I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become. ~Carl Gustav Jung

Resilience is our capacity for stress-related growth, to recover quickly from difficulties.

There are two distinct aspects to resilience:

• Durability or hardiness, which is 0ur ability to manage daily stressors and hassles successfully
• Bouncing Back, our capacity to effectively recover and grow from major life adversities like death or divorce

We can build and reinforce our resilience muscles by focusing on three key things.

1. THINK DIFFERENTLY

By recognizing and understanding how we think about adversity, stress and challenging scenarios, we can alter how we think about them and as such, how we react to them. Our thinking runs along a sliding scale from optimism to pessimism.

People who have a more pessimistic way of thinking tend to impart personalization, permanence and pervasiveness on stressful situations. They tell themselves:

“This problem will be around forever. It will affect my entire life and its all my fault.”

Consistent pessimistic thinking increases our likelihood of depression, anxiety, hopelessness and helplessness. Read more