Why Emotional Regulation and Resilience Matter

Emotional regulation and resilience are key to learning to cope with adversity and stress.

As an emotional resilience coach, I have found that most don’t people understand what that means. Today, I want to take some time to have a conversation with you about emotional resilience. I want to talk about what it is, why it’s important, and how coaching can help you build it.

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I have been a life coach for over a decade. 11 or 12 years now I think. I’d have to go check my records to be sure but it has taken a lot of different turns. I started off as a general life coach and I did time management, finding your purpose and vision, and those kinds of things.

Then I did spiritual growth coaching for a while and then mindset coaching. I finally landed on emotional resilience coaching because it captures the essence and the heart of what I do and it’s what I am most passionate about.

What is Emotional Resilience

First, we’re going to start off with definitions, because I’m a word girl and I always like to define our terms. So what is emotional resilience? It is the ability to adapt to stressful situations and bounce back from adversity.

When life happens, good or bad, you can come back from it. You don’t get completely knocked out. You’re not always completely overcome and overwhelmed with life circumstances. I feel like I’m always going through something hard and the thing that helped the most was building resilience.

Learning how to bounce back when life happens and when something slaps me in the face. Being able to say, okay, that was hard, kind of knocked me down, but I’m going to get back up and keep going.

Why Resilience is Important

Having resilience is important in everyday life not just hard times. Something as small as getting up in the morning, getting everybody ready to get out the door, and your kid spills milk all over the floor. Now you’re going to be late because you’ve got to take time to clean it up and change somebody’s clothes.

Even that requires resilience because it knocks you off your plan. When hard times come you need to bounce back. You can’t just not function in life because you’re going through a crisis. You can’t skip work because you had some road rage on the way. You’ve got to be able to live life and exist on this planet, no matter what is going on.

That is where emotional resilience comes in to help you adapt when things are happening. To be flexible and change when you need to. It’s going to help you stay calm under pressure. When you just want to punch somebody in the face, you’re not going to do that because that muscle of resilience is built in. It’s also going to allow you to have a more optimistic view of the future.

Now, I am not talking about toxic positivity here. No Susie Mary Sunshine where everything’s all happy and rainbows. I am talking about being able to have hope. Not always looking at what’s negative, what’s bad, and what’s wrong. You can see hope when you look toward the future.

Are you a highly sensitive, introverted woman who feels overwhelmed by your emotions? Processing your feelings and learning to embrace your sensitivity can be challenging. But what if you didn’t have to navigate this journey alone? Take the first step towards peace. Book your Feel Your Feelings coaching session today!

Emotional Wellness

The other thing that I want to talk about here is emotional wellness. There’s a distinction between emotional resilience and emotional wellness. Emotional wellness is being aware of your emotions, understanding them, and accepting them so that you can manage them well.

It is a step before resilience. If you want to build emotional resilience, you need to have emotional wellness first. To be able to label what you’re feeling, understand what it feels like in your body, and how it affects your thoughts.

Understanding all those things so you can process them and accept that this is what you’re feeling and manage. To not be overwhelmed by it, get stuck by it, or be trapped in making decisions through your pain and overwhelm. Having the ability to cope and handle stress. To live and enjoy life, even though you may not feel amazing. That’s emotional resilience.

My goal here is to help you cultivate emotional wellness so you can build emotional resilience. I hope that that makes sense. A big part of emotional wellness is having self-awareness, learning to regulate your emotions and thoughts, having empathy, healthy relationships, and building community.

Coaching is Not …

What role does coaching play in emotional wellness and building emotional resilience?

First a disclaimer. If you want to grow or make some kind of change in your life and you’re looking forward coaching can help. Coaching is about growth, not looking back to fix or heal the past – that is a place for therapy.

Coaching and therapy are very, very different. If you have something in your past that’s troubling you, you might go to therapy to work through that and heal from that so that you can move forward into coaching. In coaching, we look to your past as it informs your present – looking for patterns and lessons.

Coaching is also not the same as mentoring. Mentoring is about showing you how to do what I did, exactly the way I did so that you can do the same. Coaching is not about me and my journey. It is me helping you find your own journey and supporting you. Coaching is not discipleship either. It’s not about spending time in God’s word and becoming more Christ-like.

How Coaching Can Help

My goal as your coach is to empower you to achieve whatever goals you have as you begin to build emotional wellness and resilience. We do that by having conversations that lead to transformation and action.

As I listen and ask you questions, you begin to build awareness about what you’re dealing with. You’ll have a better understanding and then be able to take action that will help you find coping strategies and other tools you’ll need going forward.

Coaching is also personalized support. Your sessions are tailored to you, even in a group coaching session. In group sessions, you have the added benefit of watching and listening to somebody else be coached. It is still tailored toward you, what you want to talk about, where you’re stuck, and where you want to go.

Coaching provides accountability. Regular check-ins to help you stay on track with the goals that you set for yourself. I’m going to ask what you accomplished between sessions, how you’re feeling, if something got in your way, and what needs to be fixed, changed, or stay the same.

I’m also going to help you build skills. I’m a teacher at heart and teaching and coaching go together. I try not to do a ton of teaching, but when I do it’s to give practical skills like journaling, mindfulness practices, renewing your mind, and learning grounding techniques. All things to help you build emotional resilience.

Practical Tips for Building Emotional Resilience

I just want to leave you with some practical tips for building emotional resilience.

Journaling

The first thing I’m going to give you is some daily habits that you can do, daily practices to help you work on awareness of, understanding, and processing your emotions. I’m starting with journaling, surprise! Take time to reflect and understand your emotions, thoughts, beliefs, and experiences. Just getting it down on paper so you can begin to look at it objectively is helpful.

Faith Practices

Prayer, meditation, and spending time with God can be helpful. They pair well with journaling because as you’re getting these things on paper, it gives you so much to talk to God about. Listening to worship music is one of my favorite things.

Gratitude

I’m not talking about keeping a gratitude journal or Ann Voskamp’s 1000 Things. They are fine if that’s what you want to do. I’m talking about having a little optimism and being able to have hope for your day and future. A positive outlook on your life.

Physical Self-Care

There are a couple of healthy habits that are great when you’re building emotional resilience. Remember, you are a whole person – physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, mental, etc.

Moving your body regularly is a must. I’m not going to prescribe a certain type of exercise, just find something you enjoy and do it. When you are taking care of yourself physically, it has so many benefits mentally and emotionally.

Eat! Are you feeding your body? Are you nourishing your body well? Please make sure that your body has what it needs to function optimally. Rest and sleep please ma’am. Rest is super important for regulating your emotions.

Community and Support

The final piece is really about community and support. Can you find your people? Do you have a community that you can go to and share your struggles? Somewhere you can get prayer, you can get support, you can get encouragement, process things, and share your struggles.

I want to encourage you to seek professional help when needed. Yes, coaching. But if you need to go to your doctor, if you need a mental health professional, whatever professional help and support you need, please, please, please, please, please, don’t be afraid or ashamed to go get it.

We all need help and support, and there’s no such thing as too much help and support when you are working on yourself.

What You Don’t Know About Emotional Resilience