Improve your resilience and succeed at your studies
What does resilience mean to you? Resilience has recently been identified as one of the most critical factors to achieving your goals and improving your health and wellbeing.
Building your resilience can enable you to bounce back from stressful situations you might encounter while studying, working or just living your life. Associate Professor Marcus O’Donnell, Director, Cloud Learning Futures at Deakin, likens resilience to a rubber ball.
‘The reason it bounces is because it’s flexible. It’s pliant. And it’s also incredibly strong. Because of this, it regains its shape very quickly. But one of the interesting things about a rubber ball is that it can bounce up and down or it can bounce forward. So resilience is also about gaining that sense of direction or forward thrust in your life.’
Resilience is not just something we are born with; it’s something we can learn through developing and building habits that increase our flexibility and strength.
Resilience skills have become a crucial part of succeeding in a complex and fast-paced world. The ability to cope with stressful situations is particularly useful for students. We’ve put together a few resources you can use to develop your resilience and succeed at your studies.
Cloudy – a resilience toolkit
How resilient are you? Cloudy is a resilience toolkit that gauges your current levels of resilience and then provides you with tools and techniques to develop in targeted areas. You can read articles about six key areas for building resilience and take part in a series of specially designed habit-builders. Just 10 minutes in Cloudy each day can be a great start to developing your own personal resilience toolkit. Join Cloudy and start working on a better understanding of yourself.
Professional Resilience course on FutureLearn
In our free FutureLearn course Professional Resilience: Building Skills to Thrive at Work, you’ll learn about how to deal with challenging and stressful situations both at work and in your personal life. In this short two-week course delivered by Associate Professor Marcus O’Donnell, you’ll build resilience capabilities, skills and self-care practices. Join Professional Resilience: Building Skills to Thrive at Work to create a resilience plan for your online studies, professional career and everyday life. It’s a great way of connecting your needs as a student with a future focus on the skills you will need to thrive as a graduate in the workplace.