Life isn’t easy. You will constantly have to face challenges and obstacles just to survive, and even more so if you want to thrive. With all the difficulties that life presents us with, it can be burdensome to overcome them and achieve your goals.
There are ways to make facing challenges easier, and one of the ways is by developing your resilience. Resilience is your ability to recover from a failure and give it another try. Everybody makes mistakes and it’s impossible to succeed in life without failing a few times first.
It’s not the failures that you should focus on though, rather it’s being able to get back up time and again after being knocked down. While you may be discouraged after failing, you have to be resilient. If you stay knocked down, then you can never move forward.
If you want to be resilient to face difficult situations, then read on to find out how resilience can combat any difficulties you might encounter.
1. Have Confidence
If you tell yourself that you aren’t able to do something, then you will convince yourself that you’re right. Being confident is a part of resilience that gives you the strength to try again after a failure. It isn’t always easy to be confident; failures are discouraging and they may dissuade you from ever attempting in the first place.
With confidence, you can create a mindset that conjures motivation and aptitude. Confidence also gives you the ability to undertake a task that may seem too difficult to complete. If you’re confident enough, then you won’t only overcome challenges within your reach, but you’ll also surprise yourself by doing things you didn’t know that you could.
Being confident while facing adversity can be arduous, so here are some tips to help you stay confident:
● Your only opponent is yourself. As you work alongside others, some of those around you will succeed while you seem to be stuck in one place. While some may hold contempt for themselves or the successful others, you cannot compare your successes to the ones of those around you.
Each time you complete a task, you don’t have to be better than somebody else to be successful. As long as you’re trying to be better than your past self, then you will eventually succeed. Your enemy isn’t the strengths of others, it’s the weakness within you.
Strive for improvement within yourself. Some people are better at some things than others, but that’s the way it’s always going to be. You have to accept that others will succeed where you have failed, but that is not a determinant of your value.
● Be aware of what you have the power to control. Not everything is within your power, most of what you can control stems from the self. Often, outside factors may determine whether or not you’ll succeed. You cannot always control these factors, so it’s a futile attempt to even try.
Instead, focus on what it is you can improve on yourself. By ignoring other factors, you can concentrate on making the improvements necessary to overcome these outside factors that hold you back.
● Welcome feedback. Part of confidence is being able to accept that you are wrong. This is in no way indicative of your worth. You will be wrong sometimes, that’s just how it is. But, you have to confidently move forward anyways.
Accepting feedback is one of the best ways to show that you are confident in yourself. You may have made a mistake, but you can use the wisdom of others to adjust your approach and try again with more knowledge.
If you aren’t confident, then why would you heed the advice of others anyway? You don’t think you can do it so what’s the point of trying something new? Confidence allows you to adjust your sails without feeling that you’re inept.
2. Embrace Failure
It’s going to happen eventually. Failure is an inevitable part of success. If you can accept that you’re going to fail sometimes then you’ll be better equipped at handling it, and how you handle your failures influences your likelihood of finding success.
Failure is an opportunity to learn. If you never see what you did wrong, how can you ever correct it and make it right? To be resilient, you must use failure to your advantage so that you’ll be better equipped for your next attempt. Here are some ways you can harness your failures and use them to your power:
● Acceptance. The first step in being able to handle your failures is through acceptance. You have to know that you’re going to fail sometimes, and you have to be okay with that.
By not accepting your failures, you’re relegating yourself to a lower value. Just because you have failed does not mean you are a failure. Every successful person has faced their fair share of failures. The only difference is, they didn’t let that stop them.
● Learn from your mistakes. When you fail, you learn how not to do something. This is good, as it means you can learn what went wrong and you can correct your mistakes. Mistakes are the best teachers out there.
It can be a slow process, but trial-and-error helps you whittle down your miscalculations. It’s an operation that leads you to the path of success. If you attempt something over and over with the same methods, then you’re always going to get the same results.
Instead, adjust your attempts by analyzing your failures carefully. What exactly went wrong? What went right? By answering these questions, you will be less likely to fail on the next attempt.
● Control your fear. Fear is natural. In fact, it’s beneficial. Fear is an evolutionary trait that prevents you from putting yourself in potentially harmful situations.
On the other hand, fear is malicious. It paralyzes you from engaging in challenges. It will condition you into avoiding challenges that need to be faced.
3. Stay Positive
Positivity is a trait that can be learned. And it’s an important trait at that, as it manifests itself through your thoughts. Staying positive when it’s hard to give you the mental endurance necessary to maintain focus in strenuous situations.
Without positivity, your thoughts will start to turn negative. You’ll tell yourself that you can’t overcome a challenge, and you will fail before you even start. You must cultivate a mindset of positivity if you want to fail over and over without getting down on yourself.
These are some ways you can stay positive when you have to face a challenge:
● Don’t place blame. Blame is a nasty thing that people use to denote fault. However, it usually isn’t necessary for progress and can often obscure what’s actually important. It can also make you feel inadequate, even further discouraging you from attempting to reach lofty goals.
You should take responsibility for your actions and errors, but putting it in a blaming way adds negativity that you don’t need. Accept what went wrong and move on.
● Don’t dwell on the past. Whenever you make errors, it’s easy to replay what went wrong over and over again in your head ad nauseam. But whenever you dwell on the past, you distract yourself from thinking about the future.
Stay focused on what you’re going to do next time around and you’ll spare yourself from the negative thoughts that accompany lingering over your mistakes. Errors occur, and it is what it is. Move on and start thinking about what you can do right.
● Use others for support. It’s important to surround yourself with people who will offer you positivity. Whenever you’re feeling down about a failure, don’t be afraid to reach out and talk to somebody about it. They may offer you a new perspective that changes the way you view your mistakes.
4. Focus on Growth
gbbbEach failure is an opportunity for growth. It may even be one of the only ways you can grow. By learning from your mistakes, you become more adept at handling different situations. Growth is a gradual process, but by staying focused on growing you can overcome obstacles that were once insuperable.
Resilience will inevitably lead to growth. By failing the right way, you grow a little more each time and become stronger. Growth will only come with mindfulness, however. So, use these tips to make sure your failures lead to growth:
● Realize that you have room to grow. If you think you’re already at your destination, then you won’t think that you have to travel to get there. You must face your shortcomings and realize that there is always room for improvement. The greatest master is forever a student.
Coming to terms with your imperfections can also show you which skillsets or areas that you need to improve on. With this, you can focus on your weaknesses and start to turn them into strengths.
● View obstacles as teachers. All the challenges you face are only challenges because they present some sort of obstacle that you can’t overcome. Study your obstacles wisely, and use different perspectives to determine what the best approach may be. If something doesn’t turn out right, then you are one step closer to figuring out the correct solution.
Eventually, you will start to welcome the obstacles you face because they will bring you knowledge. Learn from everything that you can, and your obstacles will turn into pillars for success.
● Choose your response. The only person who decides how you will react to any given situation is yourself. After experiencing a failure, you can decide whether you’re going to give up or whether you’ll try again. This decision impacts how much you’ll grow after each failure.
If you decide that you’re going to call it a day after a failure, then you have truly been defeated. Resilience is a response that gives you the ability to bounce back after a defeat, and your mindfulness of this decision determines whether or not you will overcome adversity.
5. Stay Motivated
Motivation is the fire beneath your feet that keeps you going moving even when you want to stay in one place. Without it, you won’t feel the necessary urge to succeed and you’ll remain discouraged from even attempting in the first place.
Resilience requires motivation. If resilience is the ability to try again after experiencing failure, then motivation is the pressure that pushes us to give it a second attempt. It can be difficult to stay motivated, but with these tips, you can find the motivation you need to succeed.
● Find a purpose. Purpose is the reason we get out of bed in the mornings. Your purpose doesn’t have to be overly-ambitious, it can be something as simple as wanting to complete the chore you’ve been putting off for the last few weeks. Purposes can be big or small depending on what it is you want to accomplish.
Finding a purpose in a challenge will give you the motivation you want to overcome it. If you have no reason to want to do something, why would you do it anyway, especially if it’s difficult?
Purpose gives meaning to the things you do. Find a purpose, and you will gain meaning, and that will give you a sense of fulfillment.
● Stay focused on your goal. When you undertake a task that can take weeks, or even months, to finish, it’s easy to lose sight of what your goal is. It’s vital to remind yourself that you have a goal to accomplish. Set your sights on your objective so that you don’t forget why what you’re doing is important.
Your goals should be ambitious, yet attainable. If you need to, break your main goal down into smaller, more easily accomplishable steps. This can help you stay motivated when completing lengthy tasks.
Conclusion
There’s always going to be another hurdle ahead of you, so you should be prepared to face it. Even if you fail, resilience will give you the ability to try and try again until you get it right. Without resilience, you may be stuck behind the same obstacle forever. Develop a strong sense of resilience, and you will eventually overcome any challenge life throws at you.
