''I can be changed by what happens to me, but I refuse to be reduced by it. '' -Maya Angelou

If you’re always in a life vest, you don’t know if you can swim.

Sometimes, life tries to test you, by sending you waves that at first, seem too big for you to be able to overcome.
But it’s always after the storm that you look back and realize how strong you really are.
While we can’t control the tsunami that comes straight at us, we can choose to control how we decide to face it.
Every cloud has a silver lining.

The good news is that there are things we can do in order to rebuild our neural pathways.
Yes, that is, to change our habitual response to things that happen to us.
Each one of us possess a different genetic makeup, and in that sense, we each have an innate capacity to be more or less resilient through life. Nevertheless, genes do not determine our whole lives, and we can actually increase our ability to become mentally stronger.
Ever heard the saying ''What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger? ''
During a very dark period of my life, I used to say ''What doesn’t kill you makes you wish you were dead''.
Today, I choose to see that what doesn’t kill us can indeed make us stronger, if we decide that it will. In the end, it all comes down to making a conscious decision about how we wish to grow from external events that happen to us.

Charles Darwin said ''It is not the strongest of the species that survives, or the most intelligent, but rather the one most adaptable to change. ''
Change is difficult, partly because we have to leave the familiar and the comfort, to jump to the unknown. However, we should not wait for adversity to come our way to decide to change or to start looking out after ourselves.

We should start implementing healthy habits today, so when adversity comes, we are already well-equipped to face whatever we will have to face.
Whether that may be practicing gratitude every day, exercising during our lunch break, reframing our personal narratives, creating a vision board in our room, or allowing ourselves a period at the end of each day to reflect on our personal progress, there are countless ways through which we can slowly build our capacity to become internally stronger.

The word Resilience is derived from the present participle of Latin ''resilire'' which means to recoil or to rebound.
Its first use goes all the way back to the 1620s.
Interestingly enough, on the year of 1824, the world resilience came to include the meaning of ''elasticity''.
Almost 200 years later, it still makes a lot of sense, since becoming resilient means the ability to bend, rather than break, when facing trials.
By exercising ourselves as much as we can to become more psychologically flexible, it can serve us as a powerful anchor to keep us at the surface of water, when the waves get too high.

I found this absolutely inspiring drawing, that resumes extremely well the habits resilient individuals practice.
If life is really 10% of what happens to us, and 90% of how we react to it, we have the power in our hands to make the best from what happens to us.
Remember, that resiliency is a skill that you can’t buy anywhere.
Nonetheless, once you develop it, it’s a gift for life that no one can take away from you!
Why not start investing in your inner strength now?

While life does not necessarily get easier, we can use its challenges to become stronger.
A key skill that I’ve been talking about so many times before, and that resilient individuals practice, is the habit of practicing gratitude.

''Gratitude is not only the greatest virtue, but the parent of all virtues'', Marcus Tullius Cicero said.

On this inspiring note to each one of you, I hope you’re all having a fantastic Saturday!
Love you all! 💓