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Resilience
Bouncing back and developing resilience all depend on the stories you tell yourself.
These stories or “self-talk” as we call them, can either help you to persist in the face of failure or disable you and make you downright miserable. Pessimists, who generally don’t bounce back easily from bad times, see setbacks as permanent, pervasive and personal.
Optimistic people, by contrast, tell themselves that setbacks are temporary, confined to that one situation and are usually about the other person and not a character defect in themselves. They tend to assume bad events are an exception and that good things will continue to happen.
Even the gloomiest of pessimists can learn to be more optimistic – we are all capable of changing the way we think about an event, which will, in turn, change how we feel about it and consequently the impact we allow it to have on our lives.
We may not be able to change our past, but we can certainly control the effect it has on our future.