Resilience - Students (5 Minutes)
Resilience is the ability to ‘bounce back’ and recover from challenges you encounter in your life, so that you can stay on track with your goals and hopes for the future.
As you have gotten older, you’ve probably faced some big changes in your life. New schools, new friends, new responsibilities...
Sometimes, these changes can happen very quickly, and you are suddenly facing very difficult challenges.
Resilience is the ability to ‘bounce back’ and recover from these challenges.
You may have heard of resilience before. Let’s take a look at some of the common beliefs people have about it, as we break it down into three ingredients.
1. Resilience is (not) a personality trait that some people just ‘have.’
Just as we work on foot control in soccer or solving math problems, it is helpful to think of resilience as a set of social and emotional skills that can be improved with practice. It’s like a set of muscles that you can strengthen.
2. Resilience is (not) about avoiding negative feelings.
Resilience is focused on positive thinking, but it doesn’t mean ignoring negative feelings either. It is important to feel and deal with uncomfortable emotions. Although your brain is wired to focus on negative feelings and events (we’ll talk more about that later!), you can train your brain to find balance.
3. Resilience is (not) about being tough and going it alone.
It does take personal work to develop skills and practice positive thinking. However, research shows that support from family, friends and trusted adults can help you make it happen.
To sum it all up, the three ingredients of resilience are:
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Social and Emotional Skills |
Positive Thinking |
Supportive Relationships |
So how do these three ingredients come together and help you look toward the future as you deal with the challenges in your life?
What’s Next?
We are going to focus next on the 40 Developmental Assets, a guide to helping you develop resilience. We will discuss how the Assets were discovered, the different types of Assets and why they matter, and how Assets relate to the ingredients of resilience.