Life Thrown You A Curveball? These Experts Teach You How To Build Grit and Resilience

You can’t control what happens to you in life. But you can control how you react. You can bounce back from any setback and become stronger than before. You can keep moving forward, no matter what. How?, you might ask. With inner strength and an ability that is simply called resilience.

Resilience is useful in the best of times. But in tough times — times, when there are widespread layoffs, financial crises, and soaring inflation rates — resilience is more essential than ever.

Interestingly, resilience is not only needed in these tough times but made in these tough times. The Resilience Institute found the COVID-19 pandemic triggered high levels of resilience globally. It concluded that adversity stimulates growth.

But how do you go about building resilience before hard times hit, or when you’re going through a tough time and need it most?

Cultivate Resilience to Bounce Back from Setbacks

To build mental toughness, the knowledge app Blinkist has partnered up with leading clinical psychologist Dr. Rick Hanson to create a Guide that specifically helps you “Build Resilience and Inner Strength”. This Guide is a short course not only created by but narrated by Hanson and his son, Forrest. The pair are experts on resilience — they wrote a book on the very topic — and they host the Being Well podcast, which shares advice on how to improve your emotional well-being.

The Hansons have brought together their expert knowledge of psychology and mental health into one short Guide you can get through in under two hours. It teaches you skills like showing yourself self-compassion, breaking bad habits, reducing anxiety, and building grit and determination. You’ll get insightful advice and guided journaling questions to learn more about yourself.

Get Life-Changing Lessons — Fast

You can find this Guide exclusively on the Blinkist app. Blinkist takes key ideas from nonfiction books and shares them in 15-minute explainers you can read or listen to. There are more than 5,500 titles across 27 categories like mindfulness, psychology, and philosophy.

Beyond bite-sized explainers of nonfiction books, Blinkist offers Guides like the one by the Hansons. These are short courses narrated by experts. The experts give you a masterclass on a topic, sharing powerful ideas from books they think are valuable, their own advice, and thought-provoking exercises to guide your learning.

Here’s what you can expect from the “Build Resilience and Inner Strength” Guide by Dr. Rick and Forrest Hanson.

1. As Well as Being a Friend to Others, You Need to Be a Friend to Yourself

The Guide kicks off with the explainer of the book the Hansons wrote together: Resilient. Resilient discusses key practices you can do to cultivate more calm, compassion, and confidence — even when times are tough.

One powerful idea is the need to be on your own side, through good times and bad. Dr. Rick Hanson says, as well as being loyal to others and a friend to others, you need to show those traits to yourself, too.

He says that being a friend to yourself is fundamental to building resilience and inner strength. So, before you start working on yourself, make sure you’re showing yourself some love.

2. Self-Criticism is Close to Self-Abuse

Building inner strength isn’t about pushing yourself harder. In fact, it’s the opposite. The Hansons share why self-compassion is so important on your journey to becoming more resilient.

They dive into Blinkist’s explainer of Self-Compassion, a book by psychology professor Kristin Neff. The book covers why self-criticism affects our beliefs, and how these beliefs affect our ability to reach our goals.

There are also guided journaling questions to get you thinking about how you talk to your friends, how you talk to yourself, and whether there’s a big difference between the two.

“Painful feelings are, by their very nature, temporary. They will weaken over time as long as we don’t prolong or amplify them through resistance or avoidance. The only way to eventually free ourselves from debilitating pain, therefore, is to be with it as it is. The only way out is through.” Kristin Neff

3. Use Mindfulness to Build Grit and Good Habits

Dr. Rick is an avid meditator and believes mindfulness is to the mind what exercise is to the body. But how can mindfulness help you become more resilient?

He says in order to build the skills needed for resilience — like grit and self-compassion — we need to hardwire them into our brains. And mindfulness can help us do just that. The Guide shares some key ideas from Unwinding Anxietyby addiction psychiatrist and neuroscientist Judson Brewer. The explainer shares how mindfulness can help you keep anxiety in check, be more present in your life, and break the bad habits that keep you stuck.

Discover More Guides to Keep Growing

This Guide can teach you how to be more resilient. But there are plenty more Guides to learn from to help you face life’s challenges.

Blinkist has Guides on “Unlocking Your Greatness” by coach and bestselling author Michael Bungay Stanier and “Using Failure at Work” by Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson.

Plus, there is a whole library of content to help you through stressful times, no matter how hard they seem. Here’s how the app works.

Build Mental Strength in 15 Minutes a Day

When you’re facing challenges, you may not have the time — let alone the mental energy — to sit down and study for hours. Blinkist makes learning easy by sharing 15-minute explainers of nonfiction books.

The team gathers all of the key ideas, powerful anecdotes, and empowering advice from a book into one easy-to-digest explainer.

There are more than 5,500 titles to choose from, so you can learn about anything, from entrepreneurism to stoicism, relationships to leadership. And the library is always growing — the team adds 70 new books each month.

Learn from the world’s best nonfiction books in just 15 minutes.

Overcome Life’s Hurdles On the Go

All of Blinkist’s explainers are available in audio form, so you can learn the skills needed for inner strength while on the go.

Listen while traveling to work, running errands, or working out, and turn any pocket of time into a moment to work on your self-development.

“With Blinkist you can boost your knowledge and gain new perspectives so that you can be a better professional, a better partner, or a better you.” – The United Nations

One of the World’s Best Apps

When you’re working on your inner strength, you want to turn to experts you can trust. Those experts have written bestselling books covered by Blinkist. And the app itself is trusted by millions around the world — 25 million to be exact.

Beyond users, Blinkist is loved by The New York Times and Forbes, it’s won awards from Google and the United Nations, and Apple named it one of the top 20 apps for lifelong learning.

Blinkist’s 25 Million Users Make Real Changes in Their Lives

It’s all well and good reading about building resilience, but to actually feel better about the curveballs life throws at you, you need to apply what you learn to your everyday life.

That’s exactly what Blinkist’s users do: 91% say they have created better habits and 87% say they have made positive changes thanks to what they learned on the app.

And they’ve given Blinkist 94,000 5-star reviews across app stores, too.

“This is by far the best app I’ve downloaded in a long time. It helps me deal with challenging work and life situations on a daily basis. I can’t recommend Blinkist enough!” –5-star review

Want to learn from Blinkist’s “Build Resilience and Inner Strength” Guide? Download the app to get started.