Resilience

Resilience isn’t about pushing through, taking control or carrying on regardless of how you feel; it's about developing strategies that help you manage when facing situations you find stressful.

But we all respond to stressful situations differently. You may be someone who can carry on without a second thought, or perhaps you're someone who finds quite minor difficulties overwhelming. Having an ability to respond well to, and learn from, stressful situations is what we think of as resilience

So, a good way to think of resilience is; your ability to cope with, or recover from, stressful and even traumatic experiences.

Resilience isn’t something you’re born with, it develops and changes over time in response to your experiences, your environment and the social interactions you have.

Throughout your life you’ll have experienced things that you felt you couldn’t control and sometimes these situations will have made you uncomfortable. Things like; a tough day at school, moving away from your friends, a relationship breakdown, or starting a new job.

These personal experiences and how you respond to them each contribute to your resilience.  For example you may use your sense of humour to help you get by, or you may have strategies that help you manage your emotions, or perhaps you simply trust in your ability to face difficult situations. All these things are part of your personal resilience toolkit that you can draw on when you need to.