Building & Maintaining
Personal Resilience
Resilience is ordinary, not extraordinary.
People commonly demonstrate resilience.
For example, following the terrorist
attacks of September 11, 2001 in the
USA, most people got on and rebuilt their
lives, and the anticipated rise levels of
post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD)
never occurred.
Developing resilience is a personal journey
involving thoughts, behaviour and actions.
Anyone can do it.
9 Ways To Build Resilience
• Cherish social support and interaction.
Good relationships with family and
friends and others are vital. Being active
in the wider community also helps.
• Treat life as a learning process.
Develop the habit of using challenges as
opportunities to acquire or master skills
and build achievement.
• Avoid making drama out of a crisis.
Stress and change are part of life. How
we interpret and respond to events has a
big impact on how stressful we find
them.
• Celebrate your successes. Take time at
the end of each day to review what went
well and congratulate yourself. This
trains the mind to look for success rather
than dwelling on negativity and ‘failure’.
“Resiliency
affects
our ability to ‘bounce
back’. At work, resil-
ient people are bet-
ter able to deal with
the demands placed
upon them, especially
where those demands
might require them
to be dealing with
constantly changing
priorities and a heavy
workload.”
70 MAL21/17 ISSUE