While baking your resilience pie, you’ve observed yourself and used what you’ve noticed to recognize your own patterns. You see yourself clearly. Now how do you grow from where towards where you want to be?
How can you increase your natural resilience? Celebrate what’s going right so that you can help it to be even better.
In Step 2 of our Easy-As-Pie Resilience Recipe blog series, you focused on appreciating the patterns of thinking, feeling, and sensing that already help you to be resilient. In Step 3, you will heighten your attention on what’s working. Just as a pie-baker embraces the qualities that only happen with homemade goods, so you can take pride in your unique combination of resilient factors. This is because working on areas of strength is usually more energizing, motivating, and sustainable than targeting weaknesses. Where the mind goes, effort flows. Therefore, training your mind on resilience will help you strive to become even more resilient!
Resilience Pie Recipe, Step 3: Celebrate your existing resilience factors (embrace homemade).
You might be asking yourself, Won’t patting myself on the back make me complacent? It’s not likely, if you appreciate your abilities and achievements through the lens of, This proves how capable I am, and I have so much more room to grow! Acknowledging and celebrating where you are now will help you strive for further progress.
Here’s how to celebrate what already makes you resilient/embrace homemade:
- Notice your resilience factors. Write down all of the skills, strengths, coping strategies, internal factors, and external factors help you bounce back from adversity and reach out for opportunities. Factors that aid resilience include but aren’t limited to: close relationships (especially with caring adults), optimism, humor, problem-solving ability, having personal qualities that you like about yourself, involvement in caring communities, and being part of something you consider meaningful.
- See your strengths. Rank the top 3-5 factors that you think make you most resilient, with #1 being your greatest resilience strength.
- Build on your best! For each of your top resilience factors, brainstorm how you’d like to become even more resilient in that area. Good at using your sense of humor to put things in perspective? How do you want to use your funny bone to be even more resilient? If you’re an ace problem-solver, how do you want to leverage that to increase your resilience?
- Pick one to focus on. Pick one of the ideas above to focus on growing your resilience. I recommend choosing the one you’re most excited to try (that’s the one you’re most likely to actually do!). Observe how it goes. If the strategy doesn’t work to your satisfaction, you can always tweak it or try one of the other ones you brainstormed.
By seeing and applauding what already makes you resilient– your homemade brilliance – you can build upon your resilience. Stay tuned for the next pie-baking step to further enhance your resilience!
