Real Strength

Build Your Resilience and Bounce Back from Anything

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• Publisher: Capstone
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780857086716
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
• Index: Psychology

"One of the best books I've ever read on practical resilience."
— Miriam Akhtar, positive psychologist and author of What is Post-Traumatic Growth?

BUILD YOUR RESILIENCE

What do you do when life throws a curveball? Adversity is an inescapable part of life, but it's how you deal with it that really counts. Resilience is about using those challenges, however large or small, to reset your course and create the life you want.

BOUNCE BACK FROM ANYTHING

Real strength is not just about surviving hard times, but thriving despite the challenges. Using the latest research and advice from experts in the field of wellbeing and resilience, Psychologies magazine will help you:

• Feel more confident in your ability to overcome change
• Tap into and build on the inner resilience you already have
• React in a healthy way to problems and opportunities
• Avoid the common pitfalls that rob you of your strength
• Adopt new techniques to help you start getting stronger today

When life knocks you back, you need to tap into those reserves of strength and find a way to move forward again. You are strong, you are brave and you are about to take the first step.

"Essential reading for anyone who wants a step-by-step guide on how to challenge themselves and grow."
— Dr Tamara Russell, Director, Mindfulness Centre of Excellence

1 WHAT DOES REAL STRENGTH MEAN TO YOU?

CHAPTER 1
WHAT IS REAL STRENGTH?

What comes to mind when you think of the word ‘strength’? Not the sort of strength that means you can lift weights at the gym of course, but mental and emotional strength (although you could argue that you need a degree of the latter, to do the former). You often hear people say, ‘she’s such a strong person’ or ‘he’ll be alright, he’s strong’, but what do they mean? Chances are, everybody will mean something slightly different, and the sort of person your friend or your mum or your colleague thinks of as strong may not be the sort of person you think of.

Try it now: if you were to describe a strong person, or identify someone you already know who you think of as mentally strong, who would you choose? What qualities and traits do they possess? Perhaps you see a strong person as stoic; someone who rarely complains and seems to be able to withstand more pain and adversity than others; or perhaps it is someone who possesses military-style toughness – who seems fearless and enjoys pushing themselves to the limit. Write down the name of the person or people if you like, and a list of what makes them strong in your opinion.

This is a useful exercise for defining your notions of real strength as they are right now, but the purpose of this chapter is to hold up those current notions and examine them; if necessary, to challenge them. Because while stoicism, toughness and so on definitely have their value, we believe that real strength is a lot more subtle, complex and wide-reaching than that. It’s certainly not as simple as the opposite of weakness. In fact, it’s probably not what you think it is at all. When you discover what real strength is really about, we bet you’ll realize you’re already much stronger than you think.

Before we begin to help you tap into the reserves of strength you already have, and help you build more, let’s explore definitions of real strength – current and more outdated. It’s important to point out that this isn’t THE definitive list because, as we’ve said, real strength is open to interpretation. Instead, see it more as an exploration of real strength. The idea, then, is that you can use this list as inspiration. You can decide which versions of strength mean the most to you. Crucially, you can decide which facets of real strength you could benefit most from working on in order to help you not just survive this bump in the road, but to come out thriving. Not just to bounce back, but to bounce higher. Because we all have reserves of strength, it’s just knowing how to access them. Once you can do that, you really can triumph over adversity and find deeper joy and satisfaction in your life.

DEFINING REAL STRENGTH

1. Real strength is about resilience

When you think of the word ‘strong’, chances are certain synonyms come to mind: tough, robust, resilient, determined … Of all these, resilient is probably the closest to what we mean when we talk about real strength. You could go so far as to say that the two words are interchangeable.

Still, there are so many ways to define strength and resilience. If we look up ‘strength’ in the Oxford Dictionary, there are no less than 18 definitions. These include:

1. Capacity for moral effort or endurance.
2. Power to sustain force without breaking or yielding.
3. Physical power.

For ‘resilience’ alone, there are three:

1. The action or an act of rebounding or springing back.
2. Elasticity.
3. The ability to recover readily from, or resist being affected by, a setback, an illness.

If we were to take all these descriptions and turn them into a three-word description, we could say that resilience/real strength is ‘thriving despite adversity’. That’s about it in a nutshell. But let’s delve deeper …

The word resilience¹ first came into use in the 1970s. Emmy Werner was one of the first scientists to use the word resilience to describe a group of children from Kauai, Hawaii, who despite growing up in poverty with alcoholic and mentally-ill parents, still thrived as a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1: WHAT DOES REAL STRENGTH MEAN TO YOU?
• 2 WHAT'S STOPPING YOU FROM BOUNCING BACK?
• 3 HOW CAN YOU BUILD REAL STRENGTH?
• What Next?
• About Psychologies
• Eula