Self-regulation is all about being able to manage your own reactivity. A core part of being resilient is to manage your own emotions, recognize when you’re headed towards negative patterns or burnout, and know how to manage those emotions and rebalance yourself. 

For those who have this Everyday Resilience pillar as a strength, here are a couple of areas where you excel: 

1. Recognizing your own emotional weather pattern
2. Knowing activities and habits that you can lean on in to steady yourself, and
3. Strong awareness of your feelings and emotions. 

Those with a high degree of self-regulation are rarely characterized as temperamental, moody, callous, or explosive. More often than not, they showcase restraint, and strong judgment (and are self-compassionate when they don’t.) They know what situations are likely to set them off (low sleep, arguments with certain family members, etc.), and anticipating these reactions, they can move through these challenging situations. 

If self-regulation is one of your weaker pillars, you may struggle with recognizing internal signs of burnout, you might have difficulty restraining emotional reactions, and you might not have the best awareness of your own blind spots. You might react harshly or quickly to conflict and interpersonal challenges, and you might say things that you later regret. 

Other forms of low self-regulation include struggling to acknowledge or legitimize one’s own feelings and suppressing real emotions instead of establishing healthy ways to express them. When we bottle up our emotions without releasing pressure every once in a while, the bottle can overflow or burst!

Having self-regulation as an area of growth means that there is a huge opportunity to transform your resilience and energy with low-stakes exercises and practices. I’ve included a next step here (also a great resource to build upon self-regulation as a strength:

Those who excel with self-care (the close cousin of self-regulation) tend to be gentle with themselves accept their own emotional responses, and know how to meet their own needs.

This is one of the most important pieces of resilience! So much of stress and burnout comes from beating ourselves up (or beating ourselves up for beating ourselves up), and being able to be self-compassionate during challenging times is crucial. It’s the challenging situations in our lives that put us in the dirt, but it’s the mental chatter and beating ourselves up that keep us there.

Those who excel at this Everyday Resilience pillar tend to know their own strengths and weaknesses well. A big part of resilience is accepting that we can’t be good at everything – and putting ourselves in situations that leverage our talents and strengths.

A core part of this pillar is just being kind and gentle with oneself, which for many of us, especially physicians, can be quite difficult.

If you struggle with this pillar – you certainly aren’t alone – this is one of the most common areas of growth. You might find it a lot easier to list what you’re doing wrong than what you’re doing right, and you might beat yourself up excessively after a failure. Furthermore, you might dismiss your own emotions or have trouble making sure that your own needs are met. You might tend to put others needs before your own and find it hard to put yourself on the list of priorities (like many caregivers).

In times of difficulty and challenge, beating ourselves up only adds fuel to the fire. A core competency of resilience is learning to be gentle with yourself and to accept your shortcomings and mistakes. None of us are perfect, and learning to be more accepting of the things you aren’t as good at will help you build calm and confidence.

Countless longitudinal studies on happiness have shown that our quality of life is in large part determined by how closely connected we are to the people around us.

These relationships give us connection, bolster our empathy and communication skills, and provide a powerful backbone to the other 5 pillars – let’s take a look at what this looks like as a strength.

Strong relationships are a waltz of giving and receiving, and strength in this competency indicates a strong ability to support others, and to advocate for your own needs and be supported. This is especially important in times of conflict – when difficult conversations need to be had, and we have to lean on our empathy and listening abilities.

Relationships take time and intentionality – cultivating strong interpersonal relationships is no small task, and encompasses a variety of crucial skills. We have to balance our time, and allocate enough to the people who matter to us. We have to be able to address deficiencies in these relationships and have difficult conversations. We have to know how to support the people around us, and know what we need to feel supported. We have to have the courage to be vulnerable with the right people in our lives, using these people as supporters and people to enjoy time with, not people to impress or compete with.

For those who struggle with this pillar, you might benefit from becoming more clear on your own needs, and knowing what you need to feel loved and supported by those close to you. Zooming out a step further, it might be a high priority for you to identify which people in your life mean the most to you, and which relationships you want to cultivate further.

It might seem daunting to have this as an area of growth, but the good news is, there are high-impact actions you can take and habits you can adopt to radically transform your ability to connect. Here are some additional resources to check out:

What may sound like a relatively pedantic pillar is actually an incredibly important one – there is a lot of merit to looking on the bright side!

Positivity can help us maintain hope and direction in challenging times, and can help us feel more connected with our work and the people around us. It also helps us appreciate the everyday beauty and love around us, which makes us happy. Being positive helps us reintegrate with our purpose and our own strengths. When we focus more on our own good, and the good in those around us, it follows that we have an easier time connecting with others.

If this is a strength of yours, you’re likely to be able to look past setbacks, failures, and minor slights, and progress towards greater achievement and connection, which will sustain you and give you the strength to tackle even more. In my business, that’s what I call an upward spiral!

If this pillar is an area of growth for you, that’s not to say you’re a regular Eeyore, but you may benefit from taking time to frame things more positively.

It’s easy to notice what’s wrong in our lives – we live in a society that encourages us to be perfectionistic, to measure our messy interiors against other people’s polished exteriors, and to believe that there’s always some new thing that we’re missing on the road to happiness. In short, all of this trains us to focus on what we don’t have or what we aren’t, and not on what we do have and what we are.

It’s ironic, but the more we focus on where we’re falling short, the less confident we feel. The more we focus on what’s going well, the more energy and confidence we have to continue to progress and thrive.

A large part of resilience is the ability to feel confident and competent, and it’s hard to do that without a focus on the positives. Fortunately, there are easy ways to mindfully integrate positivity in our lives, and it can quickly become a natural habit for the mind, propelling us into an upward spiral.

Here are a couple things to check out if you’re interested in integrating more positivity into your life:

If perseverance is one of your strongest pillars it means, quite simply, you probably have a healthy relationship with setbacks. You understand that success, professionally and otherwise, is an iterative process, and you’re good about taking missteps and challenges in stride, and continuing to move forward.

As Rocky Balboa said, “It’s not about how hard you can hit, it’s about how hard you can get hit and keep fighting.” Perseverance is the ability to get knocked down by life and keep going without letting those setbacks and failures define us. When perseverance is a core strength, we view setbacks as teaching moments, not as a measure of our worth. A large part of perseverance is perspective – recognizing that challenges are part of life, that we have the power to internally frame obstacles in ways that are adaptive to us, and that we can learn from these challenges and use them as frameworks for future success.

If perseverance is an area of growth for you, it doesn’t mean that you are a quitter or that you lack follow through, but you might have internal messaging that is keeping you from fully responding to life’s challenges. You might shy away from opportunities that you aren’t sure that you’d excel in (fear of failure) or you might take challenges or mistakes that you make as measures of your ability and character rather than a singular instance you can learn from.

It’s important to remember that success is an iterative process, and take missteps and challenges in stride while continuing to move forward.

Here is an additional resource to help you master this pillar:

If flexibility is one of your strongest pillars, you are adaptive and know that change is an inevitable part of life. Flexibility goes hand in hand with a growth mindset, and believe that people can progress in most areas, with effort. Additionally, having flexibility as a strength means that you are able to question your own thoughts and beliefs, and realize that not everything our minds tell us is true.

Flexibility is so important for resilience because it cultivates a “roll with the punches” attitude, an acceptance of the uncertainty of life and the realization that life is less about the obstacles we face and more about how we respond to them. Embedded in flexibility is the power of choice. It’s also a willingness to change, when we recognize that something we’re doing is holding us back.

A somewhat hidden boon of flexibility is that it keeps life interesting. When we embrace the possibility of change and are open to the experiences that life brings us, we become surprised more and more by how many new, dynamic, powerful experiences we have ahead of us. The old adage is true – if you think you know everything, you learn nothing – and flexibility involves embracing the truth that we don’t have it all figured out, which allows us to experience and learn so much more.

If this is a pillar of growth for you, you may benefit from being more adaptive.

Flexibility is so important for resilience because it cultivates a “roll with the punches” attitude, an acceptance of the uncertainty of life and the understanding that we can adapt to overcome whatever challenges we face. Meeting challenges with flexibility is the “bend, don’t break” wisdom – by moving and adapting in the face of obstacles, we overcome them. Often times when we’re at lower points, things seem fixed and impossible to change. Being flexible reminds us that we will eventually move past whatever we’re struggling with – and there will be a new challenge there waiting for us! Another opportunity to be flexible…

Here’s a resource to help you deepen this strength: