Building Reslience: How to use Mental Resilience to Combat Stress

I’m sure you have heard before, that we have not been created to live an isolated life. We need a support network to be resilient in times of trouble, so its important to develop healthy social skills. Developing social skills will inevitably aid in building more resilience so if you want to build your social skills, it would help to work on the following:

• Self Awareness
• Building Strong Connections
• Interpersonal Relations and Rapport
• Setting Boundaries
• Inspiring Trust

Having the abilities to effectively communicate your needs to others is crucial to developing mental resilience because it is not healthy to be solely dependent on yourself.

Having Self Awareness

Self-awareness is another necessary skill to build mental resilience because it lets us bounce back from any setback in our life. When we understand our strengths and other areas for improvement, we are able to adjust accordingly, acquire extra knowledge when necessary, and make positive decisions that reflect who you really are.

Being self aware requires us to know how to embrace our emotions. When we become aware of our emotions, we embrace them healthily and know how to deal with strong, or difficult, emotions in a constructive way.

Although excessive negative feelings tend to inhibit learning and communication, emotions play a vital role in relationships, conversations and feedback. They convey emphasis and let others know what we value. Emotional experiences stick with people, last longer in their memories, and are easier to recall. 

In recent decades, extensive neuroscience research has shown that emotions are essential to our reasoning process. Strong emotions can pull us off course, but in general, emotions support better decision making. So, although we may want to avoid triggering a threat response, we shouldn’t try to remove all emotions from our relationships. Doing so can diminish the impact of our presence and lead to a cycle of ineffective behaviors. Instead of suppressing your emotions, aim for balance: Express just enough emotion to engage with others but not so much to provoke a hostile or defensive reaction, shut down the conversation, or damage the relationship.

Of course, we may not know how another person will respond to our emotions. When we’re in the grip of strong feelings, it’s hard to calibrate how we express them in conversation. The best way to control your emotions is to practice. One of the ways we can practice is by having more mindful conversations. When do so, we learn not only how specific individuals respond to us but also how we express our emotions in helpful and unhelpful ways.

Building Strong Connections

People who have strong connections in their personal and professional life are more resistant to stress, and are happier in their role. The more we develop genuine relationships, the more resilient we become. It’s important to not only have a strong support network to fall back on but to also have people we can confide in. Having caring, supportive people around you acts as a protective factor during times of crisis. While simply talking about a situation with a friend or loved one won’t make our troubles go away, it does allow us to share our feelings, get support, receive positive feedback, and come up with possible solutions to resolve problems.

Interpersonal Relations and Rapport

People who are skilled at interpersonal relations can develop and maintain effective relationships with others.

• They relate well to people from varied backgrounds and in different situations
• They show understanding, courtesy, tact, empathy, concern, and politeness.
• They also relate to people in an open, friendly, and professional manner.

Keep in mind that interpersonal skills are only well received when they are consistently shown from that individual. This is where having a good rapport comes in.

Rapport is the gateway to trust. It is what allows people to feel relaxed with you and open up – so that personal barriers and fears can be identified. It also allows the relationship to grow in capacity to handle tougher circumstances and conversations. People are more likely to be supportive when a good rapport has been built with them. Therefore, when difficult times arise, you will have a good support system to help you be resilient enough to bounce back. Being unable to have a strong support system that you can equally depend on makes it difficult to have have the mental resilience to recover during hard times.

Setting Boundaries

People with healthy boundaries expressing to others what they love, what they want, what their purpose is, and what they stand for. These people are very different from those who are known by what they hate, what they don’t like, what they stand against, and what they will not do.

In the physical world, boundaries are easy to see. Fences, signs, walls, manicured lawns or hedges are all physical boundaries. In their differing appearances, they give the same message: THIS IS WHERE MY PROPERTY BEGINS. The owner of the property is legally responsible for what happens on his or her property. Non-owners are not responsible for the property.

Boundaries define us. They define where we begin and others end. Knowing what is in our ownership and taking responsibility for those things gives us freedom. When we know where our “yard” begins and ends, Then we are free to do with it what we like. Taking responsibility for our life opens up many different options.

However, if you do not “own” your life, then your choices and options become very limited. In addition to showing you what you are responsible for, boundaries also help  define what is not “on our property” and what we are not responsible for.

Inspiring Trust

Trust is essential to well-being as well as mental resilience. But if you look around today,  it’s apparent that we are smack in the middle of a trust crisis where social, healthcare, economic, media and political distrust jeopardize our lives. Trust can improve both our personal and professional lives. From relationships at home to leadership skills at work, it’s an essential component of communication, productivity and efficiency. Although we consider trust to be abstract and obscure, like love, it’s actually a measurable factor that we can improve!

Trust is beneficial to us, as it facilitates good communication. For example, it’s far easier to understand someone when you trust them. Trusting someone allows us to understand what someone is saying even when they aren’t speaking clearly. Conversely, it is harder to understand what people are talking about when we aren’t familiar with them. – Even if they’re speaking in plain terms.

One way we build trust with  is when we relate to others with empathy which is our ability to put ourselves in others’ shoes and appreciate how they are likely to be feeling or thinking in a given situation.

Daniel Goleman, who coined the concept of ‘Emotional Intelligence’ stated that ’empathy is the most important people skill’. He says that empathy is an important communication skill that can be easily forgotten because we focus on what should be done in a situation, rather than how the other person feels.

Humans were not made to live isolated lives, we are meant to support each other and to be connected to each other through solid and trustful connections and loving and supportive friendships. Having a strong network of friends and family is necessary for mental resilience and empathy can help strengthen those connections.

Equally important, it is also important to build self trust. It is kind of hard to be mentally resilient when you can’t even trust your own judgment. You can build trust within yourself by:

• Keeping your promises to yourself
• Remembering your successes and triumphs
• Being your own cheerleader
• Following your intuition/trusting your hunches or gut feelings

If you are unable to trust yourself to make the right decision when times get tough, then it will be hard to develop the mental resilience necessary to overcome life’s obstacles.