Do you need to toughen up?
It’s International Happiness Day on Wednesday, and here psychologist Dr Alia Bojilova reveals her four-step plan to help you boost a key factor in staying strong and happy– your resilience
As a society we are more in need of resilience than ever – with the cost of living crisis and worries about job security and global issues impacting our day-to-day lives.
But what exactly is it, and how can we bring it back into our lives ?
One person perfectly qualified to show us is Bulgarian-born psychologist Dr Alia Bojilova.
Held at gunpoint and taken hostage while serving as a United Nations military observer in Syria in 2013, she faced the possibility of death. But she managed to dig deep at one of the worst moments of her life to negotiate the release of her and her fellow prisoners.
Dr Alia, 42, who now lives in New Zealand, says resilience comes from that moment of flee or fight - how you react when life presents you with challenges.
It determines whether you are the type of person who faces your problems head on or buries your head under the duvet; whether you passively participate in your life, letting things pass you by, or if you set yourself goals like aiming for that dream job or running that 5k.
“Resilience is not just about grit and bouncing back,” explains Dr Alia.
“It’s about having a clear sense of purpose and the capacity to learn from your experience.”
Resilience is a superpower – and it can make you a lot happier in life.
“When you can see beyond a setback, you can learn and grow. It can have huge benefits at work, home, in relationships and your general wellbeing, where you can go from feeling aimless to being motivated and fulfilled,” says Dr Alia.
Today she is a peak performance psychologist, coach and adviser working with successful entrepreneurs, Olympic athletes and global leaders. Her new book, The Resilience Toolkit, reveals how every single one of us can be deep and find our truer potential, not just hardwired soldiers or sports people. The answer, she says, is as simple as ABCD. In her innovative guide, Dr Alia divides finding resilience into four steps: awareness, belonging, curiosity and drive.
Here she shares with us how it’s done. It’s accessible, easy to implement and anyone can have a go. And with International Happiness Day coming on Wednesday, there’s never been a better time to try.
Ais for… AWARENESS
“Awareness is the gateway to resilience,” says Dr Alia. “I remember that from my service in the military.
“On the first selection course the criteria was that if an individual or the team didn’t have self-awareness, interpersonal awareness and situational awareness, it didn’t matter how physically robust they were, they weren’t going to make it. Awareness is essential to be able to read the scenarios around you.
It’s our ability to lean in, to connect, to explore how we engage with people, how we look upon them and what we share with them.”
TRY: Write down your strengths, personal demons, intent and drivers. Then look at how you react to different situations, how you feel towards certain individuals and what triggers you. If you can learn to understand yourself, you can move forward and change things if needed.
Bis for… BELONGING
“Belonging is essential for resilience,” says Dr Alia. “We know belonging is a vital human necessity. But it’s not just about feeling warm and cuddly, it’s also about having a sense of purpose. It’s to invite ourselves into the spaces we don’t normally consider as ours.” There is an epidemic of loneliness in society through loss of community, loss of purpose and loss of connection. But a sense of belonging can change that.
TRY: Think of your values and what is important to you. Find a group where you are aligned in some way, a group where things inspire you, that bring you an element of shared joy. Pause for a minute and identify what that is, what fuels you.
Cis for… CURIOSITY
“Curiosity saved my life,” says Dr Alia. “I was curious about our hostage takers and got to know them. Disrupting the script with our captors meant they viewed us as something more than a target and threat. It was a confronting experience but I’ve been in far more benign experiences where I’ve wondered where my curiosity has gone.
“Many of us have stopped asking questions. We need to start again. And they don’t necessarily need to be grand, existential questions. It could just be I wonder whether, I wonder how, I wonder why. Just wondering, that habit of wondering, is exquisite for resilience.”
Having preconceived ideas about situations and people means we are standing still. We are not seeking challenges, but avoiding them.
“If we allow ourselves to look behind the curtain for a minute, we can find extraordinary things,” says Dr Alia. “Curiosity sometimes allows us to discover things are different than when we had first glanced at them. It’s often a lack of curiosity that diminishes our capacity to live richly and meaningfully.”
TRY: Look at the way you live your life and how you engage with others around you. How curious are you? If you’re not, what is stopping you from being curious? Ask yourself questions whether on your commute, doing the laundry or making dinner. It can make the mundane seem exciting and those questions can open you up to new possibilities.
Dis for… DRIVE
“This is another one of those words and definitions that we have attributed to particular types of people, a driven individual is someone who is on top of the mountain and shouts,” says Dr Alia. “But that’s not the case. We all know we have it but it can look different for each person. Drive is not a switch you can just turn on. It is something that has to be worked on.
“When we harness our sense of self-awareness, sense of belonging and explore through curiosity, then drive follows. It’s a no-brainer. You are driven because you believe in the fullness of possibility. We feel fuelled because we feel more purposeful. Your drive is sustained by motivation.”
TRY: Introduce a sense of drive by following this ABC, and setting yourself goals, whether that’s daily, weekly or monthly. Don’t listen to negative ‘What ifs’ in your head. A setback isn’t a failure - it’s a small hurdle which your resilience can overcome, making you happier.
■ The Resilience Toolkit: A Proven Four-Step Process to UnLock Your True Potential by Dr Alia Bojilova (£16.99, Headline) is out now
‘‘ You can go from feeling aimless to feeling motivated and fulfilled