Mindful Practices For Achieving Emotional Resilience And Balance

In a world where we are constantly inundated with the pressure to succeed, change and grow, it becomes unbelievably hard to keep your head screwed up straight. Between competitors doing better than you, the risks of failure, and fear of a challenge that might destroy everything you’ve worked for, mental strength seems impossible to come by.

How, one wonders, do you keep faith in yourself and your abilities when it’s so easy to crumble in the face of adversity? The answer… is in the little things. It might seem like fortitude and confidence might be something you’re born with, but the truth is, these are all qualities you can cultivate. Read on to find out exactly how you can become the kind of mentally strong person you’ve always admired from afar…

1. Hold yourself accountable

If there’s anything you’ll learn from some of the greatest success stories you’ll read, it’s that the sharpest people in the world don’t cut themselves any slack. Blaming people for failures that you have a hand in seems like it might be saving your skin at the time, but it actually doesn’t serve you in the long run. To fortify yourself and actually try to do better, you have to take stock of the things you have done, and the things you are responsible for. The more you make that a habit, the less you are likely to be fazed by catastrophe.

2. Step out of your comfort zone

Things are always splendid in the three-kilometre mental radius you feel the most secure in–but choosing to stay in it sets you up. You end up being completely thrown by anything you’re not used to doing and experiencing–and it takes a toll on your mind. The way to remedy that is easy–start with little things that frighten you, and build from there. Go on a solo trip if you never have before, sit with CA and understand how to do your taxes, ask to take on a task outside your purview at work; there’s nothing too small.

3. Analyse your mistakes

Another habit of the mentally strong and successful — breaking down the things you fucked up. Making mistakes is the most normal thing in the world, but your reaction to those mistakes is what counts. If you run away from the aftermath of your errors, you feed your weakness and are likely to do it again and lose more confidence. Instead, go back, take your mistake apart and figure out where you went wrong. That way, the next time you’re in that situation, you’ll be far more confident about what to do.

4. Practice saying ‘no’

While it might seem like the natural thing to do for most of us non-confrontational folks, nothing can take a toll on your mental health like people-pleasing. Saying ‘yes’ to challenges might be great (and we’ll talk about that later), but saying ‘yes’ to people every time is terribly unhealthy. You’ll fast be recognised for your inability to turn things down and find yourself overloaded with other people’s demands and expectations. Get into the habit of saying ‘no’. People have said it to you a thousand times before, haven’t they?

5. Cut out toxic friendships and relationships

Toxic people aren’t just the biggest time-suck, they are also an enormous drain of your energy and emotional bandwidth. Certain people become our ‘weaknesses’ over time and learn quickly to exploit that. The onus of separating the grain from the chaff is on you. Think of it as a friendship/relationship edition of cleaning the fridge. You’ll find many things have started to go bad, and shouldn’t be in there anymore but you just haven’t had the time to throw it out. You’ll find yourself with more shelf-space–and mental space–for the things that count.

6. Acknowledge your weaknesses

Knowing your strengths and playing to them is an art–but the lesser-known flip-side of that art is knowing and factoring in your weaknesses. To think of yourself as invincible only sets you up for a higher fall; which then becomes hard to mentally recover from. The smartest, strongest minds in a room usually know exactly what they’re good at–and not–so that they can plan for it. You can’t work on something if you don’t believe it exists.

7. Learn to keep your emotions in check

Of course, it’s the most human thing in the world to get emotional. What becomes disruptive (and not in a cool, tech way) is letting those emotions take the wheel. The idea isn’t to become a feelingless robot who doesn’t care about things; it’s simply to reign in your feelings so they dictate the course of action. Mentally strong people might feel things just as much as others — may be more–but they will keep those in check when making tough decisions.

8. Break down challenges into parts

If you look at a mountain from afar, getting to the top seems a terrifying and insurmountable task. Go close enough and it’s simply a large piece of rock that you have to start scaling, and as you go step by step, you make your way to the summit. The worthwhile challenges are always big and scary, but look at them as one daunting whole and you’ll be too afraid to rise to them. Instead, cut it up into parts and do those parts one at a time.

9. Keep setting new goals

The simplest way to put it is this; complacency is the enemy of strength. Mental strength–much like physical strength–needs rungs to climb. Think of it this way; when you master lifting 10kg weights in the gym, you progress to 15 and 20 and so on. Mental tenacity isn’t too different from that; every big challenge you accomplish makes you stronger; and capable of taking on an even bigger one next. The key thing is to keep setting new goals for yourself instead of sitting back and believing you have reached your limit when there’s a part of you that knows you haven’t.

10. Recognise fear–and plan for it

The famous quote by Nelson Mandela sums it up; ‘courage is not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it’. Being afraid of things, or thinking you are not capable of them is the most normal feeling in the world. But the key difference between the people who seem unafraid and take on the world–and the people that don’t–is that the former don’t shy away from recognising their fear and working through it. Dismantle your fear and ask yourself what the worst possible outcome is if you try–and would that really be so much worse than the outcome if you didn’t bother to try at all?