There has been a lot written about resilience in recent years and how important it can be to our mental health. If ever there was a time we could all collectively experience and practice resilience, it is now! We bear witness each day of this pandemic to the extraordinary acts of courage by the people in our society that care for us. It is evident that distress, disease and pain cannot be avoided, we cannot live without risk, but we are also not totally powerless in these situations, because we have resilience to draw on.
We may fear that we do not have enough resilience and yet, due to the very fact we are still here, that we have endured, shows we are capable of resilience.
No one would argue that we need something as extraordinary as a pandemic to show us that, or indeed to learn how to be more resilient, this pandemic acts as a mirror to show us our resilience capability.
The good news is that more resilience is available to all of us. We can draw on our resources, of who we are, what we have and what we can do. Each one of us can make small steps in improving these areas to give us more resilience, to be able to face adversity with more confidence. We are not born with resilience, it is a learnt skill; shaped through relationships and experiences.
For the next three blogs I will be looking at how specifically that can be done. In the meantime here are a few resources to explore.
