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Resilience is about building our inner strength, becoming strong in dealing with the crappy things that happen to us. Things happen in life that are outside our control or what we want to happen.
Our best friend moves away to a different school, and we lose contact with each other. Our parents separate. We get picked on and bullied just because someone decides they do not like us or because we are different.
Resilience helps us manage these situations more effectively.
How do we build and develop our resilience?

Confidence

Being confident helps build our resilience. There are two types of confidence. One confidence comes from people telling us we are good and praising us. It is great to get recognition and acknowledgement from other people, but if this is all we rely on, when people are not around us telling us how good we are, we can begin to doubt ourselves.
There is a deeper confidence that comes from inside us and is based on the knowledge of our strengths and what we are good at. How do we build this deeper confidence? We base it on things we enjoy, things that bring us a sense of satisfaction. Interests that we get lost in for long periods of time. When we know and enjoy what we are good at, it builds a deep sense of confidence.

Connections

Having lots of friends and connections with other people also builds our resilience. When we feel alone and isolated, it is harder to feel resilient. Having friends with whom we can talk about things with helps us keep what we are dealing with in perspective.

Control

While things may happen to us, we can’t control we can control our attitude to what has happened. Some people have a very passive attitude towards life. For example, they may be bullied either in person or on-line. Their attitude is, ‘there is nothing I can do because the person bullying me will just continue to bully me’.
This passive attitude does not help in building resilience.
Another person will think, “what can I do?” In the example of being cyber-bullied, the person may choose to block the person, or to report them. The important thing is they decide to exert some control over what is happening to try and resolve the matter.

Building our self-confidence, developing connections with friends, and taking some control over what is happening builds our resilience.

Remember, resilience does not mean you will handle every situation perfectly. That is okay. You will demonstrate amazing resilience in one situation and fall in a heap in another. That is being human. It is not about having perfect resilience every time, it is about building our resilience in every situation, no matter how small a step we take in building it.