Resilience – how to build and strengthen it
July 2025
“Resilience” – it’s one of those new buzz words popping up everywhere. We all want it. We all hope we’ve got the resilience to help us cope with the challenges we encounter.
Many have written about resilience in recent years. A great place to start is “The Big Little Book of Resilience” by Matthew Johnstone. It may be light on words, but the creative images convey in a direct visual way the key points of resilience.
Johnstone keeps his definition of resilience simple: “It is not about what happens when we get knocked down, but more about what happens when we get up again.”
It’s the “getting up again” that some of us can find tricky.
Especially when significant life events have knocked us down, such as a family death or estrangement, illness, redundancy or job stress.
So what happens when we’re floored by a crisis and try to get up again? This has a lot to do with how much we BELIEVE in our ability to cope with challenge and stress. Some of us carry a positive self-belief that tells us, “I can deal with this, I know how to bounce back, I’ve done it before.”
But many of us don’t possess such a rock-solid self-affirming belief. In stressful times we naturally fall back into old survival strategies, often created in childhood. Back then, with a child’s eye view of a sometimes threatening world, we told ourselves things like, “Nobody is here to look out for me… I’m on my own…. don’t ask for help, don’t show weakness.”
When we feel alone at a time of crisis, and maybe even blame ourselves for being there, then “bouncing back” with resilience is not that easy.
And I’d love to help make it easier for you. To lighten the load of those old core beliefs that stop you bouncing back from tough times.
Please get in touch if you’d like to explore old survival strategies, and learn how to update them for a more resilient you!
“For the majority of life’s adversities, there is no magic pill or silver bullet – to get over anything we generally have to go through it – but if we’re prepared to learn from that experience, good can certainly come from bad.” Matthew Johnstone