How to Build Resilience

Published in Living Now Magazine Sept 2012

If you're like me and many other people I've spoken to recently you may have found 2012 thus far a rather challenging year. The thing about challenges or crises or whatever you like to call them is that they knock you off your game, divert your attention away from what you want and send you into a reactive spin - something which can take you a while to recover from.

Whilst pondering this I watched a great TED talk about sustainability and change, in which the speaker extolled the virtues of resilience and the ability of systems to be internally self sustaining. Now, much has been written about resilience but what always comes to mind for me is the poem 'If' written by Rudyard Kipling and inspired by Dr Leander Starr Jameson, who led a failed raid by British forces against the South African Boers in 1895.

"If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too:
If you ca…