How To Be Resilient: 5 Steps To Success When Life Gets Hard

by Eric Barker

(Click here to read on the blog)

Here’s how to be more resilient:

• Emotional Regulation: When feelings overwhelm you, you can’t make good decisions. You’re an emotional crash test dummy. Slow down and get some distance. Notice and name your emotions. Then reappraise. Is this really that bad? Are these thoughts useful?
• Optimism: When we can’t see a potentially positive outcome, it’s rational to give up. Consider your Best Possible Self. See difficulty as transient, local, and controllable so you stop feeling like a pigeon in life’s shooting gallery.
• Cognitive Agility: When you immediately jump to the worst-case scenario, you’re going to want to quit. Take the time to consider more possibilities. And then ask yourself which one you’d bet the mortgage on being most likely. Otherwise, you’ll feel like a shut-in in a house of horrors.
• Self-Compassion: You’re letting someone walk all over you. But the person doing the walking is also you. Take that compassion you usually extend to others and offer some of it to yourself.
• Self-Efficacy: You build confidence and agency by accomplishing things often enough that it changes how you see yourself. Start small and achieve goals until you start to see yourself as “the kind of person who achieves their goals.”

Everyone struggles. Everyone. Life is about how we see those challenges and how we respond to them.