Building Resilience: 7 Tips to Help You Access Your Inner Strength
This article was originally published on Soulaia.com. This version has been lightly updated to reflect my current understanding, work, and offerings while preserving the heart and core message of the original article.
As I sat down to write this article, I found myself thinking about all the advice we're often given when life feels hard: Stay positive. Push through. Be stronger. Don't let it get to you.
While some of those ideas contain a grain of truth, I've found that resilience is usually built in a much quieter and more human way. Not by avoiding our struggles, but by learning how to meet them.
If you're willing to explore that with me, here are seven ways to build resilience from the inside out.
1. Feel your feelings.
To be resilient is to acknowledge and deeply know that wanting to give up and feeling crushed are temporary feelings. Every feeling is temporary and that is one thing resilient people know– that tough times don’t last forever.
And though feelings are temporary, they don’t disappear as a function of magic. They disappear, transmute, and transform as a function of being felt. The only way out (of anger, sadness, despair) is through.
When you can feel your feelings, and wrap them up in a blanket of self-compassion, you’ve practiced the foundation of resilience. It allows you to meet yourself where you are, rather than “should” on yourself for where you ought to be. And the sooner you meet yourself where you are, the easier it becomes to move through life with a little more openness, flexibility, and self-understanding.
What might it feel like if you let yourself have your sadness, anger, irritation, or fear while it’s fresh, new, and alive? What might it feel like to welcome all of your feelings, no matter what they are? What might it feel like to not try and take the experience of feeling away, to not distract, to not hide, to not numb? To show up as your true self, thoughts, emotions, and all? All feelings, as you may have heard, are simply visitors who come and go. They do, however, tend to stick around a lot longer when we ignore, deny, or push them away. Every feeling simply wants to be acknowledged, heard, and responded to with compassion.
The essence of being human is to feel all of your feelings– every single little one. Not just the happy ones, not just the peaceful ones– but all of them. It’s alright to be alright. And it’s equally alright not to be alright.
2. Practice acceptance.
We mentioned in our last article that to be resilient means to be agile. The fact is: you can’t be agile without practicing acceptance. If you are resisting life, you are not flowing with it.
So, in order to build resilience, we practice acceptance. We don’t have to like or even be okay with what is happening, but we are nevertheless willing to see things as they are without resisting them; instead, we acknowledge and work with them accordingly. This becomes easier, of course, if you practice #1 and know that the situation you are experiencing and its emotional impact, no matter how bad they seem in the moment, are not permanent.
It is said that “Not all storms come to disrupt your life. Some come to clear your path”, and I’d say this is largely true, yet it takes many people a long time to notice the cleared path. Some people never do, because they're so busy fighting their reality, wishing it wasn't so, and pouring all of their energy into resisting what has happened that they struggle to see what else might now be possible.
If you don’t want to stay buried in stale, negative emotions, it pays to practice adaptability in the form of acceptance, which means befriending that fine line between wanting to make and see change happen and accepting this moment and this life exactly as they are right now. When you tune in to your mind, your body, and your soul, where do you notice tension or heaviness? This is likely the place where you’ve been resisting reality. What can you do, in this moment, to ease up on that just a little bit? What can you do to more consciously walk that edge of accepting the situation or person as it is or as they are, while also actively embracing the potential and hope for change?
If this idea resonates with you, you may also enjoy my article What You Resist, Persists — What You Accept, Transforms, where I explore more deeply why acceptance and change are often more connected than they appear.
3. Practice self-care and relaxation.
The significance of rest and relaxation can’t be emphasized enough. When we hone in on what kind and how much regular rest and self-care we need, and give it to ourselves, there is less resilience required in the first place. Sure, situations in life can be tough, but they feel, appear, and are less tough when it is our well-rested self that experiences them. Without rest, resilience can be quite hard to come by. So, if resilient is what you want to be, let the most important thing you do each day be to practice some form of rest and relaxation.
Sleep in, take time to sit and read while you drink your morning cup of tea or coffee, take breaks during the school or work day, go for a walk, take a conscious breath, put away your phone, spend ten extra minutes cuddling with your partner or enjoy an extended hug with a friend, take a few more conscious breaths, read a few pages of a book, go to bed earlier, take a day off. Whatever version of rest and self-care resonates most with you right now, do it. Because emotional resilience can seem so difficult to come by sometimes; yet it’s so much easier when approached after a walk, a breath, a rest, or a break from the typical hustle and bustle of life’s activities.
4. Nurture your close relationships.
I bet you didn’t think you’d find close relationships on a list of ways to build resilience. But, guess what? No matter the personal characteristic– whether it’s reliability, honesty, passion, or resilience– it doesn’t exist in isolation of the people, relationships, and communities around us. Keeping connections around and keeping them close alone can catapult resilience up from a 1 to a 10. After all, it’s the difference between thinking “I’ve got to do this on my own” and “I’ve got the help that I need”. So, whatever you do, nurture your close relationships, keep them feeling like the zone of safety, security, and vulnerability that they are designed to be, and make social connections and support the crux of your life. When you’ve got the foundation of support, don’t be afraid to use it. It’s the person who knows when they can’t do it all alone, who seeks advice, and who asks for help when necessary that is ultra-resilient.
Keep in mind that close relationships don’t start close. They become close over time after an ongoing exchange of giving and receiving, appreciation, connection, trust building, and an experience of mutual ease. Notice who you feel most yourself around, and around whom words, ideas, stories of your past, and dreams about your future flow easily from your lips. Notice around whom life feels like a blessing instead of a chore, and who approaches you with the same curiosity, respect, and desire to support you as you do them. It’s easy as 1… 2… okay, maybe not. But rest assured, the more you appreciate those who appreciate you, laugh with those who laugh with you, and invest in those who invest in you, the more your social life will begin to serve as, and will remain, a solid framework of resilience and support well into the future.
Relationships can be some of our greatest sources of support, resilience, and belonging — but also some of our greatest sources of longing and disappointment. If this topic resonates with you, you might also enjoy my article Friendships and Relationships: The Longings and the Limits.
5. Practice gratitude.
Gratitude is the ability to see the good– to not miss the blessings that are right in front of us and that are influencing our life experience each and every single day. Because it’s a perspective, gratitude can be changed with a simple redirection of attention.
Are you feeling less than good? Try widening your attention. Look up, right, left and around. What changes when you ask, "Is there anything this experience might be teaching me?" or "What might I learn from this chapter of my life?"
You might envision positive and negative experiences alike as your teachers. You might open yourself up to strength, growth, and wisdom. You haven’t moved, your physical position has stayed the same, and you’ve stayed the same; yet things have changed. Simply because your view has changed.
That, right there, is one of the gifts of gratitude. Sometimes nothing about our circumstances has changed, and yet our experience of the moment shifts because we've widened our perspective. When you can say thank you for what is here today, it often becomes easier to notice the goodness, support, beauty, and possibility that already exist on the way to tomorrow.
6. Keep your locus of control internal.
An internal locus of control implies that it is you, your thoughts, and your actions– and not anyone else’s– that impact your destiny. It is the idea that your thoughts matter; your habits matter; your hard work matters; what you do every day between the time you wake up and go to bed matters in determining the course of your life. While we can't control everything that happens to us, we often have more influence than we realize in how we respond, what we practice, and where we direct our energy.
And, an internal locus of control isn't about believing we can control everything. It's about recognizing the difference between what is ours to influence and what isn't. When we focus our energy on the choices, habits, responses, and values that are within our control, we often feel more grounded, empowered, and resilient — even when life remains uncertain.
The belief that our choices matter — that our responses, habits, and actions have influence — can make such a big difference in how we move through difficult seasons. While we can't control every outcome, we are not powerless either.
7. Let go of attachment to the outcome.
Similar to practicing acceptance, when you let go of attachment to the outcome by letting go of your grip on what you want and think should happen, you allow space for things to unfold as they will– and hence, you can be agile.
Sometimes it feels like letting go of wanting what we want so badly will keep us stagnant. But, in fact, it’s the only thing that keeps us moving forward. To hold a tight grip on what, according to our mind, must happen in order for us to feel happy, satisfied, and okay is like stepping in a puddle of crazy glue. Try all you may, but you can’t move forward because that crazy glue’s only mission is to keep you in the place you once were, with the goals, desires, and thought streams you once had. To accept things as they come, to allow others to leave when it’s time, and to trust the beauty of change– that’s more like getting on your bicycle and maneuvering down through the hills and valleys before jumping into the river for a quick dip and getting back on your bike to skillfully navigate the trails back to the mountain top.
Although it helps to believe that you have control over your life so as to avoid complacency and helplessness (the crux of #6 above), at the end of the day, when, why, and how things happen is not up to us.
As Kate Eckman so beautifully says, “Being okay if it happens and okay if it doesn’t is a very powerful place to be”. In fact, it’s one of the most powerful and empowering places to be, because as long as we are trying to control the future, we are anxious. And anxiety tends not to be the foreground from which a resilient attitude and a quality life are built.
These seven practices work together, each supporting the others. Over the years, I've found that resilience is often built this way — from the inside out, through the small ways we relate to ourselves, our experiences, and the people around us.
Many of the practices that support resilience — self-compassion, emotional awareness, acceptance, understanding our inner world, and responding thoughtfully rather than reactively — are themes I explore more deeply inside my course, Happy from the Inside Out®. If you're looking for a gentle, practical way to strengthen your relationship with yourself and build greater resilience from the inside out, you can learn more about the course here.
