Everyone experiences hardships. Resilient people often lean on their mental toughness to overcome those challenges.
They don’t act like their problems don’t exist. Rather, they have self-compassion, allowing them to view emotions like stress or disappointment as a learning opportunities, as bestselling author and leadership expert Brené Brown said in a 2022 episode of her podcast “Unlocking Us.”
“The core of mental toughness is actually self-compassion,” Brown said. “People who are mentally tough stay mentally tough because they don’t slip easily into shame or self-criticism or self-loathing.”
Instead, resilient people rely on a few specific words and phrases to help them process and respond to obstacles, experts say:
‘I need some time’
Even the strongest people have to take a step back and reflect sometimes.
Instead of rushing to recover from a tough situation, give yourself time to feel your emotions, psychologist Cortney Warren wrote for CNBC Make It last year.
“A key component of resilience is emotional flexibility, or the ability to regulate your feelings and reduce their intensity in a given situation,” wrote Warren. “Mastery over this can help us feel empowered during challenging times.”
Say you just got some negative feedback from your boss, for example. If you’re feeling anxious or upset afterward, say something like, “I’m feeling a strong emotion, so I’m going to take a moment before I respond or make any big decisions,” Warren added.
‘I can handle what comes my way’
Reassuring yourself that you’ll overcome your circumstances can go a long way, neuropsychologist Judy Ho wrote for Make It last week.
People who use this phrase can “better cope with, accept, and adjust to difficult situations,” wrote Ho. “They can let go of a fixation on a certain outcome, adapt their coping strategies, and find different solutions and paths toward their goals. And they can do all this even when their thoughts and feelings might tell them to run away or pull the proverbial covers over their heads.”
The next time you face a particularly stressful situation, tell yourself you can handle it — instead of using phrases like, “I don’t think I can make it through this.”
‘No’
Imagine this: You’re dealing with your jam-packed work schedule when a colleague asks you to help them finish an assignment. You may want to say yes, despite your hefty workload, to be a team player.
Don’t feel guilty for putting yourself first and saying no, according to psychologist Jessica Jackson.
“Resilience is often confused with independence, like, ‘let me shrink as much as I can to support others,'” Jackson told Make It in 2022. “But resilience should be more about prioritizing your needs.”
Setting boundaries this way can be uncomfortable, but down the line, you’ll thank yourself for saving your energy and putting your mental health and wellbeing first, she added.
“It’s important to know your threshold, know your boundaries and honor those before you burn out,” Jackson said.
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