12 Tools for Fostering Resilience in Your Clients

12 Tools for Fostering Resilience inYour Clients

fostering resilienceThere are protective factors necessary for building resilience (Masten et al. 1990).

For each one of the following factors, two tools are listed that can be used to foster resilience in your clients. Finding subjective growth in connection to these protective factors is highly recommended.

life satisfaction
optimism
positive affect
self-efficacy
self-esteem
social support
All of the factors that are necessary for building resilience should have a foundation in cognitive practices that allow for self-awareness and self-acceptance to flourish. Self-awareness takes intentional work and practice. Through mindful and deliberate practices, this development allows for more growth to continue.

Life Satisfaction
Gratitude invading every area of your life with heartfelt authenticity will help you move toward a more satisfying view of your life. Studies have shown that including a gratitude practice in your life can improve wellbeing (Nelson, 2009). With any positive emotion, it must be with the lightest touch that one embraces gratitude. Make your practice less routine, but be more aware of its presence in your life. Cultivate that attitude of gratitude.

The next time you grab a piece of fruit, bring to mind all of the people involved in bringing that fruit to your home. As you become aware of the number of people that it takes for that fruit to be savored in your space, send out grateful wishes to those people. The farmers, the pickers, the boxers, the drivers… the chain is enormous. When you become more aware of the intertwined work of others, gratitude arises.

Another way to increase life satisfaction is by finding meaning and purpose. By continually offering a compassionate view of growth and learning where we can be of service to the greater good in the community around us, our life satisfaction increases. Volunteerism is a great place to explore purpose. Find an opportunity in your area.

Optimism
Developing a realistic, optimistic explanatory style is a skill that anyone can grow to foster increased resilience. Having flexibility in how we explain outcomes is a skill that can be built with intention. Attributing failure less to personal ability and more to personal effort tends to move people in the direction of action rather than self-defeating and depressive explanations.

A tool to help improve the presence of a realistic, optimistic explanatory style is reframing. Most people can quickly identify what they don’t want. To use a common struggle, let’s use weight loss. A pessimistic explanatory style would be phrases like, “I’m fat,” or “I need to lose weight.” Reframing into a realistic optimistic explanatory would be into phrases like, “I am cultivating healthy habits,” or “I am taking action toward building a healthy lifestyle.”

Practice self-compassion regularly. Compassion fatigue has an impact on levels of stress among service providers, reducing their overall wellbeing. Self-kindness, an understanding of shared humanity, and improvement in mindfulness can counter the effects of compassion fatigue.

An exercise that can serve you in real-time is the ‘say it to a friend’ test (Neff, 2020). Once you are in tune with your inner monologue, you will notice what you say to yourself. If what you’re saying to yourself would never be uttered to a friend, it does not pass the friend test and then should be tossed aside. The first person to hear your voice is you; make sure it speaks kindness.

Positive Affect
Many people are struggling with improving their positive affect or their propensity to feel positive emotions. Our negativity bias is strong (Vaish, 2008), but human beings can shift perspective to focus on cultivating opportunities for positive emotions mindfully. Though human experience is exceptionally subjective, improving opportunities for increased positivity is universal. Anyone can do it.

A simple tool to activate positive emotion is the Duchenne smile pencil test. It is hypothesized that the induction of a Duchenne smile (Soussignan, R., 2002) can trigger a positive afferent response. Take a pencil and place it in the back teeth. This facilitates a Duchenne (authentic smile), triggering the experience of the positive emotion felt when smiling. Give it a try with a friend, and you’ll probably end up laughing.

Finding a positivity mentor is an impactful tool. Find someone who consistently exhibits positivity. Ask them how they continually focus on what’s good. Learn from their example and start to mindfully shift your perspective toward subjective experiences of the following: joy, gratitude, serenity, interest, hope, pride, amusement, inspiration, awe, and love (Fredrickson, 2010)

Self-efficacy
How one attributes success is an important area to explore when attempting to illuminate self-efficacy. When we attribute growth to personal effort instead of globally attributing it to character, efficacy is allowed to flourish. Research shows that positive and negative affect influences a person’s expectations, estimates of successes, self-evaluation, and goal setting (Wright, & Mischel, 1982).

A tool to help re-establish attributional focus is a mastery memory exercise. Think back to a skill that you have mastered. List every step that had to be developed to achieve that mastery. None of us waved a magic wand and could suddenly read the words on a page. There were incremental steps to that mastery. Every skill that is mastered has a series of steps that build upon each other.

Allow yourself to attribute success to the consistent effort required for mastery, and celebrate how effective you were in building those successes.

Stacking successful habits is another tool that one can use to build self-efficacy. Start with a goal. Then think backward from that goal to the most simple habit you could adopt that would move you toward that goal. Make that simple habit consistent over a period of time. Then, once that simple change is well established, stack a new habit on top of the first. Consciously track the consistent change over time.

Self-esteem
When one can subjectively and cognitively emphasize what is personally valued about themselves, esteem grows. To appraise one’s value (Leary, M.R. & Baumeister R.F., 2000) requires a clear personal lens. Though we will have to interact and intertwine our value with other human beings, our value need not be disrupted by those interactions.

Getting crystal clear on a personal set of values is a first step in building self-esteem. Knowing one’s core values and stepping into living those values daily gives a foundation for their “sociometer” (Leary, M.R., & Baumeister, R.F., 2000). To know what you value about yourself, then makes interacting with others easier. It allows you to lead yourself in any interaction already holding in high esteem your value.

Another great way to build self-esteem is to find a new area of growth and master a new skill. Practicing mindful speaking, for instance, is a great skill to develop to build self-esteem.

Anxiety tends to interfere with social interaction, disrupting our ability to hear the other person in any conversation. By increasing our ability to listen to others actively, we can then improve our mindful speech. Practicing with every person we meet gives us ample opportunities to grow the skill, making conversations more fun.

Social Support
Boosting your friendships is one way to increase your resilience. Don’t be concerned about being the most popular person on the block. Enrich and nurture close friendships to improve social support. Find more science on positive relationships here.

Get involved. There are many people in need of help in your community. Whether it is through volunteerism, schools, or places of worship, getting involved in supporting others helps everyone. People who are involved in altruistic endeavors live longer and have better health (Schwartz et al., 2008

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