How resilient are you? Resilience is defined as the ability to return to your original form after being bent, stretched or compressed. It’s the ability to readily recover from illness or adversity. And success depends on your skill at cultivating resilience!
Life’s setbacks and disasters often arrive without prior warning. And while we may not have a choice as to what happens in our lives, we do have a choice in how we respond.
A healthy response requires cultivating inner resilience to recover from setbacks, broken hearts and dreams, financial crisis, loss of a loved one, or health setbacks.
The good news is that you and I can succeed at cultivating resilience. We can exercise it like a muscle, and in the process we can turn the challenging circumstances of our lives into opportunities that deepen our faith and strengthen our very fiber.
Cultivating resilience requires the ability to ask tough questions of yourself and be honest with your answers. If you had something to do with your loss or setback, it is important to accept responsibility for your share of it.
It also requires a sense of responsibility: the understanding that we are all connected and that your actions – for better or for worse – affect others. While you may not have control over the actions of others, accepting full responsibility for your own actions sets you free to respond in a manner that contributes to the greater good.
Cultivating resilience calls for humor to help reframe daunting obstacles and setbacks. When all else fails, learn to laugh at yourself and at the absurdity of your situation. When doctors handed journalist Norman Cousins a grave medical prognosis, he resolved to take charge of the things he could do: he checked himself out of the hospital, embarked on his own healing regimen, watched comedies… and literally laughed himself back to health!
Above all, cultivating resilience calls for faith: faith in your guidance, purpose and potential; faith to commit to life daily; and faith to get back up when circumstances knock you down. Once, when life had knocked me completely off my feet, a friend sent me a card that simply read,
”Fall down
seven times,
stand up eight.”
This Buddhist saying reaffirmed my faith and gave me the courage to keep going.
Every time you get up after a setback, every time you overcome a challenge in life, you develop more resilience.
May you grow, prosper and succeed despite your current challenges. May you grow stronger and more abundant despite the setbacks you’ve suffered in life, and may you cultivate resilience to see you through every challenge!
©Copyright Ada Porat. For more information, visit adaporat.com. This article may be freely distributed in whole or in part, provided there is no charge for it and this notice is attached.