14 Steps for Building Resilience

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It’s no secret that we often feel beat up or knocked down by the end of the day. This is unfortunately a typical part of life and can leave you feeling unsettled and defeated. Building resilience helps turn this around.

Instead of allowing adversity or stressors to determine your demeanor, you can learn how to go the distance. Resilience simply means developing the skills needed to regulate, or balance, your outcomes.

This still may sound difficult to accomplish, but I believe each of us is born with the skills needed to become resilient. However, improving them does take effort. Learning how to sharpen these skills, and get to a point of resilience, is possible. It might look a little different for each person, depending on circumstances, but everyone has the capacity to build resilience.

Learning the steps can improve character also. When developing wellness to build resilience, you naturally build character. There is a certain amount of strength needed to keep going, but you also learn the art of recovery by practicing resilience.

If something is threatening to make you crumble, building skills to move past it helps create wellness and character. Also, the point of a moving finish line must be mentioned. Resilience isn’t a one-time thing because life is constantly changing. Creating these skills helps you continue the journey every time something happens.

First, we’ll go over some signs that take place when you’re not resilient. Then, we look at 14 ways to help build resilience in your life.

In This Article

Signs When There is No Resilience

We’re taking a look at five ways to determine if there’s a lack of resilience. These points often lead to more difficulty rather than an experience of success with progress.

Frustration

Rather than focusing on building yourself up and moving through a situation, you might become exceedingly frustrated or angry. This is an imbalance of emotion that shows where your insights land during a circumstance that’s challenging. Building resilience doesn’t necessarily keep you from feeling frustrated, but it replaces bouts of elevated emotion with reasoning and improved insight.

Impatience

Someone who is impatient has trouble viewing an entire situation. Instead, they often look directly at what should immediately change for them to feel less frustration. This can be a detriment. Sometimes the timing isn’t right to make a move. Being impatient can create incorrect steps and might even lead to more anger or impatience in the long run if things end up worse.

Overreaction

This is usually driven by the previous two points. If you feel frustrated and/or impatient in a circumstance, emotions can lead to irrational steps. An overreaction is weighty and can cause more harm than good. Leaning too far in any direction can lead to miscues.

Narrow Outlook

There are many lanes that fall into this category, but overall, it means that you have trouble seeing the big picture. This can accompany some of the previously mentioned points. It’s hard to have an optimistic or broad view if you’re focused on distractions in your immediate vicinity. How we handle these determines the ability to show resilience and keep going.

Signs of Burnout

This is the path to an end result rather than an ongoing journey. Once you reach the point of burnout, it takes a hard mental reset, rest, and other specific and intentional steps to recover. Learning resilience allows you to ward off burnout and encourages the opposite; the ability to maneuver strategically through difficulties and keep going.

Flower Growing in Concrete for Resilience

Steps for Building Resilience

We’ve discovered that building resilience takes intention and learning skills you need to build upon. Each of these steps plays an important role in a successful journey. While a focus on each is important, it’s good to begin with at least some versus feeling overwhelmed. Add as you’re able, and before long, you’ll feel more confident, capable, and resilient.

1. Set Achievable Goals

One of the first steps in building resilience is setting goals. These should be achievable rather than create challenges. There’s no need to add to your stress or the adversity already taking place. Correct goal setting allows you to make gains in progressive fashion and begin viewing your capabilities.

2. Plan Your Action Steps

Rather than move forward with the wrong intentions, carefully planning your steps is key. Instead of allowing impatience or frustration to guide you, practicing intentionality will pave a path for smarter actions. Although you can’t always know the outcome, planning action steps often helps you stay more controlled and grounded.

3. Envision Your Opportunities

Especially when you’re caught in a whirlwind of difficulty, it’s challenging to accurately view what is taking place around you. While everything might appear negative, or even impossible, there are usually opportunities found within the turmoil. It might be improved wisdom, helping others, or even realizing your strengths. Recognizing opportunities in adversity is a skill for resilience.

4. Have a Broad Outlook

Similar to recognizing opportunities, having a broad outlook is important when building resilience. Instead of maintaining a narrow view only of what is taking place around you, look to the horizon and realize that much more is out there. While it may seem impossible to make it through the moment, understanding that you will pass through is an important part of progress. More is waiting for you on the other side.

Word Optimism Floating with Balloons

5. Maintain Optimism

We’ve discussed in other articles that optimism is a vital part of growth, and building resilience is no different. The key is understanding that optimism isn’t the same as positivity. Optimism creates the mindset that although things are tough, you will experience something greater, even if it’s not perfect. Positivity tells you things will always be great. When they’re not, you feel banished to negativity. It’s one or the other whereas optimism exists in all situations, no matter how they’re going. Things can get better.

6. Build Mental Strength

This is a bigger effort than some of the other steps but is still important and needed in building resilience. One encourages the other. Mental strength comes with intention and monitoring what you allow into your mind. Rather than being complacent to what thoughts you have, filter them and realize you’re in control. As you take this step, a habit is formed and helps with overall mental strength daily. Mental strength builds resilience and resilience creates more mental strength.

7. Improve Emotional Strength

Recalling several of the earlier mentioned traits of people without resilience reminds us of signs of emotional immaturity. On the flip side, emotional strength is created when you intentionally choose to tap into your character-filled traits. Some of these are kindness, patience, gratitude, and serving others. The opposite of these is negative emotion and can drag you down rather than build resilience.

8. Maintain Curiosity

This is not only a trait of leaders, but it’s one that increases resilience by proving that there are alternate ways to handle situations. If we step with a narrow outlook and curiosity escapes, it’s challenging to see what might take place. Some of the greatest inventors and historic figures were successful because they didn’t ignore curiosity. This is how great ideas are birthed. Thinking outside the box is sometimes what it takes to build resilience.

Puzzle Pieces and Lightbulb for Problem Solving

9. Problem Solve

We all know that things don’t usually go as planned. Rather than give up when you face a challenge, think about an alternate answer. This helps build the skill of problem solving which is a necessity when increasing resilience. If you only stay in one lane with your thoughts and plans, you will miss other solutions.

10. Embrace Confidence

Once you see forward progress, or even the potential for better outcomes, allow yourself to celebrate by embracing your growing confidence. Often, we measure too harshly or can be critical. However, it’s necessary to celebrate the wins, no matter how small they may be. Embracing confidence, even a little, can spark further growth.

11. Be Flexible but Firm

During skill building, it’s important to stay open-minded to changes that might take place but weren’t planned or assumed. While not all of these will be beneficial, some can lead to greater opportunities and abilities. So, if you are sure certain steps need to take place, remain firm in your decisions. But don’t shut out the possibility of flexibility to change when needed.

12. Improve Your Physical Stamina

Earlier we talked about mental and emotional growth. In addition, your physical status is important. Sometimes, it’s the first part of you to be affected. Other times, it might begin to wear down with efforts you make. Either way, attention to your physical health is necessary. Getting enough sleep, hydration, eating well, and having an outlet such as exercise is vital when building resilience. If your physical being wears down, you’ll find it more challenging to reach success in other areas. If you already have physical difficulties, try to stay as close to your baseline as possible when building resilience. Otherwise, you’ll more quickly give in to distractions during times of physical fatigue or weakness.

Woman Looking to the Sky for Help

13. Ask for Help

Another step when building resilience is asking for help when needed. Sometimes, this step might become a necessity even before you feel like you should ask. Waiting too long can create a version of mental and physical fatigue that spins into other causes for distraction. We weren’t made to face life alone, so why do we assume personal growth must be based solely on our abilities? There’s transparency in asking for help. It improves relationships and leads to success at the same time.

14. Contiuously Assess Your Steps

This is one of the most important stages when building resilience. Following points, increasing strengths, and improving your abilities don’t always work out perfectly. Part of the effort entails unmet goals, falling by the wayside, or missing the mark totally. This is where assessment comes in.

Sometimes we glean greater lessons from what didn’t work than what did. While I don’t like the word failure, we can’t always get it right. I count it as a learning curve or “progress in action.” That means there’s room for change and gaining wisdom from mistakes. “Failure” is only present when you don’t intend to learn from where you’ve been.

Final Thoughts About Steps for Building Resilience

We’ve learned several points to consider when determining resilience. First, it’s good to assess what condition your mindset is in prior to beginning. If you notice any of the points mentioned in the absence of resilience, it’s good to make an effort to change.

After assessing your current state, you have a solid place to start. Use that knowledge to set achievable goals and begin your journey. Don’t be too hard on yourself along the way. Use your mistakes and missteps as areas of assessment to launch greater successes.

Using the steps that were outlined can help create better resilience when facing adversity or stress. We mentioned several areas that can be addressed, and assessed, which improve your capabilities and confidence. Remember, it’s not necessary to cover all simultaneously but choose a few and initiate the effort. With intention and practice, you will build resilience in your life.

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