we saw in Steve Job’s case, he had to leave everything he had build as a company
behind and start all over from scratch. The moral is, to never give up. Remember to stay positive
even in extreme situations. Have confidence in yourself. Systematically try to think through what
can be done to get it right. Who can help, can someone coach or mentor you? Do you need to
learn a skill or two to make it better?

Whenever we get so upset that we say or do something we later regret, the trigger for the fightor-
flight response. When you find yourself wanting to say or do in the spur of the moment, catch
yourself and take a brief pause. Rethink if what you are about to say or do will make the situation
better or make it worse. If the answer is, that it will make it even worse, stop yourself from doing
it. Give yourself time to cool down. Think again logically and plan the net steps.

Strengthen your resilience

Research have shown that regular and repeated practice of 20-30 mins of meditation, combined with
strengthening the resilience listed below, can help you manage daily stressful situation with relative
ease.

Build up your positivity list. To help boost resilience, every time you have an actual positive interactions,
events, and memories, times you helped others, supported a cause, took care of your pet, helped a friend
or sibling with their homework, make a note of it. Write them down in a book or digitally into a
spreadsheet. Over time the positive list adds up. These positive interactions can be very simple but made
you happy, provided a sense of achievement.

When you feel down, look at the list of good interactions you had, nice things you did to someone. It is
sure to boost your spirits and cheer you up.

Circle of Positivity. Positivity is socially contagious. how happiness depends not just on our own choices
and actions, but also on those of people around us. When we are more positive ourselves, we encourage
others to do the same, and this in turn creates a virtuous positive feedback loop, and our own resilience
is increased and strengthened by the actions of others.
You can gradually increase your influence by expanding the circle of positivity from home to friends in the
school, sports club and other activities you are involved in.
Resilience is about how you recharge, not how you endure Lastly, a good healthy diet and exercise with
enough rest boosts resilience. Keeping up with daily study and chores routine and finishing the tasks
without procrastination leaves you free of guilt and a sense of accomplishment.

• When tasks are not carried over stress will not build up.
• Remember that everyone face failure sometime or another in life. Use it as learning experience.
• Never give up on yourself, never give up hope. Go back and try again or try something different.