week 4 My word is Resilient

January 18, 2014 - Week Four - Write a secret message then paint over all but one key word.

My chosen word is Resilience.

True resilience is the ability to recover readily from adversity and hardship. It's about cultivating an endurance to go the distance while taking things in stride when life gets tough

A Weakness of mine is being too sensitive at times and taking things too personal. I need to become more resilient to the challenges in life

I painted over what i wrote and these are the pages

The long strip is a place for you to store notes behind 

And here is my word for this year.

RESILIENT.....



Resilience is that ineffable quality that allows some people to be knocked down by life and come back stronger than ever. Rather than letting failure overcome them and drain their resolve, they find a way to rise from the ashes. Psychologists have identified some of the factors that make someone resilient, among them a positive attitude, optimism, the ability to regulate emotions, and the ability to see failure as a form of helpful feedback. Even after misfortune, resilient people are blessed with such an outlook that they are able to change course and soldier on..... taken from psychology today 

Resilience may be an art, the ultimate art of living, but is has recently been subjected to the scrutiny of science. This much is known so far. At the heart of resilience is a belief in oneself—yet also a belief in something larger than oneself.

Resilient people do not let adversity define them. They find resilience by moving towards a goal beyond themselves, transcending pain and grief by perceiving bad times as a temporary state of affairs.

 What Goes Into Your Resiliency Kit?

If you choose to build resilience, what else might you do? Here are 10 resiliency-building tips:

1. Get adequate restorative sleep.  Poor sleep patterns and stress go hand-in-hand.

2. Engage in adequate physical exercise daily. Exercise is a major buffer against stress, including stress from depression.

3. Maintain a healthy diet and keep your weight within a desired range. You’ll have fewer health-related problems.

4. Nourish your quality social support networks through reciprocally supporting others who support you. Quality social support correlates with higher levels of resiliency.

5. Meet challenges as they occur and avoid procrastination and the stresses that come from it and crises that arise from delays.

6. Build tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty and you are less likely to experience anxieties related to a need for certainty.

7. Express higher-order values, such as responsibility and integrity. This gives you a compass for taking a sound direction.

8. Work to build high frustration tolerance. High frustration tolerance, cognitive flexibility, and problem-solving actions are normally interconnected.

9. Stretch to achieve realistic optimism. This is a belief that you can both self-improve and act to make things more workable for you. You exercise realistic optimism by acting to do and get better.

10. Boost resilience with preventive actions where you reduce your risk for negative thinking and increase your chances for realistic thinking. See The Cognitive Behavioral Workbook for Depression (Second Edition)(link is external) for multiple chapters on reducing negative thinking.

Let's take a closer look at tip number four. Think about what you can imitate that resilient people do.


Happy crafting

Foxy English Crafter