Making the choice to take charge of your physical and mental health and lifestyle is a pursuit worth fighting for, but making and maintaining positive changes takes resilience.
For some of us, taking the first step to a new way of life is the scariest. Others find that staying consistent and maintaining the desired outcome is harder.
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Resilience is a skill
Some of us are born with innate resilience, but it is also a trait you can build and strengthen. Without question, resilience is a skill set that you can learn and apply in your life.
But your ability to build resilience is largely determined by your outlook and responses to hardship and challenges.
Given that we all struggle with different types of stressors and challenges, resilience will look different for everyone.
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Mind, body, spirit
There are four main forms of resilience that you can build:
- Mental
- Emotional
- Physical
- Spiritual
Each one comes with their own learning process and various skills. Building resilience is learned one challenge at a time, which is why it’s a learned skill.
Not every challenge is the same, but we can repeat the way we handle hardship by learning a resilience process and then applying the skills.
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3 ways to strengthen your resilience
If you’re just stepping into your resilience process or currently find yourself in the middle of a challenge that requires mental, physical, emotional or spiritual fortitude, here are three ways to develop or strengthen your resilience:
1. How you think about yourself changes the way you feel about yourself
Start nurturing a positive self-image by identifying one thing you love about yourself. This can be anything physical, mental, spiritual, or emotional.
You are the only one who truly knows what you’re thinking and how you’re feeling but that means you have the choice to uplift yourself daily!
2. Look for opportunities for self-discovery
Even if life looks the same week after week, you need to find lesson to learn from this specific period or season in your life.
Take some time during the day to journal what you feel you’re being taught in this season of life, whether it is an effortless or challenging phase. Use your notes section of your phone or in a physical journal and write down what are you choosing to learn.
3. Avoid seeing crises as insurmountable problems
Even if it feels like what you are going through isn’t getting easier, remind yourself that you’ve made it through every challenge thus far in life. You can and will get through the current one.
Avoid all-or-nothing thinking, as this mindset often causes us to feel incapable. Build your mental resilience to connect the dots so that you see challenges as an obstacle with a solution that you can figure out along your path to accomplishing your goal.
Positive changes hardly ever come easy but building resilience will help you accomplish, maintain or move through any challenge towards your goal. And developing this ability is a skill set that you will use for a lifetime! It is the best way to keep fighting for you.
By Camee Adams
About the author: Camee Adams is a professional MMA fighter, keynote speaker, certified personal trainer and yoga instructor. She has two daughters and is also certified in community suicide awareness and alertness. On her road to becoming a professional athlete, she faced numerous hardships and challenges. Her mission is inspiring, teaching and helping people through their resilience process to be TMRESILNT. Follow @cameeadams on IG or visit cameeadams.com.
Author: Pedro van Gaalen
When he’s not writing about sport or health and fitness, Pedro is probably out training for his next marathon or ultra-marathon. He’s worked as a fitness professional and as a marketing and comms expert. He now combines his passions in his role as managing editor at Fitness magazine.
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