In our fast-paced world, building resilience and the ability to bounce forward in the face of rapid change is not a luxury but a necessity.
Resilience—A Necessary Ingredient for Happiness
Resilience is part of our human nature. We build resilience through our ability to adapt and grow stronger through challenges. At the same time, we can nurture resilience and develop our ability to recover after setbacks in our personal and professional lives.
Resilience “is the basic ingredient for happiness, and success,” according to the authors of The Resilience Factor. Self-awareness is a top trait of highly resilient people, researchers have found.
Self-Awareness
Self-awareness is a key ingredient for resilience, happiness and success. Self-awareness becomes a dependable lifeline when we’re balancing competing responsibilities and priorities.
So how do we cultivate self-awareness? Let’s break it down into three key areas: emotional awareness, intuitive awareness, and physical awareness. Developing these three areas of resilience will allow us to bend but never break.
Emotional Awareness: Recognizing and Embracing the Waves
Emotions are energy in motion. When we try to suppress or ignore our emotions, they tend to percolate to the surface anyway. Pesky unprocessed emotions can surface as sideways snarky comments, sleepless nights, or physical illnesses. Emotional awareness is about mindfully observing your emotions without judgment. Enhanced emotional awareness translates into higher EQ (Emotional Intelligence), a valuable asset in the workplace. Emotional awareness allows us to recognize and process our emotional energy without getting swept up by the waves.
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Check in with yourself regularly.
Pause during the day to check your emotional pulse. How are you feeling? Anxious, disappointed, frustrated, excited, grateful, eager? Mindfully observe emotions without judgment. Practice noticing and naming your emotional state. By identifying your emotion, you give yourself some distance to observe it from a further vantage point.
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Give yourself permission to feel it all.
Sometimes we judge negative emotions—anger, frustration, sadness, fear—as inappropriate and try to suppress these emotions. If you’re in a public setting when emotions surge, give yourself permission to feel and express those emotions later in a safe place. When I was in recovery as an adult child of an alcoholic and dysfunctional family, waves of rage surfaced for me to process. I felt great satisfaction kicking plastic water jugs in my garage to move the emotional energy out of my feet. When you give yourself permission to feel deeply, you honor your humanity. And that’s when authenticity grows.
Intuitive Awareness: Listening to Your Inner Knowing
Intuition is that inner guiding wisdom, the awareness of ‘trusting your gut.’ If you’re like most people, you’ve had an experience when you trusted your intuitive awareness and things went well for you. And at another time, you did not listen to your inner urge and later wished you had listened to that inner knowing. Your gut and your intuition pick up information faster than your ego mind can process. Many of us have been conditioned to rely heavily on what’s rational, logical, and expected rather than follow intuitive knowing. The more you listen to your intuitive knowing, the more it will guide you. Learning to trust your intuition enhances confident decision-making.
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Create Space for Silence
Our intuition is like a radio frequency that we need to tune into—and modern life often drowns it out. To reconnect with your intuition, cultivate stillness in your daily life. This could be as simple as five minutes of mindful breathing, meditation, or even a quiet walk in nature. When you create space for silence, you give your intuition the room to be heard.
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Pay Attention to Patterns
Intuition doesn’t always come in a flash of insight. Sometimes it shows up as a recurring theme, a nudge, or a subtle shift in energy. Pay attention to the patterns in your life. Notice subtle recurring symbols that may present as a meaningful song, a billboard image, or a random feather on the ground. These patterns are often the breadcrumbs your intuition is leaving for you. When you follow them, you build a deeper relationship with your inner guide and strengthen your resilience for future challenges.
Physical Awareness: Honoring the Body’s Signals
Resilience isn’t only mental and emotional—it’s also physical. We can get good at ignoring our body’s cues and signals when we’re caught up in the hustle of life. Learning to listen to our body wisdom can help us process stored emotional energy before it gets trapped in the body tissues and causes dis-ease. Trusting our body wisdom can also help us maintain energy reserves for when we need them.
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Develop a Mind-Body Awareness Practice
Yoga, tai chi, qi gong, or even simple stretching can be profound tools for building physical awareness. These practices help you connect to the sensations in your body, so you can notice tension, pain, or discomfort before they escalate into bigger issues. When you learn to listen to your body’s cues, you can prevent burnout, avoid physical ailments, and strengthen your energy reserves.
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Improvisational Movement
Create space for unplanned, intuitive, improvisational movement and allow your body to unwind. Allow your mind to observe without judgment and allow your body to move freely without instruction. Observe your body as tight muscles let go. Notice your thoughts and watch them float away like a leaf floating down a stream. Notice emotions that surface while you’re moving. Notice the story associated with the emotion and the physical sensation.
Resilience From the Inside Out
Self-awareness is a practice. The more we cultivate emotional, intuitive, and physical awareness, the more we strengthen our resilience from the inside out. Building self-awareness adds a power tool to your toolbelt for navigating the demands of work and the complexities of life.
Building resilience doesn’t mean toughening up or pushing through no matter what. It means being flexible, adaptable, and deeply in tune with ourselves. When we become more aware of our emotions, our intuition, and our bodies, we can meet life’s challenges with grace and inner strength.
Resilience is both a human trait and a skill you can develop. And it begins with the simple, powerful process of self-awareness. The more you tune in, the more you’ll be able to bounce back, adapt, and thrive in the face of whatever life throws your way.
References
Pennington, Dr. Andrea. The Top 10 Traits of Highly Resilient People: Real Life Stories of Resilience Show You How to Build a Stress Resistant Personality, 2020
Reivich, Karen, and Shatte, Andrew, PhD. The Resilience Factor. Harmony Press, 2003.
Wicks, Robert J. Bounce: Living the Resilient Life. Oxford University Press, 2023.
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