Before I started training to become a therapist, I was under the belief that resilience is something that some people are born with and some people are not. This is a myth that a lot of us believe and it can be harmful because it implies that if you don’t have it then you can’t ever have it, which is not true. There are ways to grow your resilience and I believe that it starts with the understanding of what resilience really is. Growing research within the field of psychology shows that resilience is like a muscle. Just like in the gym, you have to keep training this muscle over time and as you do this, you grow in your strength to take on more weight and bounce back faster. Resilience is your bounce back from adversity in your life and you’re more than capable of building your muscle in order to more effectively weather the storms that inevitably affect us all.
So, how do we bounce back from adversity? A lot of it comes from your mindset. A fixed mindset is rigid and closed off to other outcomes as it assumes that when we make a mistake it’s a failure and there’s no other option for us to move forward. What we want to cultivate instead is the growth mindset. The growth mindset reframes our obstacles from seeing them as barriers to looking at them as opportunities to learn and grow. It teaches us that we can learn from the adversity and that we have a multitude of other pathways that we can take to reach our goals even if our initial plans didn’t work out. Therapy is an amazing and useful space to build your growth mindset and work your resilience muscles. I want to encourage you to be open-minded to the therapeutic process on both good days and bad days, your openness can quite literally open new doors for you and your resilience structure. I wish you well on your resilience journey, it’s not easy, but it’s very much worth it.