Build resilience with a future mindset

Change can be challenging.

This often comes as a surprise when it’s a change that we really want. But it doesn’t matter if you’re adjusting to the realities of the promotion you finally won or managing a personal transition that you weren’t expecting.

Whether you worked for this, whether it’s the next step of your vision or something you didn't see coming, challenges will arise. If you are fully in, those challenges will stretch you.

In fact, so many of us are moving at warp speed these days that even regular daily life can be full of ups, downs and surprises. I’m hearing that a lot, lately. Fortunately, we have plenty of research to show how we can learn to be a bit more resilient in the face of this reality.

While many people think of resilience as the ability to withstand and move past adversity, I see it as a bit broader than that.

Resilience is about being able to surf with the changes and challenges of life— those we initiate and those we don’t — and thrive.

How? By changing perspective. Cultivating positive responses. Better understanding the differences between what we control and what we don’t.

We can build a mindset that helps us move forward, instead of spinning us into anxiety.

We can change our narrative from “nothing works” to “this one thing didn’t work, but let's try something else.”

We can step out of the past and into the future, and ground ourselves in where we are going instead of what we are moving away from. (Or to paraphrase Albert Einstein, we can stop attempting to solve problems with the thinking that created them.)

When we do this, it changes things. That doesn’t mean that life suddenly turns magical and all of your problems vanish. But it does mean that life is always a bit magical when we are open to seeing that and our problems can appear quite different depending on how we’re looking at them.

One way that I like to work with this is to know where you’re headed and place yourself there in your mind.

If you know where you’re headed, it can be much easier to find an empowering perspective that feels truthful and helps you to resolve or surf with the challenge. And that is a lot less stressful.

Try exploring these questions:

What is the result that you truly want in this situation? What does success look like for you?
If you could see this challenge from the point of view of where you’re going, and not where you’ve been, what would look and feel different?
How would “future you” handle this situation?
If you were already at your definition of success, how did you get there?
Where else have you successfully handled a similar challenge? How did you do it?

Are you acting from where you’re headed? Or are you stuck in trying to navigate from where you’ve been?

Take an honest inventory. Celebrate where you are getting the results you want, and where you're not, maybe it’s time to start with your success in mind.