Resilience helps with life’s journey. It doesn’t matter whether we need it to help us cope with a serious illness, or the death of a loved one, it’s resilience that gets us through. Resilience also helps us pave the way for a more calm and peaceful existence.

Resilience is a term used for people who bounce back seemingly well from very stressful and traumatic experiences. Everyone can have resilience, but we won’t all use it, because we’re not always aware how to.

But it’s an ongoing process that requires effort on our part. If we are to learn to develop personal strategies, we must learn to enhance our resilience to situations and circumstances that are sometimes beyond our control.

It involves our perceptions and a thought process that will help us work towards finding solutions to any traumatic and difficult experiences. Our upbringing has a lot to do with how resilient we are.

When we need to draw on resilience, we find a way through. It is easier to be resilient when we have a supportive network around us, as long as they make good role models and offer reassurance and encouragement.

The following factors may also help:

• Having a positive attitude and the confidence to believe in yourself, in your own abilities and strengths;
• Being able to manage impulses and feelings as and when they arise;
• Having the ability to communicate and problem-solve well enough not to see your issues as problems;
• The capacity to be able to make realistic plans with a view to carrying them out in an orderly fashion that won’t add to, complicate or heighten your stress.

Developing resilience is a personal journey for each of us. We won’t always react to the same stressful events in the same way, therefore what works for one person may never work for another.

Because we perceive things differently, we have to make what we do work for us.