Whenever you face any challenge, it is super easy to get swept away by your emotions and feel hopeless. When this happens, it can be next to impossible to overcome the obstacle at hand. One way to counteract these emotions is through emotional resilience.
What is Emotional Resilience?
Emotional resilience is a talent for calming yourself whenever you find yourself facing a negative experience. This negative experience can be your own emotions, an obstacle, or anything else that causes your mind and emotions to run rampant.
Everyone is born with a little bit of emotional resilience. That is how we are all naturally able to cope with at least some difficult events. The older we get, our emotional resilience deepens, allowing us to handle even more difficult situations.
You can even intentionally improve your emotional resilience through practices, self-compassion, and self-esteem. Improving your emotional resilience will help you overcome any obstacle that comes your way.
It may be helpful to think of emotional resilience like a muscle. All healthy humans are born with muscles. As we get bigger, our muscles grow too. Some people even take the time to workout and target specific muscles to grow as strong as possible.
Whenever we find ourselves needing to lift something or impress a possible date, we may flex our muscles. In other words, we use our muscles all the time, but we can flex them whenever we want.
Our emotional resilience is the same way. Emotional resilience helps us throughout the day, but it may be needed more so during individual events.
How Does Emotional Resilience Help You Overcome Obstacles?
Emotional resilience is necessary for not just overcoming obstacles but transforming them into success. It is only through emotional resilience that we feel we can handle challenges and improve on our life. This is a crucial aspect of overcoming obstacles that you can’t ignore.
Let’s imagine a life in which you had no emotional resilience. You might quickly give up, cry, and get down on yourself because of the obstacle. You aren’t able to control your mind or emotions, inhibiting you from overcoming the obstacle.
However, with emotional resilience, you would be able to quiet your mind and rationally talk to yourself. This ability would then help you think of rational strategies for overcoming the obstacle to transform it into success.
Elements of Emotional Resilience
The great part about emotional resilience is that you can build it. Whether you are very emotionally resilient or not, you can always learn a bit more. Overall, emotional resilience involves three elements: the physical elements, mental elements, and social elements. You must focus on all elements to improve your emotional resilience.
Physical elements include your energy, health, and vitality. If you are sick and your body doesn’t work as it should, it is much more difficult to be emotionally resilient. If you don’t already, focus on eating good nutritious meals and getting some exercise to help improve your emotional resilience.
The mental elements include your self-esteem, self-confidence, adjustability, emotional awareness, focus, self-expression, and reasoning abilities. These elements are crucial to having good emotional resilience. You will need to do a lot of personal work to target this element, depending on your exact needs.
For example, you might struggle with self-esteem but be very good in your reasoning abilities. If that’s the case, you might want to go to a therapist to talk through the reasons why you feel negatively about yourself.
Other people might have the opposite issue. They may have great self-esteem but low reasoning abilities. Those people might want to start reading more to challenge their brain.
Finally, the third element is social elements. This is your interpersonal relationships, communication abilities, and cooperation. Humans are not designed to be lone creatures. Boost your emotional resilience by deepening your connections and communication skills with others. They will come in handy whenever you face an obstacle.
Building Emotional Resilience
Whenever you want to build your emotional resilience, it is best to address the three elements above. Some people might need help with the relationship aspect but be great with the other two. Reflect on yourself to find out which elements you may need to improve. Most people need to improve all three to some degree.
From there, you need to be observant about your own thoughts and actions. Notice whenever you feel bad about yourself or whenever you feel like you lose control. As you are noticing your thoughts and actions, practice talking yourself down and self-compassion.
Talking yourself down involves unwinding your thoughts. See if there are any contradictions or logical reasons that come to your mind. Debunking these thoughts will help you come to a much more level minded place.
In addition to focusing on yourself, take the time to deepen your relationships. This may be as simple as scheduling a lunch with your parent, but it could also be as intensive as asking for help from a friend.
You may even want to talk about what you’ve been finding in your quest for self-reflection while deepening your social relationships.
If you are finding building your emotional resilience to be incredibly difficult, consider talking to a therapist or licensed professional. These professionals will help you identify your problem thoughts and unwind them to boost your emotional resilience.
Recap
Emotional resilience is key to overcoming any obstacle. Much like a muscle, your emotional resilience can be grown through intentional thoughts and actions. Even if you are already emotionally resilient, continue to build this muscle to help transform any obstacle into success.
