How to build your resilience

When life is challenging, resilience becomes even more important to our wellbeing as it can help us stay safe, productive and effective. Psychologists define resilience as the process of adapting well in the face of adversity or significant sources of stress, such as relationship problems, serious health problems or workplace stressors. In a nutshell, resilience helps us to bounce back from these difficult experiences and can also empower us to grow – and even improve – our lives along the way.

Because of its profound effect on our lives, people have created many myths about resilience. For example, that resilient people don’t experience emotional pain and stress; that resilient people are tough and don’t need help from others; and that you are either born resilient or you are not. In fact, being resilient doesn’t mean you won’t experience difficulty or distress, but resilient people choose to respond to challenges positively, and to find meaning and purpose in their lives. They are also resourceful – family and friends are their most critical resources. More importantly, based on the past 40 years of scientific research, resilience is not a trait but a skill that can be learned and developed over time.

Yet like building a muscle, increasing your resilience takes time and intentionality. Focusing on three core components – building mental toughness, building on your strengths and building strong relationships – as proposed by Martin Seligman, Zellerbach family professor of psychology and director at the Positive Psychology Center (and known as the father of positive psychology), can empower you to withstand and learn from traumatic experiences.

Indeed, these three components have demonstrated effectiveness in enhancing people’s resilience levels, as borne out in more than 25 years of research, development and large-scale implementation in various organisational settings. To take each of these three critical components in turn:

1 Building mental toughness

At its core, mental toughness is the ability to stick to something even when the going gets tough. People with high levels of mental toughness can push beyond obstacles and forge a path towards success, while those with lower levels of mental toughness may abandon their dreams. To enhance your mental toughness, you need to develop a positive mindset, connect with your purpose and minimise catastrophic thinking.

Develop a positive mindset:

When you have a positive mindset, you are more able to generate different pathways to achieve the goal during setbacks. It starts with understanding Albert Ellis’s ABCD model: C (emotional consequences) does not directly lead on from A (adversity), but from B (one’s beliefs about adversity). You work through a series of As (for example, falling behind the project schedule) and learn to separate Bs – heat-of-the-moment thoughts about the situation (‘I’m a loser’) – from Cs, the emotions generated by these thoughts (such as feeling upset for the rest of the day and failing to concentrate at your work). Then you learn D – how to effectively dispel unrealistic beliefs about adversity. For example, developing a habit of interpreting setbacks as temporary, local and changeable (‘It will be over soon; it’s just this one situation, and I can do something to work around it’).

Connect with your purpose:

One of the most important factors to build mental toughness and keep a focused mind is having a strong ‘why’ for things you are working on. Think about the last time you were working on a goal and things weren’t going as well as expected. Maybe you immediately wanted to give it up. Perhaps you thought you didn’t have enough willpower or discipline to achieve it. The truth is, you just didn’t have a strong enough ‘why’. Management guru Simon Sinek (who gave a famous TED Talk called ‘How Great Leaders Inspire Action’) has been spreading his message ‘Start with Why’ around the globe. In short, he says that: “Your ‘why’ is the purpose, cause or belief that inspires you.” More importantly, without connecting to your ‘why’, you can’t intrinsically motivate yourself to achieve your most challenging goals.

Minimise catastrophic thinking:

To strengthen mental toughness, we need to learn how to minimise catastrophic thinking. One of the ways to do this is by considering ‘worst case’, ‘best case’ and ‘most likely’ outcomes. For instance, a project manager receives a negative performance evaluation from their client. They immediately come up with a catastrophic thought: ‘I won’t be recommended for promotion, and I don’t have the capability to stay in the project profession.’ Indeed that could be the worst case. Now let’s think about the best case: ‘The negative report was a mistake.’ And what’s the most likely case? ‘I’m frustrated and my line manager will be disappointed. Yet I’ll work out a performance improvement plan and follow it to improve the situation.’

By thinking about and working through different cases, you are more able to evaluate the situation accurately and take necessary actions to turn it around without getting into the hopeless condition set by catastrophic thinking.

2 Building on your strengths

Your unique strengths are your special tools that allow you to build a happy and fulfilling life. Understanding what tools you possess can give you the confidence to face any challenge that comes your way. Although we can’t predict the future, we can have confidence in our ability to deal with whatever happens. Seligman and Christopher Peterson’s ‘Values in Action Character Strengths Survey’ (a free online survey that produces a ranked list of your top 24 character strengths, www.viacharacter.org) is a good starting point to understand yourself. Everyone possesses all 24 character strengths that make up what’s best about our personality in differing degrees. Therefore each person has a truly unique character profile. Research shows that people who use their strengths a lot are 18 times more likely to be flourishing and less likely to get depression during difficult times than those who do not use their strengths.

3 Building strong relationships

A strong network of supportive friends, family and colleagues that you can talk to and confide in can help you through any tough times. Don’t be afraid to ask for help when you need it – and offer a helping hand when you see others struggling. In particular, focusing on positive communication is essential to building strong relationships. Shelly Gable, a psychology professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has shown that when an individual responds actively and constructively (as opposed to passively and destructively) to someone who is sharing a positive experience, love and friendship improves. (See her ‘Four Ways to Respond’ at www.mindtools.com/pages/article/gables-responses-to-good-news.htm)

As positive interactions accumulate, they can have effects that go far beyond the initial conversation because feeling positive can boost happiness and confidence and reduce stress. Another tip for having positive communication is to give effective praise. The Stanford psychology professor Carol Dweck found that when people mention specifics and efforts (as opposed to saying something general like ‘Good job!’), it promotes a growth mindset – a belief that most abilities can be developed through hard work – to their counterparts. This belief creates a love of learning and improves one’s resilience level.

It takes time and energy to build resilience but it is a worthwhile investment to improve the quality of your life. Focus on building the above three core components and try not to be disheartened. If you still struggle to cope in certain situations: perseverance is key!

Dr Clara Man Cheung has nearly 20 years of work experience in project management. She is a lecturer in project management at the University of Manchester and a project management professional. In 2019, her APM funded research paper The wellbeing of project professionals was published, which benchmarked the wellbeing levels of project professionals and developed corresponding interventions to enhance wellbeing (apm.org.uk/about-us/research/research-fund/2019-research-fund-studies-wellbeing)