
Taking Steps Towards Resilience
Resilience is the ability to deal with life’s challenges, including separation, exams, relationships, and expectations. The resilience they gain now will not only support them in daily life but will help them through adulthood and the rest of their lives.
Resilience is important for managing your mental health, stress, and anxiety. It does come easier to some and harder for others due to our genes, personality, and past.
We often think that resilience is a self-journey. It is, but getting there, you don’t need to do it alone. Everyone needs resilience: kids, teenagers, parents, grandparents, teachers, and leaders.
The great thing about reaching for it together is celebrating the achievement together. You can ask for help and participate in group activities that encourage you to step out of your comfort zone and reach great heights.
Taking Steps Towards Resilience
- Encourage and stimulate the building of supportive and healthy relationships.
- Focus on independence and responsibility
- Encourage expression, self-reflection and management of emotions
- Step out of your comfort zone by creating opportunities to challenge ideas
On reflection of my hiking journey, which began from personal grief in 2015 as a distraction, then to a passion, a solo end-to-end in April 2016 of the 1000km Bibbulmun Track. I aim to have a vision of guiding, consulting, and mentoring others on their hiking journey in the form of a business.
The greatest gift hiking has given me is resilience, one step at a time. I carry this with me on every hike, whether I guide or go solo.
During a hike, I encourage communication and connections with everyone, their peers, adults, and other hikers on the track. I stop to meet hikers who are completing their own 1000km end-to-end. I observe the clear distinction between doubt from someone just beginning and someone only days away from completing the track and expressing the greatest expression of strength, endurance, fitness, and self-esteem they have ever felt. We then sit down and discuss it.
“Together, we motivate their doubt and celebrate their success.”
I focus on building self-responsibility in each young person and giving them the opportunity for independence. For example, they can sleep in their tent, prepare their meals, carry their gear, and self-manage solo or couple hiking.
I encourage the expression of emotions, from the highs of reaching a campsite to the challenges of feeling exhausted. Both the highs and lows receive the same opportunity to self-reflect, assess, and manage. A blister may hurt, but it allows you to experience presence, responsibility, resilience, and eventually healing.
I show them how to be present and observe everything: the smells, sights, touch, others, their gear, direction, barriers, and, most importantly, themselves.
When you hike, you learn resilience in steps. Reaching your destination five days away requires a different resilience than climbing a hill.
I found my first week of end-to-end climbs very challenging, especially in the rain and alone. During that first week, I didn’t see another person for five days. As an inexperienced multi-day hiker, this prepared me for many more days of being alone, and I had a leg injury around day 14.
“Challenges build resilience, not a walk in the park.”
The greatest gift hiking has given me is resilience, one step at a time. This resilience joins me on every hike I guide or go solo. This is a blog about how important resilience plays in a person’s life and how hiking is a natural way to lifelong resilience.