You’re on a journey. Sometimes your path is clear, and sometimes not so much. But most of the time you make your way, handling life’s little irritations and trudging forward. It’s a living.

Then sometimes the path opens up and smooths out. It’s like a miracle. Things begin to happen, you get into a flow. You gain speed and think, “time light the afterburners!” Everything is going your way. “Get outta my way, cause I’m cruisin’ on through!” You move so fast the path becomes a blur.

Suddenly you turn a corner and “WHAM!” your beautiful wide path runs right up against a granite wall. “What the hell?” You did NOT see this coming. Now what? So, what do you do?Do you quit?

Do you decide your destination wasn’t all that great?Or do you get angry and throw yourself against the wall again and again until you end up bruised, bloody and broken?

Perhaps you cry. You might grieve. Maybe you tell everyone who will listen how you would have made it if it weren’t for that goddamn wall!

Could be you sit down and wait for someone to come along and give you a solution.

Or do you get a read on where you are and look for another path? Yes, you might need to backtrack for a while or go miles out of your way and it sucks, but may be necessary to find the new trailhead that puts you on a new path; one that gets you closer to your destination. And you stay alert for the possibilities of amazing new vistas, new adventures you hadn’t thought of before; new challenges, new opportunities.

Will it take you longer to get to your destination? Probably. Might you die before you get there? That’s possible. But then maybe the destination was never the point anyway because, deep down, you know that once you got there some other, further destination would beckon and you would be on the path again.The point is the journey, your adventures, and experiences along the way.

What’s important are the lives you touch, the songs you sing, the wine you drink, the sunrises and sunsets you marvel at.

What keeps you going is resilience.

What is resilience and how do you cultivate it?

Resilience is the ability to recover from or adjust quickly to difficulties or change.

Here are 6 things you can do to build your resilience.

Resist Drama

Drama, as I mean it here, is the interaction that occurs when we act on an emotional response to a situation or event. Drama is almost never helpful and often makes a situation worse than it needs to be. So how do you resist drama? First, recognize that you will have an emotional reaction to a challenge. It‘s built-in to both our psychology and our physiology. Next, pause and breathe. That gives your thinking brain a chance to catch up to your feeling brain. When your mother told you, “count to 10,” she was giving you sound advice. Finally, ask yourself these questions: what do I really want and what behavior will best move me toward my aim?

Keep it Real

Our emotional response to a challenge may also cause us to lose perspective, blow things out of proportion and fall into thinking traps that psychologists call cognitive distortions. Thinking traps come in many flavors. You can see a nice list of them here. You can catch thinking traps by being on the lookout for the words “always” and “never.” Also watch for superlatives like worst, stupidest, hardest, or most. When you catch yourself in a thinking trap, just like with drama, pause and breathe.

Embrace Learning

The most resilient people have embraced lifelong learning. They understand that every challenge, every obstacle, and every failure is an opportunity to learn something about themselves or about the world. One of the most helpful questions you can ask yourself whenever you encounter an obstacle or challenge is, “what can I learn from this?”

Set Areas of Focus

Goals can be helpful. But goals can also have unintended side-effects. Especially if we have so invested in a specific outcome we compromise our wellbeing or our relationships. Instead of an over-reliance on goals, it may be more useful to set daily area of focus to commit to activities that will move you toward your desired outcome. That can open you up to consider more options and opportunities. For example, instead of setting a sales goal of a specific revenue, make your area of focus to conduct several high-quality conversations each day.

Cherish Social Interactions

We‘re all about teamwork at work but with personal challenges, we often believe that we have to go it alone. Don‘t make that mistake. We are social beings. The connections you make are important. Cherish and nurture them and don‘t be afraid to ask for help when you feel stuck or faced with a difficult challenge.

Celebrate Small Successes

Don’t save up your celebrations until you reach that Big Hairy Audacious Goal. To build resilience on the journey toward that goal, celebrate the small wins along the way. The new client, the good grade on a test, or making it through a day without getting into an argument with your teenager. Celebrating the small successes along the journey to your goal makes the journey more joyous and makes you more fun to be around.

Resilience is the quality we must cultivate to reach our goals. But, then again, through resilience, we come to realize that our goals, like destinations, are way-points. They give our lives a meaningful direction. And it is helpful to have a meaningful direction and thus a destination, or two, or three. But always remember, how you walk the path matters most.