Simple Daily Practices to Build Your Resilience

Intro

Over the past nine episodes, we explored the multifaceted nature of self-friendship—from understanding and nurturing our desires to practicing emotional self-care. As you understand your deepest desires and take deliberate action in your life, you’ll find success and you’ll also face failure. This week, we’ll explore how a strong relationship with yourself helps you build resilience, the ability to recover and to live through the challenges that you encounter.

What is Resilience

Psychologists define resilience as the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats or significant sources of stress — such as family and relationship problems, serious health problems, or workplace and financial stressors.

Resilience is especially important when you experience uncertainty, fear, and discomfort from your thoughts about a circumstance in your life. You develop resilience through difficulty. That’s really the only way. Resilience is what helps you experience personal growth during times of stress and difficult change.

There are 4 types of resilience: Physical, mental, emotional, and social

The Four Types of Resilience

Emotional resilience – We build emotional resilience through positive emotions and by being curious and attentive. When you’re curious, you’re not overwhelmed.

You Are Resilient

Self-acceptance and self-love are important here. Self-acceptance means seeing yourself fully, and recognizing your strengths and your challenges. It means being grounded in who you are right now, not some historical idea of who you were or a mythical idea of who you should be. You need to see yourself to truly love yourself. And loving yourself is an amplifier for resilience because it gives you a strength boost to face challenges head-on, knowing you are worthy of overcoming them.

The practices we’ve been working on throughout this series have so many benefits. Without being aware of it, you’ve already been building your resilience at the same time. Isn’t that amazing?

• Mindfulness and Emotional Awareness: Through practices like mindfulness and RAIN, you’ve learned to recognize and process your emotions. Emotional agility is a key aspect of resilience. You have been learning how not to be overwhelmed by emotions, which allows you to see challenges clearly so that you can try out different responses and find solutions.
• Inner Dialogue: The conversations you have with yourself shape your reality. I still so clearly remember the first time I heard that, that your thoughts are the foundational building blocks of your life. By noticing your inner dialogue and deliberately cultivating it, you’ve learned to challenge the naysayer and reinforce your belief in your abilities. This positive self-talk is crucial when facing setbacks, as it keeps hope and determination alive.
• Self-Care and CNS Support: Taking care of your physical and emotional well-being through self-care practices and supporting your central nervous system has taught you the importance of recovery. Recovery is vital in resilience, ensuring you have the energy and health to tackle challenges.
• Understanding and Honoring Desires: Knowing what you truly want out of life gives you direction and motivation. This clarity acts as a compass during tough times, helping you to stay focused on your long-term goals despite short-term obstacles.

Practical Strategies for Enhancing Resilience

Emotional Resilience

Finding ways to intentionally experience positive emotions, including curiosity, builds your emotional resilience. I have 5 very practical suggestions that you can do right now:

• Tell a joke
• Read a poem
• Watch animal videos
• Look outside the window
• Sing at the top of your lungs

Social resilience

There are two main ways to build social resilience: connecting with others, and accepting support. For connecting with others, touch and gratitude are crucial. A 6-second handshake or hug lets you activate all sorts of feel-good neurotransmitters, including oxytocin, which helps you build resilience. An easier entry is to send someone a note expressing gratitude. The next level is to call them or tell them face to face. This act of gratitude for someone else helps you see how you are connected and supported by other people.

Let’s give it a try right now. Pause this episode and send a friend a message of thanks. Be specific about what you’re thinking them for, and feel the gratitude in your body.

Mental Resilience

If you’ve been accepting the invitations in episodes of Changes Big and Small, you’re really good at mental resilience. The main ways that we build mental resilience are by learning something new, taking on new challenges, planning for the future, and finding opportunities to be positive.

I find the activities for this one to be the most playful, personally. Here are 5 ideas:

• Snap 50 times
• Count backwards from 100 by 7 or 9, etc.
• Solve a riddle – https://brightside.me/wonder-quizzes/10-tricky-riddles-that-can-leave-anyone-confused-585010
• Use your non-dominant hand to complete a task
• Say no when you need to, and treat it as a full sentence

Physical Resilience
Physical resilience happens by moving your body in different ways for endurance, flexibility, balance, and strength. And it also happens through mindfulness and meditation. Not only does it improve your heart and lungs, but also rewires your brain!

Integrating Resilience Practices into Daily Life

So now think about the four types of resilience. Is there a particular one that you want to make sure you spend more time on today, or this week? For example, do you want to add a morning walk to your routine, paying attention to what’s new in the neighborhood for both physical and mental resilience? Or perhaps, you’ll extend all hugs to 6 seconds for social resilience.

As you think about the suggestions I shared above, you can do many of them in seconds or minutes. Even a 3-minute movement break (I like to jump rope in the hallway of my flat) contributes towards physical resilience, for example. Or maybe, when you’re speaking with your partner this evening, you’ll enter the conversation with a mindset of more curiosity.

Remember, the goal isn’t to overhaul your life overnight but to introduce small, manageable changes. Choose one or two practices to start with, and gradually build from there. The key is consistency and intentionality.

As you consider which resilience practices to include in your life, I encourage you to listen to your body and mind—what do they need most right now? Tap into your gut, your heart. Do you most need the calm brought by physical movement, the joy of connection, the stimulation of a new challenge, or the peace of emotional processing?

Whatever you choose, know that each step you take is a step towards a more resilient, fulfilled life. I’d love to hear what practices you’ve found most beneficial and how they’ve affected your life. So be sure to message me contact@changesbigandsmall.com or send me a message on Instagram.

Reflecting on Your Journey of Resilience

I’ve just gone through this whole episode explaining resilience to you and giving you lots of ideas, but I want to recognize that you’ve already built a lot of resilience.

So before we end this episode, I invite you to pause and reflect on your own experience with resilience. How resilient are you right now? And I want to also notice that many things can affect your resilience in a specific moment. For example, we know that people may be more susceptible to emotional overwhelm with little sleep.

I’ve prepared a quiz for you. Go to changesbigandsmall.com/quiz to get it.

Resilience is created from the choices you make daily, the small acts of self-love, and the commitment to your well-being. It’s a testament to your strength and your capacity to grow, particularly in the face of adversity.

Invitation for the Week Ahead

Now it’s your turn. I invite you to think about which areas of resilience you want to focus on this coming week. Whether it’s extending kindness to yourself through self-acceptance, embracing curiosity to foster emotional resilience, or experiencing gratitude for social resilience. This week, practice and notice how it affects you. Remember to tune in to not just your thoughts, but how you actually feel.

Quiz

I’ve prepared a quiz for you to test your self-resilience. Go to changesbigandsmall.com/quiz and sign up to receive a copy of the quiz by email.

You can connect with Damianne on the Changes BIG and small website, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube. You’re also invited to join the Changes BIG and small Facebook community.

---

Listen now

Enjoyed this episode? Please click this link to rate the podcast.

---

Other Episodes in the Series

---

Credits

• Theme music by Rafael Krux. Inspiration on freepd.com. License: CC0
• Background image by Marek Piwnicki on Unsplash
• Script edited by ChatGPT