Transcript

Underlying personality has an important part to play in our level of resilience. Of course, resilience can be developed, but a personality is the starting point and it's really the platform from which we can build higher levels of resilience. Let me just illustrate that by explaining a couple of ways in which personality might influence how resilient we are. A good area to look at is the area of social support. We know that having a good social support system is important for people's resilience, but building a good social support system is also related to the kind of person we are and the kind of personality characteristics we have. It links to the kind of personality we have in terms of how we relate to other people, how much we enjoy being with other people, how we behave when we are with them, how agreeable we are, how well we empathise with their concerns, and how we build, or we don't build, long-term stable friendships. So the kind of social support that we build and the extent to which we have a really good one is partly a reflection of the other people but it's also partly a reflection of our own underlying personality characteristics. Another important aspect of resilience involves actively confronting challenges rather than hiding from them. But of course to do that you need a level of confidence and self-belief, to enable you to actually take on the challenge. You also need to focus on the challenge in a practical and problem-focused way, rather than being overwhelmed by the emotions in your own emotional reaction. Again, if we look at underlying personality characteristics, those characteristics can have an influence on how we cope with challenges, what our level of confidence is, and some people are just more inclined for example to find it difficult to escape from the emotions that they're experiencing and focus in a problem-focused way on the problem that they're trying to deal with.