Here’s Why You Should Build Resilience

Resilience is the acquired ability to face difficult events in life and to recover from them. It’s all about how you face adversities in life. Falling and getting up back on your feet again despite hardships proves you are resilient enough. Facing setbacks on your path is quite common, but you can continue your journey with time, strength, and help from others.

It is like ascending a mountain without having a trail map with you. If you are resilient, you will somehow reach the top despite all the struggles. Being resilient is very important in life as having this ability helps you surpass all the ups and downs and surge forward. Learn more about resilience theory and why you should build resilience.

Resilience Theory

One might face numerous challenges in life like losing their jobs, losing their loved ones, facing financial crisis, mental and physical torture, getting bullied, etc. But over the years, they learn to cope with this loss. The resilience theory focuses on the effects, adversities, loss, changes, and risks have on a person’s life.

Without experiencing stress, it is impossible to become resilient. Some people connect resilience with mental toughness, but that’s not the case. You can be resilient only when you work through all the suffering as well as emotional pain. Resilience is about adaptability, flexibility, and perseverance. You can define resilience by five principles – compassion, forgiveness, gratitude, acceptance, and meaning.

Top Factors

Being resilient is a complex procedure. You require both your inner strength and outer resources. There is no fixed formula to grow this ability. Different people have different characteristics. While you may develop anxiety or depression post a traumatic incident, another individual might not affect them. Building resilience is a process and requires a lot of factors to work.

There is no fixed set of instructions that will guide you through the adversities. The way you would tackle your trauma or crisis might differ from the way others would. There are a few protective factors that can help you improve your capabilities to cope and adapt, such as self-esteem, emotional regulation, coping skills, communication skills, realistic planning, and social support. The ability to be resilient builds up slowly as people come across various kinds of stressors regularly.

Is Resilience Important?

Resilience provides people with the emotional strength to fight adversity, hardships, and any traumatic events in life. People who have this ability utilize whatever resources they have and their skills and strength to sail above troubled waters and put any setback in the backburner. You might have seen or heard about people who lack that emotional strength to cope up with unwanted or emotionally disturbing incidents and bank upon coping strategies like isolation, avoidance, and self-medication too.

Some of them even commit suicide. All this is due to low resilience power. Resilient people also feel like you. They have their share of stress, defeats, setbacks, or emotionally disturbing moments. But they use their inner strength and utilize their existing support system to navigate past the problems bothering them. The ability to be resilient helps them accept a situation, adapt to it, and keep moving. Resilience is your core strength with which you can live the load called life.

7Cs of Resilience

Talking about the 7 Cs model, it revolves mainly around two basic points. One, young people either live up to the expectations that adults set on them or simply fail and need the adults for their unconditional love. Two, modeling resilience for younger people holds the key, rather than what people have to say.

According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, the 7Cs are – competence, confidence, connection, character, contribution, coping, and control. To build resilience, one needs to have the competence or the knowledge and ability to handle different situations differently and effectively. The person also needs confidence, as competence in practical situations leads to confidence. It is important to build a connection, which is having close ties with near and dear ones, gives a sense of security and makes one feel loved.

Resilience is of no value unless the person has good character, which is knowing what is right and what is wrong to make responsible decisions, have a feeling of self-worth, and contribute to society’s development. Based on these learnings, one needs to understand contribution. Contribution is about having a purpose and motivating oneself by contributing towards the betterment of one’s community. The sixth C is coping, which refers to how a person copes with stress helps tackle any setback and adversity. The last C is control, which is essential for understanding internal control helps in solving problems.

The interplay between your inner strength and outside resources is what the 7Cs of resilience depicts. Without resilience, one can be a victim of the circumstances, thereby taking the undesirable path.