Resilience Training (A complete guide)

This blog explains in detail the concept of resilience training.

Resilience is the ability to adapt well and heal soon from stress, hardship, trauma, or disaster.

If you are resilient, you are better able to maintain well-being and a good degree of physical and psychological well-being in the face of life’s challenges. This blog focuses on resilience preparation. 

Resilience preparation focuses on four fields, namely social, cognitive, behavioral, physical, and spiritual resilience.

Training in these fields will strengthen your endurance, improve your quality of life, and reduce stress and anxiety by helping you to see life’s unavoidable challenges as opportunities.

What is Resilience Training?

Defined as a complex process involving successful adaptation in the sense of severe adversity, by Luthar and colleagues ( 2000), empirical work suggests that resilience can be influenced by how we view the adversities we face (Yeager & Dweck, 2012).

This means that it is not simply a consideration of our characteristics or our environment, but that it can be strengthened, created, and nurtured. (Kim-Cohen, 2007).

Put another way — yes, we can learn and teach resilience. So endurance preparation is one way to do so.

Essential Teachings for Resilience Training 

The most important exercise to improve your resilience, according to the Mayo Clinic, is to train your attention and awareness.

Becoming more mindful and purposeful can all your negative thoughts and attract your attention to what is most important around you.

Along with improved endurance, exercise-focused preparation can also reduce stress and anxiety and improve the quality of life (Mayo Clinic, 2018).

The Thrive Program Consultant and professional coach James Woodworth agrees with this statement and notes that there are also other important areas to be discussed.

There are some factors that can enable successful resilience preparation to have an impact on resilience.:

• Creating an internal control locus: believing that you are in control of your life. 
• Developing a strong sense of self-esteem: feeling that you have value and that you are worthy 
• Developing a strong sense of self-efficacy: knowing that you should do what you’re talking about. 
• Developing self-awareness and regulation/management of emotions: knowing and controlling your own emotions. 
• To cultivate confidence and hope: to participate in life and to look forward to the challenges it brings.
• Development of positivity and positive emotions: creating a sense of positivity, well-being, and purpose in life. 
• To cultivate gratitude and appreciation: to be appreciative of what you have and to practice gratitude on a regular basis. 
• Developing SMART objectives: setting goals that are clear, observable, achievable, practical, and time-bound. 
• Build a flexible and adaptable attitude: prevent the thought from being static or static. 
• Developing a positive, optimistic style of explanation: choosing to see the glass as half-full rather than half-empty. (Woodworth, 2016)

Boosting any of these features is a good way to improve resilience — and, of course, concentrating on them all is sure to boost resilience! 

The Penn Resilience Program is one such program that provides resilience training in a number of key areas and skills to enhance resilience, including:

• Outlook-Taking 
• Decision-making 
• Regulation of communication and emotion 
• Assertiveness
• Relaxing 
• Cognitive enhancement (Coutuli et al., 2013) 

And that’s just the Children’s Penn Resilience Program! The Adult Curriculum, which has been taught to individuals and organizations around the world as well as thousands in the United States Army and Pennsylvania State Police, focuses on developing 18 skills in six jurisdictions:

1. Self-awareness – the capacity to pay attention to your feelings, emotions, behavior, and psychological reactions. 
2. Self-regulation – the capacity to alter one ‘s mind, emotion, actions, and physiology in the context of the desired outcome.
3. Mental Dexterity – the capacity to look at things from different viewpoints and think creatively and flexibly. 
4. Character Attributes – the opportunity to use one’s highest attributes to connect authentically, resolve obstacles, and build a life consistent with one’s values. 
5. Connection – the ability to build and maintain strong and trusting relationships.
6. Optimism – the ability to notice and expect positive things, to focus on what you can handle, and to take conscious action (Positive Psychology Center, n.e.s).

Recommended Books

The following is a list of some good books on resilience. These books are a great source of increasing knowledge.

Just click the book you wish to study and you will be redirected to the page form where you can access it.

• The Resilience Workbook: Essential Skills to Recover from Stress, Trauma, and Adversity (A New Harbinger Self-Help Workbook) Part of New Harbinger Self-Help Workbook (73 Books)
• SMART with Dr. Sood: The Four-Module Stress Management And Resilience Training Program by Amit Sood M.D.
• The Stress-Proof Brain: Master Your Emotional Response to Stress Using Mindfulness and Neuroplasticity by Melanie Greenberg PhD
• Teaching Hope and Resilience for Students Experiencing Trauma: Creating Safe and Nurturing Classrooms for Learning by Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey, et al.
• Forward-Facing(R) Professional Resilience: Prevention and Resolution of Burnout, Toxic Stress and Compassion Fatigue by J Eric Gentry Ph.D. and Jeffrey Jim Dietz M D
• Promoting Emotional Resilience: Cognitive-Affective Stress Management Training by Ronald E. Smith and James C. Ascough

What are the 5 skills of resilience?

The five skills of resilience include self-awareness, attention – flexibility & stability of focus, letting go physically, letting go mentally, and accessing & sustaining positive emotion.

How do you build resilience?

Resilience can be built in the following ways:

1. Get sufficient sleep and exercise, and learn how to manage stress. 
2. Practice sensitivity to thought. 
3. Practice cognitive restructuring to change the way you think about negative and bad situations. 
4. Learn through errors and failures. 
5. Pick your answer. 
6. Keep your perspective.

Why is resilience training important?

Resilience is a key strategy that helps employees cope with stress, a competitive job market, conflicts in the workplace, and challenges on the job.

It is important to improve resilience because employees identify work as the number one stressor in their lives.

What are the 7 C’s of resilience for adults?

The 7 C’s of resilience are competence, confidence, connection, character, contribution, coping, and control.

What are the pillars of resilience?

The pillars of resilience are: mental, physical, social, and spiritual.

Is resilience a skill or quality?

Resilience is a special ability because outlook and response are so defined.

It’s an integrated way of thought that needs to be slowly built alongside strategies to enhance one’s immediate reaction to something negative or unwelcome.

This blog explained in detail resilience training.

If you have any questions or queries regarding this blog, let us know through your comments in the comments section. We will be glad to assist you.

References 

Resilience training – Mayo Clinic

Resilience Training: How to Master Mental Toughness and Thrive by Catherine Moore (2020)

How To Build Resilience With Resilience Training (+ Real-Life Examples) by Courtney E. Ackerman (2020)

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