5 keys to building resilience

5 keys to building resilience

No one can or should expect to be happy all the time.

No matter who you are or what you do; things will go wrong.

Facing and dealing with stress, therefore, is crucial for those of us who want to be happy; because the better we deal with problems the sooner we can bounce back to and enjoy the good things in life – and that’s pretty much what happiness is all about!

via Quartz by Melody Wilding

Tight deadlines. Increasing demands. Rising expectations. Success can be great, but it’s not without stress.

When the pressure is on, it’s easy to feel like you’re falling behind or not accomplishing enough. Minor setbacks may crush your motivation. Criticism can leave you reeling for days.

If you want to perform at high levels, then you must be able to bounce back from failure and all the ups-and-downs that leadership entails. In other words, you must learn how to become emotionally resilient.

Resilience, psychologically speaking, is the ability to adapt to adversity or significant stress. When faced with difficulty, resilient people recover more quickly. They view setbacks as temporary and move forward despite uncertainty. Research finds that resilient people excel in problem solving, positive communication, emotional intelligence, and emotion regulation. They tend to be hopeful and optimistic, and have higher levels of self-esteem.

Resilience isn’t a magical quality that’s bestowed upon a strong few. Everyone is equipped with some degree of resilience, and you can intentionally deepen your capacity to bounce back. By cultivating key behaviors and habits, you can boost your ability to remain calm during a crisis.

1. Change your relationship to stress

You can’t prevent setbacks from happening, but you can change your response to them. Instead of viewing stress as a sign of failure or as a threat, you can choose to look for the challenge within it or the lesson to be learned. By doing so, you’re cultivating what psychologist Martin Seligman calls an optimistic explanatory style, or the ability to perceive setbacks as temporary and solvable. Instead of asking yourself, “Why is this happening,” ask “What can be done?” or “What am I meant to learn from this?” Finding meaning within chaos is a core component of resilient leadership…

…keep reading the full & original article HERE