How resilient are you?

There isn’t a single one of us who hasn’t had to deal with big challenges in our lives. For special needs parents, it can feel like the challenges never stop coming, and we really don’t get to the point where the adversity dissipates and life feels totally calm and settled. There is always a sense of disquiet over something that our family is facing with our special needs child. Plus, if you are finding yourself juggling work, home/family, and community demands altogether, the challenges become even more demanding. Training up our resilience really matters, for this reason.

You are resilient if you are able to face life’s challenges (e.g. stress, struggle, loss that arises from difficult life events) and keep going. Resilience has to do with your ability to shoulder your emotional burdens and work through them. This requires a willingness to do the mental processing needed, but even more difficult, it requires the ability to persevere through the emotional work of facing your painful situations and making your way through so you emerge stronger and better outfitted to continue your journey.

Resilient people outfit themselves with the attitudes and skills that help them to cope better. They still face life challenges that are just as big as anyone else, but they use their challenges to develop new insights and tools so they find healthier ways to keep going. Their self-confidence and self-control makes them better able to persevere and work through their next problems.

So how resilient do you think you are? Dr. Amit Sood talks about 9 personal attributes that stack up to determine our resilience. You can learn what he has found them to be and assess your resilience by clicking here. Will your evaluation of your own resilience match the result you get from this assessment? More importantly, what can you learn about how you can improve your internal attributes and external factors that will help you to increase your resilience so the next big challenge that you face does not faze you quite as much?