I’ve written a fair amount about being happy, feeling gratitude, dealing with disappointment, and other related topics over the last two years. But it was only last week that I realized that a lot of what I talk about is actually how to be emotionally resilient.
I’ve been thinking about emotional resilience (although not under that particular label) since I was a kid. I took a good look at the people around me who were dealing with stress and adversity, and who appeared to be miserable most of the time, and I thought, “I don’t want to turn out like them.” Thus began my strong determination to become an emotionally resilient person.
At first my plan was to become resilient to tide me over to the point where my life would no longer have any upsetting bits. Now I realize that second part of my plan is never going to come to pass. Adversity is a part of life, and similar to whack-a-mole, the minute one difficult thing is more or less under control, another one pops up to do its own excited little “look at me” dance. The world is changing around us all the time, and inevitably some of those changes aren’t going to be ones that we want to happen. Health changes, life circumstances change, families change, employment and careers change, accidents happen. I can’t stop these things from changing because nobody can.
However, the first part of my plan, to become as resilient as I could, has been enormously helpful. It’s something I still work on and attempt to improve, and I expect I’ll continue to do so for the rest of my life.
Photo by Tom Magliery
Why is resilience so important? Because it’s something constructive we can do in the face of adversity. It tends to make us happier people. It makes it easier for us to deal with disappointment and rejection, which in my case means I’ve been able to continue working on my writing skills (and my singing skills before that). Resilience is what causes us, in the face of difficult circumstances, to be able to stand up, brush ourselves off, and continue forward. It allows us to hold onto the belief that whatever happens, we will ultimately be okay. It keeps us from becoming bogged down in a never-ending morass of negativity and powerlessness. It helps us live more fully in the present.
Resilience is real strength.
I found an article that describes eight of the attitudes and characteristics that encourage resilience, and I found myself nodding along as I read. It lists the following: emotional awareness, optimism, support, internal locus of control, perseverance, sense of humor, perspective, and spirituality. I’ve written about many of those ideas already on this blog, and I’m sure I’ll continue writing about them.
What about you? What helps you be more resilient? In what areas do you run into trouble?
The Practical Free Spirit 
Amy… you are so “spot on” … i could’nt agree with you more… yes there will always be a “new” mole to whack… as long as they dont all come out at ounce…lol… i have often realized (and too late at that) … that its not the mole that upset my applecart, it was how i dealt with it… more than often the event was long forgotten, but the fact that i may have lost my temper or just let myself down through my reaction to a particular “stressfull event”, that still lingered and caused me to have terrible feelings of guilt or even failure… the quiet time after the storm and how foolish i usually feel… im sure we can “grow” with strides if we deal with stressfull events in a positive manner …
I definitely agree that the more skillful we become at dealing with difficult stuff, the better. It seems like there is always something to learn or examine about this!
I’m usually pretty good about keeping calm, but I don’t consider myself emotionally resilient.
Of the characteristics listed, I think I have good emotional awareness, humor, and spirituality. I have okay perseverance, but I’m somewhat lacking in optimism and support and I’m definitely lacking in internal locus of control. Perspective is a bit complicated: I think I am decent at learning from my mistakes (and certainly don’t deny them), but I struggle with obstacles and challenges.
I think my main problem with emotional resilience is my emotions have taken enough of a beating over the years that long-term emotional damage was done, leaving me a bit aloof and numbed.
It’s especially hard to deal with the cumulative effect of life, I think. And even if you’re trying very hard to work on things as they happen, it can be hard (or impossible) to keep up. All the more reason to work on qualities that help resilience, though, at least for me.
One thing that one must be avoid when becoming resilient, which is a very easy trap to fall and not realize (cause you think you’re resilient instead), is to become emotion-/senseless (in the sensorial meaning).
Being resilient pretty much is something happens, this something hits you, you withstand it, get back to your feet quickly and you keep going. Being that (which I am yet to find a good name for) is when something happen, but it doesn’t really hit you, it just passes through you and your life, but the consequence is that you “recover” from the incident quickly (cause internally nothing clicked, there is nothing to recover from in the first place). I can deceptively look similar, but it is nothing alike resilience. You just miss the pain because you taught yourself to barely feel anything at all (its the easy way) and consequentially you miss out a lot of other things too, things a person like that will fail to see meaning because they forgot how it is to completely feel all those other strong emotions too – they have just scraps and think it is all that matters. Just like everything passes through that person’s life, said person just passes through life but doesn’t really live life. Similar traits can also be developed too, like false optimism, which only makes it easier to continue in that direction.
Not that I e’er did such a thing *swims on the Nile”.
Ha!
And yes, there is a very important difference between dealing with something and then bouncing back, or going numb/in denial/ignoring something and bouncing back. Thanks for bringing this up, because it is an easy mistake to make.
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