The Resilience Plan: The Four S’

The folks at Positive Psychology posted this image and the following method to follow to help manage difficulties in one’s life. Look to add this tool to your wellness toolkit!

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How do people overcome difficult life experiences, such as the death of a loved one, losing a job, or being diagnosed with a serious illness?

Most people experience a wave of negative emotions varying in intensity between events and individuals, but, in time, they overcome these emotions and adapt to the situation. People can ‘bounce back’ from adversity, trauma, and tragedy. However, resilience is not a trait people either have or do not have. Resilience involves behaviors, thoughts, actions, and motivation that can be learned and developed in anyone (McDonald et al., 2012).

The Resilience Plan: The Four S’ of Resilience is a tool that allows individuals to draw on resilience sources they have used in the past and create a plan for tackling adversity in the future. There are two parts to the plan.

In Part A, the individual reflects on a past difficulty they overcame and identifies the Four S’ (supports, strategies, sagacity, and solution-seeking) they drew on in that time. These could be written in a table like the example given above. Part B uses those responses to create a plan of resilience for any present or future difficulties, which could also be noted in the same format as the example given.

The beauty of this tool is that the resources identified will always be relevant to the individual, no matter how ridiculous they may seem to another person. If an individual finds comfort in listening to the same pop song on repeat, they can include that in their resilience plan, knowing it will help them. In this way, these resilience plans are highly individualized and thus personally meaningful and useful.

Is there a ‘tried-and-true’ resource (source of support, coping strategies, sagacity, or solution-seeking behavior) that jumps to mind for you that has worked in the past and would likely use in the future? Let us know in the comments below!

[Taken from our Realizing Resilience Masterclass©]

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