To get started on building resilience, it’s important to understand your default setting. The ideal way to do this is to do a little “audit of your resilience”. What will help us to do this?

A personal resilience audit

✅ My values

Values are our internal compass, they help us identify what is important to us in life and help us make the right choices. Check out this article on Mindtools.com (https://www.mindtools.com/a5eygum/what-are-your-values) where you will also find a list of values from which you can choose the 10 that are most important to you. As a next step, try ranking these values on a scale from most important (1) to least important (10).

✅ Personal SWOT analysis

Try to create a personal SWOT analysis in relation to your resilience. That is, what you perceive as your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Instructions on how to create a personal SWOT analysis can be found at Mindtools.com (https://www.mindtools.com/aaiakpy/personal-swot-analysis)

✅ Test your resilience

It can also be useful to use one of the self-assessment tests to help you identify your strengths and challenges in relation to resilience. There is a 20-question resilience text on the Psychology Today website that will give you some basic guidance: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/tests/personality/resilience-test

✅ Learning from experience

What has helped you overcome difficult situations in the past? What strategies have helped you and what resources have you used? How have you responded to change? Try to write down these experiences and find resources that will help you in the future.

👉 Do you already know where you stand with your resilience? First, we took the time to analyze where you are today and what you can draw from. Next, we’ll go through the steps to create a practical plan that can strengthen our ability to adapt to change.

Let’s now show how to make a concrete plan to build our resilience so that we can better adapt to change.

A plan for a personal resilience-building strategy

✅ My goals and priorities

In the previous section you tested where you stand with your resilience. You also got to know your values, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats and past experiences better. Now let’s focus on what your goals and priorities are. What exactly do you want to focus on? To learn relaxation and meditation techniques so you can better handle stressful situations? Explore and engage in supportive communities to gain a sense of belonging? Learn to be more assertive. Identify your priorities and then define your short and long term goals.

✅ Step by step

Now set a point-by-point plan that will lead you to your goal. If your priority is to reduce your stress by using relaxation techniques, a point plan might include, for example: exploring different types of relaxation techniques, choosing a technique to try, setting a specific time and space to practice the technique, practicing daily for a minimum of 10 minutes for 30 days.

✅ Compiling a personal “Resilience Toolkit”

Create your own set of tools to help you in difficult situations. For inspiration, click here: Building Resiliency: 73 tools to help people develop the skills to overcome all of life’s challenges (A. M. Doel, https://www.adrian.edu/files/assets/theresiliencytoolkit.pdf). This comprehensive toolkit is a great source of inspiration and includes chapters on: assessing resilience, coping with adverse life experiences, learning to regulate emotions, achieving meaningful goals, cultivating hope and optimism, and strengthening health.

✅ Ongoing “check-in”

To stay motivated and reflect on whether we are still on the right path, it is important to stop periodically to do a personal “check-in.” This can be done by asking questions such as: What worked for me? What didn’t? What can I do differently? Where can I add and subtract? You can also keep a personal diary to record your successes and experiences.

👉 We are now over and in the next exercise you will have the opportunity to recap everything you have learned. Let’s do it.