What is Resilience?

Resilience doesn’t mean being immune to stress or sadness, rather it is about coping and ‘bouncing back’ from challenges and setbacks. When you are resilient, you are able to grow and develop, whatever problems you encounter.

Resilience gives you the capacity to face, overcome, and even be strengthened by difficult experiences.

Resilience is not a fixed trait within a person, it is a combination of attitudes, skills and behaviours that can be learned and developed. This means everyone can develop their resilience and, by extension, increase their sense of well-being and satisfaction with life.

Five Domains of Resilience

1. Purpose: Create a sense of purpose and develop your passion for living.
2. Self: Appreciate your strengths and build positive self-esteem.
3. Connections: Create great relationships and make connections in your community.
4. Body: Prioritise your physical well-being and build a healthy lifestyle.
5. Mind: Cultivate a positive mind and learn how to enjoy life.

Set Goals

Resilient people are proactive. They take action to solve problems and work towards things that are important to them. Having clear goals for what you want to learn, do or achieve is the key to taking effective action.

Setting goals can increase your resilience and make you feel more in control of your life, by helping you to:

• Track your progress: Goals allow you to see how far you have come, which gives you momentum to keep going.
• Direct your focus: Goals can help you to identify what is really important to you and guide your action towards these things.
• Increase self-confidence: The more progress you make towards your goals the more you see yourself as someone who can do it.
• Rethink set-backs: Obstacles and set-backs can be beneficial when you are working towards goals, they allow you to learn what works for you.
• Improve time-management: Goals help you to manage your time effectively and avoid procrastination.

Mindfulness

Leading a resilient life goes hand in hand with the practice of mindfulness. Research has shown that regularly practicing mindfulness meditation can actually rewire your brain, increasing your mental flexibility and helping you to respond more adaptively to stressful situations.

We have partnered with Silvercloud to offer you free access to a Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) self-help programme, designed by clinical experts using proven methods for helping people, all with the aim of empowering you to think and feel better.

This programme is based on the principles of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT).

CBT consists of two key steps to feeling well:

1. Understanding what’s going on inside you
2. Making changes to feel better

The key idea behind CBT is that your emotions, thoughts, behaviours and physical sensations are connected, and affect each other.

Simply choose your programme on SilverCloud. When prompted to sign up, you will need an access code to enable you to create your account and use this resource. The access code is kwnelselfhelp