Sometimes you feel that everything is against you. You experience stress and you do not know how to deal with it. Probably you have heard of resilience and it is an important quality to have. But what is resilience? And what can you do to grow in this quality?

Dealing with problems
You need resilience if you want to deal with problems. Being resilient can help you with handling problems and stress. By handling problems better your self confidence will grow, it can cause that you dare more things in the future.

TNO describes resilience as: the ability to adapt your work to a different circumstance by organizing the strategies, resources and competences in a different way (TNO, 2016). It is a whole sentence but in short it means that you can adapt yourself if there is a change, you can organize yourself to the change.

How do you become aware?
By becoming more resilient you will get stronger, you have experienced something and by that you will get stronger. For example, you failed for your exam, you got fired or you got a divorce. To feel better after such an experience you will need resilience, but how do you develop this?

• Set up achievable goals. When you do not have goals that you can achieve, it can have a negative impact on your self-confidence.
• Accept yourself. It sounds cheesy but stop looking at other people, appreciate yourself more. It can be a waste of energy focussing on others so much.
• Sometimes you just have to ‘survive’. Not everything will go as planned. You have to be kind to yourself and sometimes you have to pamper yourself more.
• Exercise more. This will help against worrying and helps for the resilience. Choose something you like to do, such as: cycling, taking a walk or just doing a sport.