Frequently Asked Questions

Simple Explanations of Mental Resilience –

• Mental Resilience is developing mental tenacity to be able to bounce back from just about anything and everything that may happen to you in your life.

• Mental Resilience is a process of attaining a state of mental equilibrium.

• Mental Resilience is about developing and strengthening your mental environment is such a manner that the betterment reached is manifested in all of your activities, all of the time. Sounds phenomenal? Yes, it is.

• Mental Resilience is the starting point of resilience because everything always starts in the mind.

To be resilient means to attain such a state of thought and action, where nothing disturbs the equilibrium of your mind – your peace and calmness. This is a state of mind where nothing disturbs your action taking capabilities. In short, your performance and delivery are not dependent upon your situations and circumstances.

It should be an extraordinary achievement, right? Indeed, it is.

The main benefits of Mental Resilience are –
• You become clear in your thinking.
• You start taking better decisions in your personal and professional areas.
• You start adjusting to situations and circumstances better.
• You start performing better.
• You become more calm and peaceful.
• You become a more amicable person.
• And many more…

Can you now see and decide why Mental Resilience is important?

Just observe your reactions when things don’t move in your favour. How do you react?

• Can you stay calm and composed?
• Can you still think of how to turn things around?
• Can you remain solution-centric?
• Do you start panicking?
• Can you perform and make the most of your capabilities?
• Can you deliver results?

If the answer to the above is yes, you have started developing resilience.

There is nothing called being resilientbecause there is no upper limit to resilience. You can keep cultivating it all your life and still can never become totally resilient.

Is resilience a trait or a skill? To this, we say that resilience can be learned and cultivated just like any other skill, so it is a skill.

The more you practice a skill, the more it keeps getting ingrained into your mind. This skill then starts reflecting automatically in your actions.

Then you don’t have to think about this skill before incorporating it into your actions. It starts coming naturally to you.

Now this skill becomes a part of your habitual character. And so it can be called a trait.

So Mental Resilience starts with something that you can learn and cultivate and eventually becomes a part of your natural traits.

The process of development of Mental Resilience is –
a) First you have to understand your present state of thinking.

b) Next you have to practically implement better control over your reactions. This can be done by:
• By observing your thinking and actions.
• By constantly developing your awareness about Mental Resilience.
• By incorporating what you learn into your actions.
• By starting to change your reactions.
• Many times you may see that you start reacting as per your earlier low resilient habits. You should aim to keep reducing the time frame of going into your habituated reactions, and your newly learned actions.
• By meditating upon your habitual reactions and your newly learned actions.
• Discovering new ways of implementing your new-found resilience, and increasing the time durations of staying in that mindset.
Practicing the above again and again…

c) Start taking your mental development seriously. For this you can choose some educational resources and start following them. This will help you in enhancing your awareness about Mental Resilience.

Ability to overcome their fears is what makes a person resilient.

You can start with overcoming some small fears first. You can use outside help if you need it in this process of getting over your fear.

For example, if you have intense fear of public speaking and feel that you need to get over it in order to do well in your professional life, the only option for you is to seek help in order for you to get over it.

Once you start taking charge of your fear, you will notice that you have enhanced confidence. This enhancement in confidence will start manifesting in other unrelated areas of your life also; and will start compounding itself.

When you keep doing this for a consistent period of time, you will see an enhancement in your ability to get up one more time when circumstances and situations throw you down.

That’s resilience!

Here are some ways in which you can increase your emotional resilience –
• Start valuing yourself more.
• Identify your strengths and weaknesses.
• Start maximizing your strengths. Your weaknesses will start getting minimized.
• Start nurturing yourself.
• Identify your purpose in this life and start devising ways to attain it.
• Start setting some goals for yourself and set a timeline for their attainment. These goals should be in terms of short-term (3-6 months), mid-term (1-2 years) and long-term (3-5 years).
• Develop a system for attainment of these goals.
• Develop a circle of family, friends and colleagues, whom you can trust and who value you. Spend time with these people on a regular basis.
• Start embracing positive changes in every area of your life. If people ridicule you for this, learn to ignore them, and keep embracing the positive changes that make you happy.
• Learn to be optimistic about everything, no matter how bleak the situations may be.
• Learn to be a problem solver and develop your solution-centricity.
• Learn to develop your communication skills, especially the skills of relating your feelings. This will help you understanding the feelings of others.
• Choose a role model. This could be anyone you like. Start following them for the way they handle their emotional pressures.
• Be action oriented.

Main benefits of resilience training for your organization are –
• Enhanced interest of performance under extreme and adverse conditions by employees.
• Enhanced personal efficiency and productivity of employees.
• Enhanced solution-centricity.
• Enhanced value for resources.
• Enhanced sense of ownership towards the organization.
• Enhanced results – both tangible and intangible.

Human beings are born naturally resilient, just as all other creatures of this world.

We lose our resilience because of the fears that are instilled in us slowly and systematically through our nurturing.

These fears keep getting lodged in our subconscious mind and start governing all our habitual actions.

The more fearful we are, the less resilient we become.

So, a simple method of increasing our natural mental and physical resilience is to keep monitoring your fears, and keep getting rid of them.

Face your fear. Look your fear in the eye. Then scale up and overpower it. That’s the only sure-shot way of making your fear vanish.

In the face of adversity, there is absolutely no time to improve your resilience. This is the hard fact.

Resilience improvement is therefore a constant activity, which should be undertaken on a daily basis, if you wish it to come to your rescue in times of adversity.

So, as a part of your daily routine, here are the physical and mental exercises that you should do. These will help you in improving your resilience.

a) Keep aside a time period of 15 minutes purely for thinking every day. Don’t get disturbed or distracted during this time. Use it only to meditate upon yourself – your past, present and future.

b) Use this time to think about your greatest fears, right from your childhood up to the present day.

c) Make a list of all the fears you have overcome so far.

d) Pat your back and give yourself accolades, acknowledgement and even gifts for this achievement.

e) Make a list of your biggest present day fears, which you feel you need to get over quickly in order to do well in your professional life. You can do this for your personal life also if you feel there are certain areas in which you need improvement fast.

f) Then start using this time of meditation to devise ways in which you can overcome these fears.

g) Make a list of educators, courses, books, friends, family and any others, who can help you in the process of getting over your fears.

h) It will be imperative that you should be able to completely trust the resources you choose.

i) Then start taking help from these resources and keep paving a way through your fears.

j) This is how you will keep raising the bar for yourself. And this is how you can do your goal setting and achievement also.

k) Keep doing this exercise without fail every day. And, do not disclose this to anyone. Secrecy is the keyword over here. The reason is that if you tell it to someone, there are heavy chances that they will trigger your deepest fears.

l) Keep 30 minutes every day to do some physical exercise. It can be yoga, walking, swimming, aerobics or any other type of exercise that you like. Just do it every day.

When you exercise your physical as well as mental muscles this way, you will increase your resilience. This will then come to your rescue in the time of adversity, otherwise not.

This is practical and implementable advice, not pure theory. You can try it and see the difference.

There are numerous definitions and even greater number of opinions and debates about the similarities and differences between Mental Resilience and Mental Toughness.

I have found that Mental Resilience is a state of mind, which has elements of mental toughness and mental flexibility all at the same time.

This means, that a mentally resilient person will be more suited for business environments and family environments because he or she will know when to be tough and when to be flexible. And they will be better at keeping things in balance as they will not break under pressures.

While a mentally tough person can be excellent in those situations where a spurt of enthusiastic activity is needed, like at sporting events. But they may not be consistent with their excellent performance in situations, which needs them to think calmly, reach a decision and then take action. This is the reason why mentally tough sportsmen many times don’t make it as good coaches. They may also break under pressure, sometimes irreparably.

A simple analogy will make it further clear – in a bad storma tremendously tough tree gets uprooted more easily under wind pressure. But a green sapling just bends and lets the storm pass, and survives.

To us, the green sapling is a far greater example of resilience.

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.