It is my hope that you will use our e-book “Building Personal Resilience: A Guide to Positive Living” to improve the quality of your life, to develop insight into yourself and others and to increase your compassion for people going through some of the problems and challenges described in the following chapters. Some people will use this e-book as a manual, reading relevant chapters as they go through their lives. Others will read this e-book out of curiosity and find that it helps them understand and empathize with people they know who are going through some of these problems. Still others will consider this e-book as a stepping-stone to becoming all that they were meant to be.

Here, I would like you to contemplate with me the concept of self-improvement. The human growth movement of the 1970’s has matured and many of us are interested in actualizing our potential. One look at the “Psychology” section of any bookstore illustrates how many of us are seeking to help ourselves develop as complete, whole

people.

I have spent many years providing psychotherapy to people, reading the scientific literature and introspecting about my own life experiences. Any good psychotherapist or counsellor will tell you that we learn as much from our clients as we do from our textbooks and scientific journals. When a client asks me “What am I aiming for? How will I know that I have achieved my goals, other than that I will feel better?”, it causes me to analyze and synthesize my professional experience to articulate a reasonable and well reasoned answer for the client. As a result, I have developed the following list of “adult capabilities” which we, as psychologically mature adults must develop in order to be mentally healthy and happy. As you read them, you can assess yourself and see what

areas you might want to work on to more fully be yourself and be happy.

Adult Capabilities:

1. The capacity to deeply experience liveliness, joy, vigour, excitement and spontaneity, without using alcohol, drugs, sex or other people to augment our experience. Also, the ability to relax without using these negative strategies. This entails finding and maintaining a balance of the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual dimensions of our life.
2. The capacity to feel entitled to self-fulfillment, pleasure and support from others to achieve our ends, but also to keep this sense of entitlement within reasonable limits.
3. The capacity to identify our own unique wishes, to initiate the actions necessary to fulfill our wishes, and to assertively express ourselves. This is the capacity to self activate, to generate our own excitement and make the things we wish to happen constructively.
4. The capacity to defend our individuality, our actions and our wishes even when attacked and criticized for them. This capacity builds the ability to maintain our self-esteem and self-confidence at a good level on our own, without excessive shoring up by others. This also means living true to our beliefs and our perceptions of reality.
5. The capacity to emotionally connect with others without losing our sense of independent self. This is the ability to find common ground with most other people and allow mutual rapport to develop without feeling threatened. This ranges from the spontaneous rapport of a chat with the bus driver to the deep connection of marital intimacy.
6. The capacity to cope adaptively with our emotions, issues, events, and people in a positive way. This capacity involves accepting rather than fighting our emotions, and developing ways to re-think things so we can turn adversity into opportunity.
7. The capacity to soothe painful emotions. This is the capacity to modulate, reduce and soothe emotional pain and provide ourselves with comfort on our own.
8. The capacity to experience ourselves as the same individual across time; a sense of continuity of self that allows us to feel that it is, indeed, “me” in that particular experience just as it was “me” in another. Also, the capacity to recognize others as the same even when their moods change. This capacity also involves letting some old selves go when we outgrow them.
9. The capacity to make a commitment to an objective, a goal or a relationship and to persevere, despite obstacles, until we reach the goal. Conversely, the capacity to know when to let go of commitments that have become wrong or bad for us. This means making a strong commitment to ourselves as individuals.
10. The capacity to be creative, to change old familiar patterns into new, unique and different patterns; to connect surprising, different and unusual things (idea, associations, events) to produce new and original things (ideas, events, associations, solutions, products). This is the capacity to be productive in a way that expresses ourselves in all our uniqueness.
11. The ability to see things clearly and in perspective in order to make choices suitable to our personality and circumstances. To develop a sense of humour, to help us cope with difficult situations and thereby keep a sense of proportion. The ability to laugh at ourselves and allow our self to be human, not perfect.

As you review the adult capabilities, you may find that there are a few that you could work on that would help you improve yourself and result in being more adaptable, having more fun and being happier.

The Building Blocks of Self-Improvement

I view the building blocks of self-improvement to look like this:

To get to proactive coping (at the top of the pyramid) we must develop a solid base of self-knowledge, self-acceptance, self-regulation and self-discipline.

• Knowing ourselves is harder than we think. It is difficult to look honestly at ourselves, our strengths and our weaknesses. Sometimes we need help seeing ourselves as we are, and having feedback from a trusted friend, family member or counsellor is very useful.
• Self-acceptance actually helps us grow and self-actualize. It is one of life’s contradictions that we are better able to change in a positive way if we accept who we are now rather than criticize ourselves.
• Self-regulation refers to getting enough sleep, eating nutritiously, getting regular exercise and not overdoing these things (at least not very often). Our minds and our bodies are one, and if we do not regulate our bodies appropriately we soon find that our moods and even our thinking become unmodulated too.
• Self-discipline is required to make us get into a reasonable routine which allows self-regulation to be possible. Self-discipline is different from will power. Will power is like a whip we use against ourselves and, as many of us discover, when we try to use will power to achieve a goal, very often we encounter a resistance that operates with equal intensity against our goals: a sort of “won’t power”. Self-discipline is gentler and is based on scheduling and routines that make many repetitive jobs in our daily lives automatic. This leave us time and energy to do other more creative things and keeps our energy resources filled up so that we can work, love and have fun.

Information refers to all of the new ideas and knowledge about others and how the world works that we can get from reading, TV, friends, family and counsellors. Indeed, counsellors can help with all the building blocks of self-improvement, which leads us to hope, without which we would do nothing. With the first six building blocks in place, we can not only cope in a proactive way that prevents many problems from developing, but also enjoy life knowing that while problems may crop up, we have the resilience, stamina and creativity to deal with them.