Resilience is a crucial component of mental and physical wellbeing, says Realise HR's Martin Norris.

He says: "'It ain’t about how hard you hit, it’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward'," said one great psychologist. No, not Freud, Jung or Erikson, but Rocky Balboa, 2006.

However you feel about Stallone as a writer, I think this dialogue quite neatly sums up the importance of resilience to the human condition. Resilience is not only critical to success, but a crucial component of happiness, satisfaction, mental and physical wellbeing. And what’s great about resilience is that it can be developed; Dr Julie Smith, clinical psychologist and best-selling author writes: “When people hit a certain life event that proves more demanding than their current coping strategies can meet, we’re learning new ways of coping, to bolster that resilience.”

It's incredible. The ability for people to work through trauma and hardship, to live through unimaginable anguish and pain, and come out the other side.

And yet, despite the importance of resilience, and the fact that none of us are inherently born ‘resilient’, it doesn’t get much airtime when it comes to developing this incredibly important piece of self. While it might have changed in the 20 years since I was at school, I don’t remember attending any resilience classes, or being coached on strategies to handle stress in truly effective ways. What I do remember, and this might resonate with some of you, is hearing things such as “It’ll get better” or “Be positive” or “You’ll get there in the end” – sentiments coming from lovely, good-hearted people, but not particularly useful in navigating the situation you’re facing at the time.

And I’m not going to talk to you about diet, sleep, and exercise – although important – because I don’t want to be one of those people who tell you to simply “go for a walk” when you’re going through sh**. Resilience is much more complex and nuanced than that. Here are some insights that have truly helped me:

In times of stress, it’s easy to get caught up in feelings of victimhood. That the universe is specifically working against you and that you can’t catch a break. The danger in this mentality, of course, is that it prevents you from taking positive action (often any action) and you can spiral into a state of depression.

Our egos are sensitive, attention seeking, emotional, irrational, all-encompassing, energy draining and fantastic, all at the same time. The ego is uniquely wrapped up in the concept of ‘self’ - in many ways it’s the conscious part that makes you, you. But, because of this, it’s temperamental, and often prevents you from seeing things clearly and objectively. The ego is aggressively seeking out threats and in doing so is disproportionately feeding us more negative than positive. As Fredrik Imbo, in his Ted talk on ‘How not to take things personally’ says, we have 50,000 thoughts per day and yet only 10,000 are positive, that means 80% of what we think are negative thoughts. We sometimes need to train ourselves to put our ego back in its box and look at the facts rather than our feelings.

It’s important to be honest with yourself and evaluate whether what you’re doing is helping you or harming you. For instance, are you exposing yourself to situations, people or experiences which are particularly triggering or stressful? Exposure to trauma, in my opinion, does not make you resilient. Instead, as Dr Smith says: “(Resilience is) about making lots of small changes. Reflect on what those might be, try them, keep what works, ditch what doesn’t.”