Building Resilience Starts with You

Building resilience is one of the most important things we could develop to prepare for the challenges ahead and improve our well-being. We can do so by practicing mindfulness. Mindfulness is paying attention in a particular way, on purpose, in the present moment, and without judgement. 80% of leaders like Oprah Winfrey, Tony Robbins, and Steve Jobs adopt mindfulness by meditating as part of their daily life. Deep breathing helps to change your state of mind and release the tension and anxiety that you experience. It also helps with recognising our and improving our emotions and improving memory. As part of the Pay It Forward Mentorship Programme’s Building Resilience workshop on 14 August, our speaker Ratna Juita, Well-Being Facilitator at The Mindgem, shared her tips on how practicing mindfulness can help one adapt and bounce back to setbacks:

1) Mindfulness is a superpower but it’s not magic. Building resilience takes time and consistency. It is not a quick fix, and it is important to be patient with oneself and care for ourselves in different area of our life. We can take the first step by making connections and building a social support network by creating our own tribe of mentors and peer support to help as a pillar to personal growth. Networking will also help us to build relationships and learn from other’s experience. We can also maintain a hopeful outlook in life by moving towards realistic goals by writing them down to help us be on track. Taking decisive actions will help us face our challenges. As long as we know where we want to grow, we can take small actions to get to where we want to be. 2) Look at emotions like your friend. Mindfulness breeds resilience, it helps us become more aware of the emotions we are experiencing and become more at ease. Many times when we experience discomfort, we try to push it away. Mindfulness helps us to change our relationship with discomfort by treating it like a friend, caring for them, and eventually we build the resilience muscle towards setbacks in life. Look at the bigger picture and see a crisis as an opportunity for growth, self-discover and improve oneself. View challenges in life as something that’d help to discover personal strengths. We should nurture a positive view of ourselves and hone our ability to help keep things in perspective and context. 3) Reframing our thinking is key to handling stress. Self-care is vital for building resilience towards stressors in our lives that we can’t eliminate. When we’ve taken steps to care for our mind and body, we will be better equipped to live our best lives. Self-care should be added into our routines, it would help us to build a healthy habit and manage stress better. With a clear mind, we can manage challenging situations better. “Between stimulus and response there is space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” - Viktor Frankl

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YWLC’s PIF Mentorship Programme is a 6-month mentorship programme in partnership with International Women’s Forum (IWF) and ITE College Central. YWLC members mentor budding young adults from IWF and ITE that are driven to learn. Mentor-mentee pairs from this programme consistently learn and bring out the best from each other.

For other queries about YWLC’s Social Impact initiatives, email impact@ywlc.org.sg.

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Organising Committee: Social Impact

Organising Team: Stacey Chua, Dayna Ho, Audrey Tim, Nithya Karthikeyan

Speaker: Ratna Juita

Author: Joey Ong