Developing resilience as a lifestyle and making it contagious to change peoples lives

What is resilience?

Psychologists define resilience as the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats or significant sources of stress — such as family and relationship problems, serious health problems, or workplace and financial stressors.

There are many aspects of your life you can control and modify and grow with. That’s the role of resilience. Becoming more resilient empowers you to grow and improve.

Being resilient does not mean you won’t experience difficulty or distress. The road to resilience can involve emotional distress. Resilience involves, thoughts leading to actions  - like building a muscle, increasing your resilience, intentionality, increasing your capacity for resilience to gain strength, to grow, connect with people who care about you.

Why do some people always feel vexed?

Feeling vexed and using it to develop resilience is like building up your muscles. Should we be concerned that we worry? There are reasons to worry, and reasons not to worry. If reasons for worry are realistically tied to what's happening in your life, guilt can add to sadness or anxiety. Guilt is a normal emotion – although it can be paralysing for some people. It is is a natural emotional response. It can be used to provide a strong motivation to correct or make up for a wrong. Being in a bad mood and feeling vexed isn't always a bad thing. Sometimes you may even be able to see yourself and your life in a clearer and more honest light.

Cognitive behavioural psychologists can work at changing your moods to positive ones, by changing thoughts, using depressive realism although going overboard with positivity also carries risks. The focus should be to work to change situations that you can control – this is the muscle of resilience.

Traumatic memories

Angst, pain and despair are very real. We cannot deny that everyone experiences such emotions. It is linked to your biological make up – flight and flight. Developing resilience helps you deliberately cultivate positive, emotions as a way develop habitual modes of thinking or acting, strengthening your capacity to accept what can’t be changed and developing the focus on kindness, compassion, gratitude, awe and delight rather than angst, anger and despair.

Managing difficult, negative emotions, by amplifying the positive emotions shift the brain from contraction and reactivity into openness and receptivity.  By doing this the brain cultivates positive emotions such as kindness, compassion, gratitude, awe, delight, which results in not just feeling better but doing better.  The outcome is resilience.

Positive emotions

Constricting negative emotions include envy, resentment, regret and hostility which all affect the nervous system focusing attention on stress and worry.  This can cause anxiety, depression, learned helplessness and loneliness and help you feel less enthused, energetic, and alive. 

When you intentionally and continually evoke experiences of positive emotions, you strengthen the parts of your brain that allow you to respond to life events with openness rather than a contraction developing resilience rather than fear. Experiencing more positive emotions increases curiosity and engagement with circumstances that strengthens the capacity to approach challenges that you and others face.

Awe

Experiencing awe is the larger-than-life feeling one experiences in the presence of something vast and extraordinary – the glory of a panoramic sunset, a star-studded night sky, a total solar eclipse, or the aurora borealis. In young children awe is experienced in almost everything they see. We somehow lose the feelings of awe as we begin to take things for granted. Experiencing awe and curiosity and exploration soothes the nervous system putting the day-to-day concerns into perspective developing interconnection with others. This is closely related to well-being.

Grit

To develop resilience we also need grit. According to Angela Duckworth’s (2007) research, grit is a question of nature and nurture, not one or the other. In an article for the Harvard Business Review (Dweck, 2016), she points out areas of confusion - people mix up open-mindedness and positivity with having a growth mindset, believing that they have always had a growth mindset, and therefore, always will. Second, some people believe that praising and rewarding effort is all that matters and that people think that if they talk about a growth mindset, or put up posters about it, that is all that is needed without doing any work to create a growth mindset culture or environment, those posters are just paper on a wall.m People who consistently develop and maintain a growth mindset share the following characteristics (Dweck, 2016, p. 245). They,

• Embrace challenges
• Persist in the face of setbacks
• See effort as the path to mastery
• Learn from criticism
• Find lessons and inspiration in the success of others

Grit and resilience is required to achieve short and long-term goals.

Grit: The power of passion and perseverance.

Duckworth defines grit this way:

“Grit is the tendency to sustain interest in and effort toward very long-term goals” (Duckworth et al., 2007).

People are born with various levels of grit, but she believes it is a trait that develops through experience. She points out in her TED Talk, that shifting one can shift their mindset from a fixed to a growth orientation.

Grit is about intense passion. Grit is about sustained, consistent effort toward a goal even when we struggle, falter, or temporarily fail whereas resilience is our ability to bounce back after we have struggled, faltered, or failed. It involves optimism.

Grit is the engine that moves us toward our goal. Resilience is the oil that keeps the engine moving. Developing grit and resilience helps a person to build and sustain a growth mindset.

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus said, “The only constant in life is change.”

Walt Disney famously said, “We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we’re curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.”

We need to forget negative self-talk and trust that we know ourselves better than anyone else. We need to practice optimism, acknowledging the good and what is possible practicing self-compassion, and keeping physically healthy

Duckworth created the Grit Scale so you can discover how gritty you are. The higher the score, the grittier you are.

https://angeladuckworth.com/grit-scale/

The Big Life Journal company creates resources that help children to develop a positive mindset.

There are also many books that help develop resilience.

Some resilience quotes

Resilience is accepting your new reality, even if it’s less good than the one you had before.

Elizabeth Edwards

Sleep is a key part of the requirements for resilience and good decision-making.

James G. Stavridis

Being gritty doesn’t mean not showing pain or pretending everything is O.K. In fact, when you look at healthy and successful and giving people, they are extraordinarily meta-cognitive. They’re able to say things like, ‘Dude, I totally lost my temper this morning.’ That ability to reflect on yourself is signature to grit.

Angela Duckworth

Humans are creatures of habit. If you quit when things get tough, it gets that much easier to quit the next time. On the other hand. If you force yourself to push through it, the grit begins to grow in you.

Travis Bradberry

Grit, in a word, is stamina. But it’s not just stamina in your effort. It’s also stamina in your direction, stamina in your interests. If you are working on different things but all of them very hard, you’re not really going to get anywhere. You’ll never become an expert.

Grit, resilience, and growth mindset are intertwined

An important aspect of all the research is that grit, resilience, and growth mindsets change over time and are influenced by our thoughts, beliefs, and experiences.

Grit, resilience and PERMAH

According to Martin Seligman, the father of positive psychology, positive psychology is founded on the belief that people want to lead meaningful and fulfilling lives, to cultivate what is best within themselves, and to enhance their experiences of love, work and play.

Flourishing is more than just the absence of illness, it is the deliberate development and enhancement of the traits and elements which act as the building blocks for a positive and flourishing life.

He speaks about how to create an optimistic and flourishing life using positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning and accomplishment.

Some of the definers that come up when considering well-being is the feelings of certainty, safety, calmness, variety, adventure, connection and relationships, significance, growth and making progress, contribution and purpose and health.

The ability to be optimistic and view the past, present, and future in a positive perspective can help you in relationships, work, and inspire you to be more creative leading to more pleasure and enjoyment . Pleasure is about satisfying bodily needs for survival; such as thirst, hunger, and sleep, whereas enjoyment comes from intellectual stimulation and creativity, for example when a child completes a complex task that requires real focus resulting in awe and joy on completion.

By focusing on what goes well right as well as accepting what is wrong changes the focus to the positive. The power of focus is important on developing habits of positive leading to positive emotions.

Developing habits of gratitude, random acts of kindness increases positive emotions and levels of wellbeing, for example, giving a compliment, making someone laugh, really listening to someone, show your appreciation or writing an email expressing gratitude and thanks expressing in detail and recognising what was appreciated.

Engagement in your work, developing a passion is the neuroscience of learning as emotion drives cognition. When you are able to recognise your own personal strengths, and feel confident and valuable in using them, using a growth mindsets enables the feeling of great satisfaction and appreciation resulting in clearer thinking and increased our motivation and passion. In learning the deficit-based approach leads to things considered to be ‘wrong’ and fails to provide information about strengths. The strength-based approach leads to learning being dynamic, complex and holistic focusing on what’s present—not what’s absent building a picture of the future using the belief that we all have strengths and abilities, we can all grow and develop , the problem is the problem we are not the problem.

Using this approach helps us appreciate and understand our own strengths, develop self-belief, self-confidence and a real desire to improve and with this more resilience and grit leading to more mindful better well-being and flow.

Psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi first introduced the term flow linking it to feelings of happiness and euphoria, and to peak performance among workers, scientists, athletes, musicians, and many others. He found that flow deepens learning and encourages long-term interest in a subject.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi asks, "What makes a life worth living?" Noting that money cannot make us happy, he looks to those who find pleasure and lasting satisfaction in activities that bring about a state of "flow."

One of the central conditions for flow, according to Csikszentmihalyi, is that an activity be challenging at a level just above one’s current abilities. If a challenge is too hard, we  become anxious and give up; if it’s too easy, we become bored. Research has shown that when we understand the relevance of what we are doing we are more likely to engage in it. When we are able to develop autonomy we engage more. Csikszentmihalyi has found clear goals, with ongoing feedback promoted better engagement and flow.

Resilience research The quote from philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche “what does not kill me makes me stronger” (Nietzsche, 1888) suggests that it is the event or challenge that strengthens the individual, but research points more to the role of individual responses.

Resilience, like mental health, is not static but is something that can change over time due to experiences, education and life’s circumstances. Young people who show resilience know how to cope in spite of setbacks, barriers or limited resources, are willing and able toovercome obstacles to get what they want, bounce back from adversity and disappointments, are flexible and adaptable ,see setbacks as temporary and failures as isolated and short term, Where they lack resilience, they see failure as permanent, demonstrate inflexible thinking, tend to dwell in the past, get “stuck” in the past and can’t move forward, experience a great deal of negative “self-talk” and catastrophic thinking.

The pillars of developing resilience related to who I am, I can, I have the capacity and I am optimistic and realistic.

What we believe in  ourselves our feeling of self worth -self value contributes to our ability or our perceived ability to overcome challenges whether we see ourselves as a fighter or a failure, whether we see ourselves as able or unable, whether we see ourselves as strong or weak, whether we see ourselves as worthy or unworthy, whether we see ourselves as loved or unlovable.

Carol Dweck’s work on Growth Mindset and the Psychology of Success helps us to understand that how we see ourselves plays a significant role in career and a life in general, helping young people to develop a positive sense of identity and personal power where you feel you have control over “things that happen to you”, leading to a high self-esteem, a purpose, realistic optimism and the enhanced ability to identify strengths, gifts and passions increasing of confidence, the impetus to try something different increasing confidence and competence, developing capacity, and am I can attitude increasing resilience.

Is this you?

Growth Mindset - three ways you CAN change your brain

Developing a Growth Mindset - Carol Dweck

"Don't just aspire to make a living, aspire to make a difference. "

Tassos Anastasiades