How to Build a Resilient Life: The 7 Qualities of Resilience
It’s my belief that everyone would benefit from having a coach. I believe that working with the right coach can change your life. I believe that people who work with a coach expand their capacity to thrive, whether it’s financially, relationally, professionally, or otherwise. I believe that building personal resilience is the path to thriving. If we have support along the way, we can all build resilience in the areas most important to us. And if you are ALL IN, meaning you are deeply committed to your transformation, to doing the work along the way, to showing up even when it’s challenging — you can change your life!
So how do I coach people towards resilience?
Resilience is a way of being. It is a beneficial and generative orientation towards ourselves and the world around us. This orientation works alongside a developed set of skills and behaviors that enable us to be aligned with our true selves and the people and things that are meant for us. When we develop both a resilience orientation and skillset, we can live authenticity and thrive. So when I coach towards resilience, it’s not about promising that you will bring in 10 new clients, lose 20 lbs, or meet the love of your life. It’s about aligning with yourself, bringing forward your innate strengths, and turning unhelpful behaviors and patterns into productive ones so that you can bring in all the things meant for you—whether that’s more fulfilling relationships, greater satisfaction in your work and home life, or greater balance and less stress.
Resilience has reshaped my life for the better. I used to take shortcuts to get by. I used to move through the world hyper-independent, inflexible, and suspecting that the world wasn’t on my side. Through cultivating resilience, I’ve become capable and thorough, interdependent, flexible and curious, and experienced the felt sense that the world is here to collaborate with me (even when it might not appear that way.) This reorientation and the skills I built along the way has transformed my life.
When we are personally resilient we behave with integrity, meaning we understand our personal ecosystem and are authentic, transparent, and equitable in our interactions with ourselves and others. We are adaptable and can sense complex influences, be flexible, and pivot beneficially in changing situations. We are resourced and have access to the resources we need. We approach life through discovery and curiosity and are able to learn, turn learning into action, and innovate. We are collaborative and participate and engage with the world around us in generative and complementary ways. We are diverse in our thinking and have a range of options to achieve our goals and meet our needs. We are able to withstand the impacts of day-to-day life and are set up to fail forward in the event of a larger disruption.
These 7 Qualities of Resilience are our north star when we are cultivating personal resilience: Integrity, Adaptability, Resourced, Discovery, Collaboration, Diversity, and Fail Forward. Stay tuned for a deep dive into each quality in the coming weeks!