Building Resilience: What Does It Mean to Bounce Back?

When you hear the phrase, “bounce back,” what comes to mind? For some of us, it’s the image of a community coming together to recover their strength and rebuild their homes after the shock and destruction of a natural disaster. For others, it recalls the past couple of years and how well our nation’s schools and businesses transitioned to full-time studying and working from home after the outbreak of COVID-19.

Still, resilience does not only apply to major hurdles or events like tragedy, trauma, or disaster. Resilience also applies to the little things in life like mistakes, shortcomings, and criticism. This is not to say that your problems are small, but greater emotional resilience can help us in more instances than we realize. And because resilience is helpful in all life’s adversities – big or small – it means we have ample opportunities to cultivate more of it. 

But first, what exactly is resilience?

The definition of resilience is the capacity to rebound from adversity. While being resilient means being able to rebound, there are a few important things you should keep in mind when thinking about how people develop that “bounce back” ability. For example, resilience isn’t something that happens overnight; it’s a process that takes time and involves many steps.

When someone has high levels of this trait, they tend to be happier overall because setbacks don’t knock them off their feet for long periods; instead, they pick themselves up relatively quickly.

Despite some people being naturally higher in this trait, most of us develop resilience throughout our lives as we work through various life obstacles like illness, heartache, rejection, and conflict. It’s not easy to bounce back from adversity, but the good news is that you’re able if you work at it.

When something or someone in life knocks you down, you want to be able to overcome it quickly, so you don’t stay down, right? 

You can do several things to increase your emotional resilience, and your focus areas will depend largely on your characteristics and areas needing improvement. For example, people who tend to be overcritical, defensive, pessimistic, inflexible, indecisive, quick-tempered, or narrow-minded may benefit greatly from strengthening their resilience.

Overall, there are a few key things to understand about resilience and how building it might apply most to you.

First and foremost, we talked about how resilience means getting up after being knocked down. Having resilience doesn’t mean that you’ll bounce back immediately when something goes wrong, as that would be unrealistic. It also doesn’t mean you have to forget about the unfavorable thing that happened. Instead, it means that you’re able to realize enough positives and remove yourself from a negative mindset to keep going.

Another way to think of resilience is trying again tomorrow. Failure truly is an opportunity – to learn, reassess your methods, and try again. Resilient people look at failures as opportunities for growth, not complete downfalls with no chance of returning. For this reason, they are less afraid of failure and less likely to hide from fearful or vulnerable situations.

Finally, resilience means baby steps, not giant leaps. If you want to build resilience, work on taking things in stride. For instance, maybe feedback and criticism tend to sting fiercely and knock you down for longer than you’d like them to. So, one critical instance at a time, practice receiving feedback objectively, trusting that it’s not personal, and expressing gratitude for a chance to be better.

Remember that everyone’s personality, background, and experiences will always be different, so no two people will build resilience in the same way.

While some people may take baby steps to become more resilient over time, others might encounter something traumatic and take giant leaps without intending to. And sometimes, you might even need to take a step back before you can take two steps forward. So, honor where you are and know that this type of emotional growth takes time, experience, and practice.

No matter what your path to greater resilience looks like, be encouraged by others who have figured out ways of being resilient, and remember that a little self-compassion goes a long way.