DON'T you sometimes wish someone had taught you about resilience when you were growing up? Yes, I am talking about the ability to recover readily from adversity. Not just survive it but to recover. And readily, too.

Very often, instead, adversity is, well, the elephant in the room. It is seldom talked about, either because it is considered shameful or just too painful. Think about it, nobody is really comfortable talking about failure. Especially their own.

Truth be told, we are such a success-oriented society that we try to avoid people who are "losers". In case, it's catching! I remember the time I lost my job. I was just collateral damage in a bigger game some guys were playing at work but the result was the same as if I had been bad at my job: I was terminated.

I didn't really know how to bounce back for the first couple of months. In fact, I was in a state of shock and could only find comfort with the group of people from work who had suffered the same fate.

We called each other, met for coffee and talked. None of us knew how to crawl out of the hole we were in but after a while, we had to move on. To find new jobs, to get on with our lives. Was that resiliency? I'm not entirely sure.
But I do know one thing. That painful period taught me how to be resilient later in life. Fast forward two years later and I was in a job I really hated. From the outside, it looked like a dream job: editor of a magazine, invitations to the best events in the city, and all the accompaniments. The view from inside, however, was something else.

I was very conflicted about leaving. After all, it had been less than a year. Would people think less of me for giving up so quickly? And I had no other job lined up. So how did I decide in the end? I remembered the time I had been fired and how I had eventually found my feet.

That is the thing about resilience. It's the kind of skill you pick up as you go along in life. You bump into it accidentally as you flounder. Still, it is something one has to build up like resistance to colds.

My favourite definition of resilience is this: the power or ability to return to the original form, position, etc., after being bent, compressed or stretched. The key word here is power.

Everyone has a different set of "tools" they use to help build up their resilience. Maybe it's a strong support group of friends and family? Nothing helps you recover faster than the support of those who love you.

For me, I learned how to build up a store of positive feelings I could draw from for the inevitable negative moments in life. Example: make a list of all your favourite things. I did this with my colleagues once and we passed our lists around. It was fantastic.

Nobody wrote "BMW 5 series" or "Birkin bag". Instead there were things like "the smell of coffee", "the trees in Lake Gardens" (a group of us from the office used to go for walks there regularly), "eating Cheezels during a shoot". Really simple things.

Doing that list and passing it around made us realise how easy it was to access the good times. Work can be very stressful and it is not often we can get away from it all but that list made us realise we could step out of any bad day just by doing any one of the things on our list.

It's a logical idea. Counter something bad with something good. It's like this: anybody who practises yoga will be familiar with the idea of counter-poses. It's where if you have been bending one way, you counter it by bending the other direction. Simple really.

Then there is my gratitude journal. It forces me to look at the good things that happened to me even when I cannot find any. It's easy to be grateful for the big things in life like a promotion, a business win, an unexpected bonus. But what about the days when nothing goes right? That is when you are forced to really examine your day and look for the good.

Writing the journal has been amazing discipline for me. It has helped me to focus on the positive and when I come across the odd bad day where nothing goes right, I am calmer and less likely to think it's the end of the world.

Another tool is confrontation. This is where you face the obstacle head on. Talk about it with your family or close friends so they know what is going on. They may not have the answer but just sharing the problem lightens the burden. Sounds like a cliche but it works. Cliches are very often born out of truth.

I also like talking to people about how they overcame tough times in their lives. While you cannot always apply what they did to your own particular adversity, it is inspiring nonetheless to hear their stories.

So yes, I think they really should have taught us some of these things when we were growing up. These skills are as necessary as learning how to make a living, don't you think? But then, learning how to build up your own resilience through trial and error works too.