The Role of Character Strength in Resilience Development

The Role of Character Strength in Resilience Development

Introduction Resilience attracted considerable attention and underwent substantial development in the 1970s, leading to a more profound understanding of the concept. According to Masten (2011), resilience has been observed in at-risk children with mental health and developmental issues caused by genetic or environmental factors. Resilience, as defined by Masten (2001), is the ability of a dynamic system to withstand or recover from significant changes that threaten its stability, viability, or development. This is primarily achieved by managing negative emotions and mobilising behavioural responses to alleviate stressful situations. Moreover, resilience aids individuals in coping with challenging life experiences by proactively adopting behaviours that enhance positive emotional perceptions of those experiences (Folkman & Lazarus, 1985). Key Theoretical Elements Masten (2001) is renowned for describing resilience as ‘ordinary magic’, emphasising two essential criteria: (a) one’s capacity to adapt and develop in a positive way and (b) conditions that makes it difficult to adapt well. Positive adaptation, or development, refers to the accomplishment of developmental tasks and psychological adaptations to the environment. Masten (2001) frequently mentions two resilience theories: variable-focused and person-focused approaches. Using multivariate analysis, correlations among variables are explored in a variable-focused approach. Even though this method is statistically strong and can show patterns across variables (such as the person, their environment, and their experiences), it falls short of capturing a person’s entire experience. On the other hand, a person-focused approach considers the whole person, compares resilient and non-resilient individuals, as well as examines life course pathways and determines why they differ. Character Strengths as Resilience Factor Many people find that navigating through a traumatic experience necessitates the use of both...
Just Keep Going, Don’t Give Up!

Just Keep Going, Don’t Give Up!

When I look at many successful people in life, be they successful on the grand stage or in their private lives, whether they run a multi-million-pound business or they have the happiest and most wholesome marriage, one thing that they seem to have in common is this: they never give up. This is a big life lesson that I’m learning right now. If you want something, if you dream of something, if you have a vision, a goal, if you have a challenge to get through, a dark period to traverse, you simply cannot give up. I know it sounds so cliché. It always sounded that way to me, too. But, now I’m realising in practice just how important it is. As a life skill, a key element of resilience and a denominator of success, happiness and wellbeing. When things get tough, you may have to drag yourself along with your last iota of strength to take just one… more… step. To get out of bed for just one… more… day. To work for just one… more… hour. This is the totally unglamorous and often painful side of success in many areas of life. You just have to keep going. There’s also something about our ability to push ourselves further than our minds had previously decided we could go. It’s almost a ‘proving oneself wrong’, ‘surprising oneself’ and delighting in the discovery that you have more courage and resilience than you thought you did. It makes you realise how the mind and body can trick you into thinking that you’re done, when in fact, you still have a lot...
Reframing Change: Staying Resilient As Life Happens

Reframing Change: Staying Resilient As Life Happens

This September my daughters left for their first term at university. They are twins so milestones arrive in duplicate. No dipping toes into changing family dynamics for me; it’s a head first dive into an empty nest situation, and it has churned up a lot of emotions. Will the loss of my ‘mum’ identity mirror the kicking and screaming of my younger self as I was dragged in to motherhood 20 years ago? Can I step back into the pre-child version of me or is she lost forever? Am I equipped to navigate this time of change and uncertainty? Luckily the answer to that last one is, hopefully, yes. Positive Psychology has offered me some tools that come into their own when life gets uncertain. That doesn’t mean the sea doesn’t get choppy it’s just I am more confident in my ability to float, perhaps even swim. So today, Day 2 in a childless house, my chest is tight. It feels like there is a tangled knot of something stuck there and unpicking the mess of feelings may just help me digest the whole. So here is what I have learnt about transitions, emotions and resilience.   Emotions This season of change is bittersweet. Positive and negative emotions are jumbled together and hard to separate. The aim is to acknowledge these, trying to discern them as clearly as I can, without assigning judgements like ‘good’ or ‘bad’. For me, there is pride in my daughters’ success in their exams and excitement as they move towards adulthood but there is also sadness, loss, regret and emptiness. I accept I will...
Pandemic – How to manage emotions and increase resilience

Pandemic – How to manage emotions and increase resilience

We are only too aware of the physical, social and economic effects of this current pandemic, but it is also widely acknowledged that the psychological effects on individuals will be possibly our biggest long term challenge.   Mental health and the pandemic The burden of mental health disorders following disasters and previous viral outbreaks is well documented. A recent report for mentalhealth.org.uk  [1] looked at the effect of the pandemic on our mental health; ‘Resilience enables us as individuals, communities, nations and as a country, to cope with the stress of the coronavirus pandemic. Whilst 64% of people say that they are coping well with the stress of the pandemic of those who have experienced stress almost nine out of ten 87% are using at least one coping strategy. People have used a wide range of strategies to cope; these most often included going for a walk, spending time in green spaces, and staying connected with others whilst some people are resorting to potentially harmful ways of coping, including increased alcohol consumption, substance misuse, and over-eating, putting their mental and physical health at greater risk’ The Health Foundation’s findings [2] show that when you take into account the effects of social isolation, job and financial losses, housing insecurity and reduced access to Mental Health services you can begin to imagine the sheer numbers of people that are potentially affected.   What can we do to stay psychologically well? Well, one of the best things that we can do is to manage our emotions. Managing our emotions during this pandemic will increase our resilience. The RQi Resilience Model developed by...
The Gift that Keeps on Giving: Building Your Conceptual Knowledge

The Gift that Keeps on Giving: Building Your Conceptual Knowledge

In previous posts I have written about emotions and how they are constructed by us rather than fixed within our brains. This gives us a great deal of freedom and opportunity to construct many different emotions to build a healthy emotional life. To do this we need to have a rich body of conceptual knowledge. This post will look closer at what this means and how we can do this through skill development, so we can start the New Year by giving ourselves the gift of healthy mental health and resilience.   The importance of situation We experience emotions within context, meaning with each moment of the day we are doing something, with or without another person, at a particular location, for a particular reason. All of this is data is gathered by our brains, alongside the feelings we have about the situation (it’s good or bad), and ends up as an emotion, thought, or behaviour. We therefore have the potential to have an infinite amount of emotional experiences as each moment is slightly different to the next. These differences may be subtle, but they are different and if we want we can develop the skill of constructing emotions that are specific to each of those moments. This is called ‘emotional granularity’, or the ability to be really specific about the emotion we experience for that particular situation.   Why a skill, isn’t it just what happens? Even though we all have the ability to experience our emotions very specifically, we are taught to experience them in a more general way. In our culture, we talk about basic emotions...
Want to be resilient? Then Forget the Crowd and Follow Your Truth

Want to be resilient? Then Forget the Crowd and Follow Your Truth

You know that feeling when you’re doing something or being somewhere and your heart’s just not in it? It might be your job, your relationship, a family event or a social gathering. Whatever it is, you know deep down that you don’t really want to be there but, you felt like you had to do it because that’s what everyone else was doing. You felt like you didn’t have any other options. You felt like you just couldn’t say no. So, there you are, in that icky situation and you’re feeling… strong, capable, empowered, resilient? Of course not, you probably feel the opposite of all those things. You feel irritable, weak, trapped and maybe even like the slightest challenge could tip you over the edge. This is the opposite of resilience and it’s what you experience when you follow the crowd, instead of following your truth. Resilience isn’t just about how you think and how you handle your emotions. It’s also about authenticity, it’s about how true you are, to you. Why we choose the crowd over our truth There are many things that we could say no to but, we don’t because we’d rather follow the crowd. We might think they are just small things – like going to social gatherings with people we don’t really connect with or, wearing clothes that are popular even though we don’t feel comfortable in them. The problem is, we do these small things repeatedly and the negative effects compound as we get further and further from our truth. We do this because we don’t want to be the odd one out,...