Building Resiliency

Facilitator Reproducible Self-Assessments, Exercises & Educational Handouts

Resiliency includes the ability to:

• Manage life’s challenges, stresses, changes, and pressures effectively.
• Cope and adapt successfully to adversity.
• Bounce back to a balanced state after facing a significant disruption in life or career.

Resiliency, or a positive behavioral adaptation, is critical when people encounter any type of trauma. People have an innate ability to demonstrate resiliency when they have resiliency skills built into their lives. Resilient people can adapt successfully under adverse circumstances such as poverty, mental illness, disasters, terrorism, physical or psychological trauma, divorce, job loss, prison, loss of a loved one, parent’s divorce, prolonged stress, physical or sexual abuse, or a lack of safety.

The Building Resiliency Workbook contains five sections, each with its unique resilience scale, to help participants learn more about themselves and how to build resiliency, enabling them to thrive in times of adversity, change and stress.

• Optimistic outlook helps participants identify how optimistically they view and live life.
• Locus of control helps participants explore the extent to which they believe they have control over what happens in their lives.
• Sense of self helps participants explore the strength of their self-esteem, self-confidence, and self-concept.
• Ability to bounce back helps participants increase their ability to bounce back and recover from a setback.
• Change management helps participants become aware of how well they deal with change and develop skills necessary to accept change.

Effective use of journaling, exploratory activities, and a resilience scale

These sections serve as avenues for individual self-reflection and participating in group experiences revolving around identified topics of importance. Each section includes exploratory activities, reflective journaling activities, and educational handouts to help participants discover their level of resiliency and provides reflective exercises and instruction to build personal and professional resiliency. Each resilience scale includes directions for easy administration, scoring, and interpretation.

This workbook is also available in PDF eBook format, making it simple to store on your computer or mobile device and to access with a PDF viewer. The PDF format allows you to easily print copies of the activities and worksheets during therapy and counseling sessions.