Why build resilience?
‘Resilience Transforms, it transforms hardship into challenge, failure into success, helplessness into power’.
Resilience can be learned. Wherever you are today, you can take small steps to strengthen your resilience for tomorrow. Small changes at the beginning can turn into a massive change down the line.
Imagine if you practiced one resilience skill for 5 mins every day for a year. That would be 1,825 mins you’ve spent well in total! How resilient you might be by the end of those thousands of minutes?
So how do we transform our lives? How do we make positive changes?
First you have to commit to the change; that means being motivated enough to change.
Exercise:
Ask yourself during the day: What am I doing? Why am I doing this — and where will this take me?
If you can’t find a good answer, then stop. You are making space for doing something else that you enjoy more.
Exercise:
Ask yourself what you really want. One way of doing this is imagine that you could do anything you want with your life without any limitations, what would you do? The answers will reveal hints to what really motivates you.
Sometimes you really just don’t know what you want. That just means that your goal is find out what you want bit by bit. It’s OK if you only know what you want to do for the next week ahead, or even the next day or the next minute. Living life purposely can help you move forward. The question is: How do I want to spend the next 24 hours, the next week?
Another approach is to ask what you don’t want to do, and take steps to move away from that person or those activities. By building up awareness of what makes you move forward, this strengthens your desire for change.
As you create understanding of what you want to change, you have already taken the first step to changing your situation into something better.
Exercise: build a motivation collage
Get a A3 or A4 sheet of paper, preferably card.
Load of magazines/images/words.
Use a pair of scissors to cut out anything that inspires you or motivates you. Anything that you want or you like the look of. Then attach them onto the board however you like.
Here is an example:
