Fortitude is the mental or emotional strength that enables you to find courage in the face of adversity, whereas resilience is the mental ability to recover quickly from depression, illness or misfortune. Have you ever known a person who seems to be able to keep going and stay motivated when everything seems to be falling apart? This is called mental fortitude. Many people wonder how a person can be with such high mental strength and think if did he/she was born with this quality? But the fact is that we are not born with fortitude, it is something we develop in ourselves gradually as part of our life. I feel every person experiences this stage in their life at least once at some point of time. I, personally, have gone through this stage and have understood how developing a strong fortitude has helped me to cope up with so many tough situations in my life. It does not happen overnight and it does not happen easily, but it is always possible to do so. It needs lot of patience and efforts to tune your mind towards learning to get mentally strong. How you do it? Everyone has their own way of doing it. I am sharing my ideas and thoughts which I have been following and which have actually helped me to build a strong fortitude for myself.

1. Have Courage – The first thing to have to build mental toughness is courage. It is important to have the courage to face your fears and endure those challenging and at times uncomfortable situations. This is where your attitude towards such situations comes into picture. You need to believe that you can overcome the challenge and when you do, you need to reflect on how you felt at that time and how great you feel now. To have courage, you need to be prepared to fail and to learn from that failure. This will help you to improve your mental fortitude.
2. Be Determined – You need to be determined and focused on your goals and vision. It will help you to keep an eye on what is most important to you and to prioritize where you focus your energy and determination.
3. Be emotionally self-aware & calm – It is actually important for you to be aware of your emotions and how you feel in certain circumstances. What actions or behaviors of others make you feel uncomfortable, strong, confident or upset? By identifying these situations and how they make you feel will help you improve the self-awareness of your feelings and body language. The next and important step is being aware and controlling your emotions in these situations. Being calm under fire is an important trait of great leaders. It is very important for us to be calm and composed during difficult situations and help our mind to think in the right possible way.
4. Work hard at building fortitude – Building fortitude takes time so be patient and look at it as a learning process. We should not be too hard on ourselves but find someone to hold you accountable.

A great outcome of having fortitude and mental toughness is that you will develop resilience. In challenging times, you will be able to bounce back and remain productive and be focused on your goals. Acknowledging that we are not perfect but yet we can still be confident and have a positive attitude towards life is a great feeling. You might make mistakes in your life but you can have the toughness and fortitude to not let these mistakes stop you or derail your plan to move forward in life with confidence. Resilience is the outcome of having strong fortitude.

It’s your reaction to adversity, and not adversity itself that determines how your life’s story will develop.”

Dieter F. Uchtdorf

What is that one thing which can help us to keep going when you just want to quit? It’s nothing else but Resilience. It is to bounce back from negative experiences and disturbances in life. To some like me, resilience is a sort of “miracle drug” personality trait, something that can heal all wounds and right all wrongs. To be more precise, developing resilience basically requires emotional distress. If we never ran into disappointment in the first place, we would never learn how to deal with it. When you think about it in those terms, it’s easy to see that we all display some pretty impressive resilience. Some of us are more resilient than others, but we have all been knocked down, defeated, or disheartened at some of time in our lives; however, we kept going – and here we are today, stronger and more experienced with such difficult situations in life.

My Personal Memoir

We all have some kind of motivational factors in our life which help us to face the challenges life throws at us and successfully overcome those situations with confidence. I am no exception in this matter. I have been a very active child right from my childhood. I used to love to keep myself busy with all different learnings and passions I had which used to always help in having a positive atmosphere around me. I used to be a passionate dancer and an enthusiastic sportsperson right from the beginning. I was always a below average student when it came to studies but my passion always was in other activities. Things were quite smooth for many years until I was in my Graduation. That was the period when I had some medical complications and had to undergo a surgery and had quite a few side effects post that surgery. Gradually my health started deteriorating and got too complicated post marriage and even worse after having kids. As and when the time passed with these medical complications, I was forced to go away from my passions as they needed much physical strength. There were few years in life where I could not even think of anything else apart from my regular job and my routine activities. It was quite difficult managing the same but am blessed to have a wonderful family around who had been my biggest support in all these difficult times. Still, to fight with these challenges wasn’t easy at all for me and had gone through a bad emotional phase many times during these years. But the only thing which kept me going is my mental strength which I had developed for myself. The resilience I had developed was the only key factor in facing these challenges and fighting it back every time life knocked me down with some emotional challenge. Even after trying my best, I could not win over these medical challenges which had made my life very difficult. In every bad situation, life gives us a second chance to make it right. Some take it, others leave it and most don’t see it. Life had given me as well the same chance and I was fortunate to grab it by bringing back my passion of dancing again into my life. Dancing and sports have always been my biggest motivational factors which give me the utmost strength to fight with anything that comes in the way and successfully come over it over a period of time.

I am 40 years old today and would you guys believe me if I say that I had undergone 10 surgeries in past 20 years of my life? Many people don’t. In fact, I myself feel surprised when I think of these 20 years of my life. It has never been less than a roller coaster. But I am glad and proud of myself that I have been strong enough to face all these challenges and overcome them with self motivation and confidence. Recently, had to undergo a major knee surgery and may be I will never be able to dance or play sports in my life in the same way again. This had shaken my confidence in a worst way. But again, my resilience had helped me to motivate myself and bring a hope back again that I might not be able to lead my life in the same way as I used to do earlier but this would not stop me. I always believe in a quote which says, “When life gives you hundred reasons to cry, show life that you have thousand reasons to smile.” What if I will not be able to lead my life in the same way, I am sure I will still manage to make the best out of it. I always haven taken these challenges in a very positive way and I feel these tough situations help me to bring out the best version of myself every time. I feel life is too short and is very unpredictable. We never know what is in store for us the very next moment? We should live every moment of our life with positivity, try to be happy with whatever life gives you and make people around us happy in the best possible way.