Our Personality as the Key to Greater Inner Strength
Resilience, the ability to recover from setbacks and emerge stronger than before, is an essential part of our mental well-being. But is resilience something that is innate or can it be trained? The answer is: both – and often lies in our personality. Because if you want to become more resilient, you need to develop inner strength and mental robustness. This also means dealing with your personality.
In other words: If you want to train your own resilience, you can’t avoid dealing with your own strengths and limitations.
A person’s personality plays a significant role in the development of resilience. Some characteristics such as optimism, self-efficacy and flexibility can strengthen the ability to cope with stress and challenges. People who are open to change and see difficulties as opportunities for personal development tend to be more resistant.
Overcoming challenges and reacting to change is easier for some people and more difficult for others. In this context, the characteristics that are relevant to resilience take on significance and are sometimes stronger and sometimes weaker. These characteristics are deeply rooted in our personality, trigger us in certain situations and ensure that we behave the way we do. As a result, they also determine how we deal with challenging situations.
But does that mean that, depending on your personality, you can’t be resilient?
No, because: Resilience can be trained and strengthened, but differently depending on personality. Overall, the relationship between resilience and personality is complex. Our personality can influence our ability to be resilient, but it does not define it. Everyone can work on becoming more resilient by focusing on strengthening positive characteristics and developing coping mindsets. Mindfulness, social support and developing problem-solving skills are some ways everyone can foster resilience.
However, it is also clear that everyone deals with stressful situations differently
Psychologists Anthony Mancini and George Bonanno have studied resilience several times and investigated the question of where the individual differences in dealing with loss come from. They have formulated two coping styles: flexible adaptation and pragmatic coping. “Flexible adaptation” is the ability to adapt behavior flexibly to demands and challenging stimuli. “Pragmatic coping” is a mostly goal-oriented “whatever it takes” attitude and cannot always be seen as positive. By blocking out feelings, this strategy often has a maladaptive (unhelpful) effect and produces negative consequences on an interpersonal, physiological and emotional level, although in the first instance, resilience is increased through the experience of competence and self-control.
Our personality therefore certainly plays an important role in the development of our resilience. However, it is important not to forget that our personality is not cut in stone and that we have the opportunity to develop ourselves further. Each of us can work on our inner strength, develop our mental resistance and practice the art of resilience.
No matter what personality characteristics define us, we have the power to cultivate and deepen our resilience.
