5 Ways Resilience Can Make You A Survivor
Rishi Chourasia
1. Understand The Obstacles You Face
The way in which you deal with turmoil in life is determined at an early age. Overprotective parents try to shield their children from adversity, but in doing so they also keep them from the hardships that help them mature.
Getting in shape to meet life’s difficulties takes considerable effort and practice; start now so you are not traumatized when faced with giant-sized turmoil.
How you do one thing is how you do everything.
2. Overcome The Urge To Run Away
Resilience can be summed up like this:
Resilience is recognizing that if you are dissatisfied with certain aspects of your life, then it is your responsibility to take the initiative and make the changes you need to become a survivor.
Running away or expecting others to handle your problems is childish.
Gritup and change the way you look at your obstacles and roadblocks. Mental toughness is believing you can prevail in your circumstances rather than believing your circumstances will change.
3. Acknowledge All Emotions You Are Feeling
Because many of us are wimps, we run away or deny unpleasant thoughts and feelings. We don’t think we’re strong enough to handle the hard stuff so we listen to self-help gurus and pretend negative emotions and feelings don’t exist.
Ignoring negative feelings is not healthy, nor is wallowing in them. If life has handed you a tough hand, remember that the only thing you may still have control over is your attitude. If you feel powerless because of your circumstances, it’s because that is what you are telling yourself.
Your circumstances may not be what you planned, or expected, but if you are a survivor, you never forget that you still own your thoughts—so make them powerful.
4. Challenge Yourself To Be Brutally Honest
When the chips are down, honesty is your best salvation.
Self-awareness, or mindfulness, is the practice of thinking about the way you think. It’s hard to change negative habits and ways of thinking if we aren’t aware of them.
As you become more aware, take negative reactions and feelings as clues that you need to probe deeper into where the resistance is coming from and what is causing it. Train yourself to notice what is going on.
A survivor knows himself/herself well enough that they can discern the best way forward in every situation—even the tough ones.
5. Keep Three Types Of Friends In Your Life
No matter who you are or what you do, you need three types of friends in your life.
1. First: the one you can call when things are going well and you need someone with whom to share the good news, someone who will be genuinely happy for you.
2. Second: the one you can call when things are going miserably and you need a listening ear.
3. Third: the one who holds you accountable. Life is hard, and you need people who will stop you from feeling sorry for yourself so you can reach down and pull yourself back up by the bootstraps.
None of us have a magic ball to predict our future. However, we can become a survivor and be prepared for what we can’t predict
