7 Key Resilience Skills to Be Stronger and Go Further
When it comes to resilience, who really wants to just endure hardship? Wouldn't it be far more interesting to do more than bounce back? What if every time we took a hit, we actually thrived more? Now that is my kind of resilience!
We dug deep into what resilience is and how to build resilience in previous posts. Here, let's look at how we get even stronger and go further.
Building a Resilience Baseline
When it comes to resilience, there are two areas we need to pay attention to—building resilience before the s#*! hits the fan and pulling out the big guns when in the middle of the mess. It never hurts to practice the precise skills that help us get through whatever may happen, and to practice them all the time, so they are strong when you need them. Actually, you want them to be more than strong. You want them to be instinctual. Here's a short list of skills to practice all the time, and particularly when the going is good:
Focus on what you can control. Let go of what you can't control.
Put some distance between yourself and your feelings. Self-awareness and mindfulness help with this.
Give yourself the space, self-compassion, and grace you need to feel whatever you feel.
Get curious and reframe: What is the gift here?
Nourish community and social support, and learn to count on them.
Believe in your competence, your strengths and ability to overcome. Remember all the times you have. If you are here now reading this, you definitely have overcome some things in your life.
Act for something beyond yourself.
Going Beyond Resilience
For the longest time, I was content to be resilient. Then, I discovered the notion of antifragility from Brian Johnson, creator of Heroic, a training platform for heroes. He discusses Alex Lickerman's book The Undefeated Mind, which talks about how "all of us have the capacity to make use of any circumstance, no matter how awful, to create value. This ability to ‘change poison into medicine’ . . . ."
Through Heroic, I also learned about Nassim Taleb's book Antifragile. He describes the difference between being fragile (you break when you take a hit), being resilient (you bounce back until you finally break), and antifragile (you get stronger). He reminds us that “A wind extinguishes a candle but fuels a fire.” Fires are antifragile.
As Brian Johnson writes, "Believing in your ability to transform poison into medicine when you don’t know how, and often won’t except in retrospect, is difficult, I admit. But that’s the confidence you have to find. That’s the confidence that represents your greatest defense against discouragement.” The real transformation—becoming antifragile—comes in believing that so strongly you run toward challenges as opportunities to get stronger. You apply what Phil Stutz's tool called Reversal of Desire: rather than ignoring or running from the pain, you face the discomfort, you move toward it, knowing that infinite possibilities and freedom lie beyond it. This shift is a powerful one.
“My barn having burned down, I can now see the moon.”