Emotional Resilience — The Be Well Collective

Resilience is generally understood to mean a person’s ability to cope with hard times, or the knock backs of life. It is a skill we hear a lot about, but often we don’t understand how it can be achieved.

By Lucy Beresford

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The word often calls to mind soldiers undergoing training for battle, enduring night marches with the weight of a human being on their back. Realistically, when will a soldier need to carry another human being on their back? They won’t – but they practice to the extreme, so that very little can phase them in the heat of battle.

The same principle applies to building emotional resilience. You may never need to cope with an extreme situation, but it’s good to know you can cope – not least as it gives you the confidence to aim high in life. Rather like physical fitness, emotional resilience is not about a final test. It is about being prepared long before you need to put it to the test.

I was thinking about this when I set myself a challenge this year. I had always had a mental block about driving on the ‘other’ side of the road. So this summer I arranged a trip to include hiring a car and driving to a place I had never been to before in Italy. With the aid of google maps and chats with friends, I accomplished the booking, hiring, and driving of a hire car, the navigation, and the listening to the SatNav in Italian. And then spend many happy evenings pootling around Italian lanes, pinching myself at my new skill.

I may never need to use that skill again, although it ended being so much fun, why wouldn’t I do it every year?! But beyond the actual skill itself I acquired this incredible sense of accomplishment, in having faced a very real fear and worked through it.

The jury is still out about whether we are born with emotional resilience or not. You can see in small children that some are made more upset or less by changes or surprises. But for sure we can strengthen that skill. So even if you are sensitive to life’s issues and challenges, you can polish your resilience through a number of routes.

Mindset is very important. This is not just about having the ability to laugh at yourself or at the world, although that can be an advantage. People speak of having a ‘glass half full’ attitude to life, or being optimistic in outlook. And also developing a sense of perspective helps with working out where you are now in relation to what has happened or where you want to get to.

But there are also some really useful pillars to build on, which can support your emotional resilience growth. Your tribe is important, as is your thought process. And also how you take care of yourself matters.

I have a 10-point plan for enhancing resilience, which I am so excited to share with you at the Be Well Collective event. Whatever stage you are in life, because stress or change will always happen, there are plenty of opportunities to practice resilience – so you can see the payoff from all your commitment throughout your life.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Lucy Beresford is an award-winning psychotherapist, broadcaster and writer. Best known for hosting a weekly Sex & Relationships phone-in show on LBC Radio, where she was dubbed ‘the naughty Mary Poppins’, Lucy hosts On The Couch podcast for Reaction magazine, reviews the papers every fortnight for The Jeremy Vine Show and Times Radio, and her TEDx talk “Infidelity: to stay or to go?” has been viewed on You Tube over 2.8 million times. She works with adults clinically in central London, and has also worked as a psychotherapist in New Delhi.

Lucy is the founder of The Kindness Club, and its award-winning Refuge for Books scheme, which creates libraries in shelters run by the UK domestic violence charity Refuge. She is also the author of the self-help book HAPPY RELATIONSHIPS: at home, work, and play, and 3 novels SOMETHING I’M NOT, HUNGRY FOR LOVE, and INVISIBLE THREADS which is set in New Delhi.

Twitter: @lucyberesford

Instagram: @thelucyberesford1

Website: https://www.lucyberesford.com