Resilience - the ability to bend but not break

"More than education, more than experience, more than training, a person's level of resilience determines who succeeds and who fails. That's true in the cancer, it's true in the Olympic, and it's true in the board room." Dean M. Becker

Life is full of up's and downs. It seems that most of the people already know how to deal with up's moment. But there are less who can easily handle the difficult traumas and fewer who are capable to convert such situations into magic moments. These are resilient people. AAP (American Psychological Association) defines resiliency: "Process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats or even significant source of stress."
Resilience is determined by both in born traits and environment, but it's also a learning and developing skill. You can learn to think to and act resilient.

Like any moment of your life, during the process of change you may face some adversity  and trauma which requires enhancing resilience.  One of the first steps of to enhance your resilience is regulating your emotions. Regulating emotions is neither controlling nor ignoring. Again there are number of techniques which you can employ to regulate your emotions., varies from ancient mindfulness meditations to cognitive restructuring (reappraisal) techniques. The cognitive restructuring or reframing is an alteration in perception which is made through changes in cognition. Cognition is the mental process that includes an assortment of thinking and reasoning skills.

The amazing advantage of such cognitive reframing is experiencing the deeper levels of your current mind set (current frame) and the self-awareness about your beliefs, thoughts and emotions. Therefore you would be able to favorably alter your negative or stress-related perceptions (irrational thoughts) into positive attitudes.

"Everything can be taken from man but one thing - the last human freedom, to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances." Viktor Frankl

By restructuring the negative perceptions which cause toxic thoughts and toxic emotions, you'll have the choice to choose your thoughts!   

Another efficient strategy to enhance your resilience is to become physically fit. You can protect yourself against the negative effects of stress by physical activity. Exercise will boost levels of endorphins as well as neurotransmitters such as dopamine and serotonin that may reduce symptoms of depression and elevate mood. It means that simple workout (like 1.15 hr per week) will help both your physical and mental health.

There are also other strategies to be more resilient such as social network support, role modeling and accepting challenges.

You can see that all the elevating resilience strategies are motivational strategies to the process of change and by going back to the quote by Dean Becker, we can conclude that 'those who succeed are motivated to change'.