The 5-Step Process for Building Resilience

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What to Expect:

• A 5-Step Formula for Building Resilience

Resilience is a skill.

Here's a simple way we can practice.

By deliberately leveraging this 5-step process, we can all get a bit more resilient. Repeating these steps over time will help us handle progressively more significant challenges, respond more effectively to stress, and stay grounded in our goals.

These are the 5 steps that will help you build resilience:

1. Recognize your emotional response and how you’re coping.

2. Identify what triggered the response.

3. Reappraisal.

4. Evaluate effectiveness.

5. Focus on the future.

Recognize Your Emotional Response & Coping

The first step we take is building our awareness of the emotional and physiological changes we are experiencing. It’s hard to be resilient if we can’t clearly identify what it is we’re trying to manage. Practicing labeling emotions and sensations can help us get better at quickly recognizing our responses.

The second dimension of this step is to recognize your coping. Most of us automatically initiate some form of coping in response to a difficult emotion. You might try to distract yourself, ruminate, or breathe through it. While some strategies are more effective than others, this step is about simply noticing what you tend to do, and whether or not it’s working for you.

Identify the Trigger

Now that you know what you’re feeling and how you’re trying to cope, the next step is to look for what triggered this emotion. Maybe it was something that someone said or a newly imposed deadline. Maybe it was a critical thought. Whatever it may be, we want to see if we can clearly call it out. This will enrich the model of our emotional experience and help us better prepare to cope with similar situations in the future.

As a bonus, once we can identify what we’re feeling, what triggered it, and how we’re coping, we can start to identify whether our actions are aligned with our goals and values. This is a good way to give ourselves feedback on the effectiveness of our current strategies. If the coping matches the values, we’re on the right track. If not, it’s a chance to learn and improve.

Reappraisal

Here’s where we take our first step toward building resilience. Now that we know what caused the current feeling, what we’re feeling, and how we’re dealing, we have an opportunity to train ourselves to see the experience differently. This is a skill within the larger resilience process that, with some practice, can also become automatic.

The most common appraisal dichotomy is the "challenge vs. threat" appraisal.

Suppose you find yourself experiencing anxiety, for example. In that case, that’s a sign you’ve immediately appraised a situation as a threat. To reappraise in this situation would be to try and find the challenge in the situation, and to push yourself to think of the trigger more constructively.

Here are some other reappraisals we can use to facilitate performance:

• Identify the learning opportunity

• Lookfor the silver lining

• Put things in perspective

• Remind ourselves that this is only temporary

Whatever you choose, one step not to miss is to examine what can be learned from this stressful situation. This allows us to respond robustly to something similar the next time we face it. Ultimately, any good reflective process is about learning so we can be better next time.

Evaluate Effectiveness

Once we’ve gotten to step 4, we’ve done some pretty hard work.

Now it’s time to look at the first 3 steps and see what worked and what didn’t. By dispassionately observing our own behavior, we train ourselves to be our own best coach. This is a chance to be honest with ourselves and figure out what we’d like to be different next time.

Focus on the Future

In the final step, we identify specifically what we’d do in a similar situation in the future. Would we stick with our current approach, or try a different tactic? What would best align us with our long-term goals and values? This is your opportunity to proactively plan and prime your mind to more efficiently execute next time.

Bringing it Home

What the research suggests is that taking the time to reflect, and then focus on the future, minimizes the long-term negative impact of the stressful situation. We can learn, expand our range of options in the future, and move on. 

Your challenge for this week is to practice these 5 steps after a stressful situation. The more you practice, the more automatic it'll be come, and the stronger your resilience will get.

Until next time!