Are your habits building resilience?

Tough things happen to the nicest of people?

Tough times knock down the nastiest of people.?

Sometimes you lose your job through no fault of your own. Circumstances and people change which brings a relationship to an end. Health issues arise.

If you are like me these things throw you in a spin and can lead to a big case of the “what-ifs?” Or the mind can turn to dark places, that you somehow deserve all the bad things that are happening to you, that you have caused them. Rumination happens. That process of replaying difficult events and mistakes only leaves you going further south. And usually, the more you try to stop it the worse it gets.

Your resilience is not based on your strength, but on the power of your habits.

That’s where your resilience habits come into play. Resilience habits are exactly that. They are the things we do, the patterns of behaviour that we follow on a regular and consistent basis.?

All of us have habits, for some, it’s the dessert that follows the main course. For others, it’s the tartare sauce that must go with your fish. But not all habits are made equal.?

Not all habits show up as either good or bad until much later on. We often don’t know if our habits are helping or harming until much later on. A lot of the time we are not even aware of how our habits are affecting the present.

For all of us the question is not will?you get knocked down? The question is not how low you will go. The question is how long will you remain down and how deep is the trough before you recover your equilibrium?

Recovery can either resemble a?U?or a?V?shape. The ideal resilient shape is a?V.?It is a short sharp downturn followed by a rapid bounce back. What determines the shape of the bounce back is your habits before and during a downturn.

Your resilience-building habits are the insurance policies you’ve paid into for years hoping you would never need to make a claim. Anybody who has travelled in the last two years knows the value of having an insurance policy. The odds are sooner or later you need to make a claim.

Resilient people are the same. They hope they never need resilience but they know the value of their resilience habits.

Resilience habits will not stop you from falling but what they will do is make sure you don’t downfall too far. The same resilience habits provide a springboard to ensure your rebound is quick.

One habit I practice is journaling. The habit of writing things down regularly means I can offload them from my conscious mind. Writing about a situation and then reading it again later gives me the chance to cool off, find solutions to problems and allow new perspectives to come to mind.

Journaling is an excellent way of resetting your mind when everything feels negative. Writing down five positives at the start of the day aligns your mind with positive expectations. Writing down five good things that happened today sends you to sleep in a peaceful frame of mind.

Our Resilience Journal is something we have produced to help you along the way.

It’s available on the?Momentum website?as a free download.

On our??Instagram feed,?you can see examples of how Andy and Johnson have used it.

Do let us know what are some of the practices that you do to fill your resilience tank.

Remember that every habit can start today.?