Resilience or Flexibility
By: Muhammad Mohsin Raza Jutt
Tags: Content, Resilience, Blog, Entrepreneurship, Self Improvement

Resilience…… When we heard the word resilience doesn’t matter when or where its use. Our mind thinks what exactly resilience it? Why it is so important to be resilient? How resilient can be built? When we study resilience furthermore we begin to think if resilience is such a good thing so either it has adverse effects or any dark side? In this article, I’m discussed about it and much more. So the first things first.

What resilience is?

As Robert Jordan wrote in his novel The Fires of Heaven

“The oak fought the wind and was broken, the willow bent when it must and survived.”

Generally, Resilience defined as:

The capacity to recover swiftly from problems and harsh conditions.

But Health Education England states resilience as:

The ability to bounce back — a capacity to absorb negative conditions, integrate them in meaningful ways, and move forward.

According to Dr. Amit Sood, MD and executive director of the Global Centre of Resilience and Well-being said about it:

It's your ability to withstand adversity and bounce back and grow despite life’s downs.

Why resilience is important?

Life is like a trampoline, ups and downs are an essential part of our life. Some patches of life are very harsh and incidents that took place in these patches are hard to forget. These incidents leave unforgettable marks in our lives.

To cope with these incidents resilience helps us. Resilience provides us with the emotional strength to cope with misfortunes, miseries, and hardships. Not everyone is resilient or I can put in this way that the level of resilience is different from each other.

Those who commit suicide have very less resilient because they are unable to face the hardships of life. They felt overwhelmed, lose hope, and used unhealthy coping techniques such as self-medication, seclusion, and avoidance because at that time it seems to be easy to isolate themselves from family, friends, and community. But that leads to mental health problems like depression and anxiety. As a result, they quit. End up taking their own lives.

Types of Resilience

There are mainly four types of resilience:

Emotional Resilience Mental Resilience Physical Resilience Social Resilience

Emotional Resilience

Emotional resilience includes emotional intelligence, emotional awareness, perseverance, optimism, and acceptance. With the help of emotional resilience person always try to find positive things or situations in bad times. What if it's a bad time it’ll pass for sure.

Mental Resilience

Mental resilience or psychological resilience helps a person mentally to cope with hardships and challenges. A mentally strong person always consider every option to face the challenge of life. He develops strategies and alternatives to reach his goals. This helps them to manage their problems positively.

Physical Resilience

Physical resilience is usually considered as the stamina and ability of a body to face physical challenges. It helps our body to recover efficiently and maintain its stamina. Research also shows that physical resilience is one of the main reasons for healthy aging because people know how to cope with physical stressors.

Social Resilience

Social or community resilience has proven to be helpful for communities i.e groups of peoples to cope in case of adverse natural disasters like epidemics or outbreaks, acts of violence, etc. Community resilience is built on trust, diversity, patience, care, and respect.

How to become a resilient person?

As we discussed resilience, its types. Now it's time to talk about how we can become resilient? What are the factors or principles?

American Psychological Association shares 10 ways to build resilience. That is as follows

Make Connections

Good relationships with family and friends are very important. Respond to their problems positively and help them in their hard time. In your hard time don’t isolate yourself from them. Accept help from them. It boosts resilience. Don’t degrade yourself, have self-confidence.

Accept the change

Try to be a neophile. Accept the change don’t resist. When circumstances change some goals have become unattainable. Let them go don’t stick to them. That’ll help you to become more resilient.

Avoid seeing crises as unconquerable problems

You can’t change the fact that we must have to face harsh and unforgettable events but we have control over our thoughts. So we can change how we interpret the situation. We should try to look or consider our future. How bright it looks after this problem.

Move towards your goals

A goal without a plan is just a wish.

We must have some realistic goals. That excites and scares us at an equivalent time. So it develops an urge to achieve them. We start with some small goals. After their accomplishment, we must celebrate them.

Take conclusive actions

Act on any severe situation. Take determining and settling actions rather than over-thinking and detaching completely from the problems. It will help us to be confident.

Self-discovery

We should take steps to improve ourselves. Most of us feel that part of them become more strong and mature after facing the downfall or bad situation. Many peoples who have experience in facing tragedies and hardships have appeared to be better in relationships, are self-confident, high strength sense instead of feeling vulnerable, they feel strong and have high self-esteem.

Nurture a positive view of yourself

To be resilient you must have confidence or courage to face the problems. So developing self-confidence and trusting ourselves, help us to solve the problem.

Maintain a hopeful look

“Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words and never stops at all.” Emily Dickinson

Always be an optimistic person. It helps us to see good in everything and also help to expect that good thing will occur once it all finishes. If it helps try to see or think what you want rather than worrying about your fears but remember that your thought must be realistic.

Keep things in perspective.

When something is not goin’ well it's easy to be distracted by it completely. So in that case we have to stop and think about what is goin’ well. It motivates us to keep working. we should consider every setback as a learning opportunity.

Take care of yourself

To become resilient, self-love is one of the basics. We must take care of ourselves and our feelings. We should take part in activities that provide us happiness.

“It is really wonderful how much resilience there is in human nature. Let any obstructing cause, no matter what, be removed in any way, even by death, and we fly back to first principles of hope and enjoyment.” Bram Stoker, Dracula

The dark side of Resilient

As far as we learned from this article is that resilience is very important and good for our lives. Then a question arises that is there any bad effect of resilience. If yes, then what is it, and when it happens. We had been hearing since our childhood

Excess of everything is bad.

Here’s the same case in resilience. Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant state in their book that resilience is kind of a muscle that contracts during good times and expands during bad times. When we work hard physically our muscles become strong same is resilient. A person becomes more resilient as he faces more difficulties.

Nevertheless, too much resilience is dangerous life excessive exercise is dangerous for muscles. No doubt we consider that person more ambitious who have high goals, but it’ll be more effective when a person has achievable goals. On the other hand, Extreme flexibility or resilience can force people to be overly diligent on insufficient goals. Too much resilient can result in “false hope syndrome”.

False Hope Syndrome indicates unrealistic expectations about the potential speed, quantity, ease, poor coping skills, and the result of self-transformation efforts.

Research shows that people spend most of their precious time in pursuit of unrealistic goals. Even from their past, it becomes clear that this goal is unattainable. Their over-confidence and unsupported degree of optimism can lead people to waste their time on useless tasks. At the same time, too much resilience could make people unduly tolerant of misfortune and suffering. Too much resilience can also prove dangerous in leadership effectiveness and organizational effectiveness. Too much resilient man become fearless and unemotional.