Tools to increase your resilience

ANNE-LAURA VAN HARMELEN: OK, so now we know the traits that help you build resilience, but even if you don’t have any of them, if you get angry a lot or if you worry a lot, you can still become very resilient with a little bit of help. And we call that resilience tools, and here we’ll show you what the resilience tools are and how they work. Your parents are an important resilience tool. It helps when you talk a lot with your parents about how you’re feeling, about your friends, and about how you’re doing in school. It also helps when you spend a lot of time with your parents and when they make time for you.

The ambience at home is also very important. It helps when this is friendly and helpful and that there’s cohesion in your family. But that doesn’t mean that that has to happen every day. It helps when you have family members that support you, like your sister and your brother, but also your aunts or uncles or grandparents and that they support you mentally so that you can talk to them when you feel lonely, but also that they support you financially so that you can buy trousers when you need them. Friends are also very important in building resilience. It helps when you have friends that you can talk to that you can do fun things with and that will spend time with you.

It doesn’t really matter how many friends you’ve got. It’s better to have one really good friend that you can talk to and that you know will come and help you if you feel lonely than to have 10 acquaintances. Finally, there are the neighbours, the teachers, the coaches, the trainers that might be able to help you, and here it’s the same thing. It’s better to have one really close one than ten that you don’t really know that you can count on.