Life as we know isn’t always fair. Like rag dolls, it can play with us gently as well as roughly until we feel about to break. Whether a traumatic life event like a job loss, divorce, being passed over for a promotion too just a minor disappointment, it can crush our spirits to blame ourselves. Either we can let these temporary obstacles cloud our vision of ourselves or we can do something about it such as tapping into our resilience to learn how to bounce back from failure.
You may look at yourself and think resilience is not a part of your genetic makeup. After all, you remember how your own family typically reacts when life deals them a blow. Even though those perceived behaviors growing up may influence us, resilience is not passed on through heredity. For this reason, it is important to recognize that resilience and the ability to bounce back from failure is learning how to turn to coping mechanisms.
Automatically prejudging yourself when something bad happens is not helpful. Instead, turn to techniques that change such behavior can make a big difference. For example, your furnace breaks and you need a new one soon after another household emergency that cost you extra money. You may be thinking why keep saving when all the money disappears anyway? Instead, tapping into resilience is changing your mindset such as praising yourself for saving for such problems over going into debt. Applying this coping mechanism to other self-defeating situations by seeing the bright side of your action can strengthen resilience that otherwise would doom you to failure.
Another helpful aid to building resilience is examining the friends you keep. Why surround yourself with people that seem to drain the life out of you with their constant criticisms and complaints? A better plan is keeping friends that support as well as help you to move forward to try new things instead of remaining stagnant.
Sometimes, writing things down with possible choices to the problem also can help you find the solution. Seeing ideas on paper over leaving life problems to your imagination gives more clarity.
Resilience and learning to bounce back from failure may not be the easiest of tasks, but it is one that can be developed simply by attempting to change how we think of ourselves. Try it and hopefully your life may run smoother.
