Successful people are resilient, allowing them to adapt to life's challenges while maintaining good mental health. Resilience is having the ability to adapt to an undesirable situation as quickly as possible. It allows you to tap into your resourcefulness, or your ability to call on different solutions that are within your arsenal of success so that you can adapt to adversity with ease. Being resilient helps you manage stress, respond to difficult times with ease, and allow you to emotionally regulate yourself so you can deal with adversity.
If you want to become the person you were meant to be, then you must follow these 5 core tools to build your resilience so you can deal with difficult situations.
1. Establish your purpose.
Having a sense of purpose helps you understand what you're willing to fight for. Your purpose, or your “why”, is your ultimate source of motivation. When you’re motivated by something that’s emotionally meaningful to you, you’ll fight for it no matter what.
The problem is that most people are too focused on fighting for a meaningless result, versus fighting for something they truly care about. If you want to build your resilience, then you must understand why you do what you do, and it must be deeper than just “wanting something”. Ask yourself “why” you really want something and continuously go deeper into it. When you discover a reason that makes you emotional, you’ll know you found your true purpose. Every time you’re going through an adverse situation, go back to your purpose for instantaneous motivation.
2. Set a target, make a true commitment, and don’t waiver from it.
In order to be resilient, you must know where you want to go, and you must be willing to continuously adapt until you accomplish what you set out to. Resilient people pick one thing that they’re looking to accomplish and stick to it, no matter what. A true decision must be made to accomplish this target, which means understanding that adaption is inevitable. When you make a true decision, it means making a commitment, taking action, adapting, and then succeeding. Society likes to focus only on the success of individuals and tends to neglect the process, or adaption, of getting there. Think - isn’t it true that anything great that you have accomplished in your life required constant adaption?
The key is that you don’t waver, or settle for less, just because you’re being forced to adapt. Remove your other options; commit to one thing. Resilient people give themselves one option, they make a commitment to accomplishing it, then they continuously adapt until they get it.
3. Establish your values and stand by them.
Resilient people stand for values that they believe in. The reason that most people bend, or break, is because they don’t have values they stand by; they lack a value system that empowers them and end up self-sabotaging in the long run. If you’re someone who finds themselves in a constant “push, pull” scenario, where you’re leaning one way with a decision, but also leaning another way, then you most likely have conflicting values.
Take the time to consciously set your values so that you don’t slip into a self-sabotaging mechanism. If you make sure that your values work for you and not against you, then being resilient will be easy.
4. Build systems to adapt.
The consistency of your daily systems is reflected in the consistency of your results - or, how you think, and behave, will be present in your performance results. The systems you put in place for yourself become habits. If you want to be someone who instinctually responds to adversity then you must have systems in place that allow you to do so. Having a habit plan in place allows you to respond to adversity with ease, providing you with simple action steps to overcome adversity.
A habit plan is simply creating a plan of action for how you’ll respond when a specific situation arises. It means understanding the cue, craving, routine, and reward of a behaviour, or understanding the habit loop to a behaviour.
A cue is a stimulus that triggers you, either mentally or physically, to take action. A craving is the motivation you have to take action. A routine is the behaviour you select, either mentally or physically, to respond to a cue. The reward is the result that you’re after by carrying out your routine to the cue and craving. To create a habit plan for adversity, simply understand the situations that set you off and adjust the routine to get the best result.
For example, maybe you’re someone who is has a tough time managing their emotions and is cued by a situation going wrong in performance (adversity), you crave making things right, and your current routine is to get angry with the desired reward that it’ll inspire others to take action. The way to change this routine, so that you respond better to adversity, is by understanding that the cue, craving, and reward will still be there, and adjusting your routine to be calm and action-oriented, versus angry and belittling. Research shows that those who have a habit plan often stick to it, even when willpower is low.
5. Use a form of visualization to better your certainty
Visualization is one of the best ways to build certainty, or belief, within yourself. It allows you to future pace, or see yourself in situations before they happen. When you practice visualization with enough emotional intensity and do so consistently, you create neuro associations that prime the nervous system and actually make it believe that you’re physically practicing!
By using this type of mental practice, or what we call “mental reps”, you’ll be able to practice with perfection and create neuro associations within your nervous system so that they come to life in performances. We go deeper on mental reps, with questions you can ask yourself to build them here.
Resilient people are able to adapt because they have systems in place to build their commitment, competence, focus, and toughness. Stick to this list of these 5 tools so that you can be more resilient. We'll cover part 2 of 2 on how to be more resilient next week.
If you want to extend this list and be trained weekly on building your resilience, then you’ll want to sign up for the Molliteum Insider. This is a once-per-week newsletter, that brings you resilience skills like these so you can become the person you were meant to be.