Emotional Resilience

This literature source has helped develop ideas and open up other topics and sources to aid in the development of my literature review. Mainly because emotional resilience is the essence, the foundation of maintaining a good emotional health. 

From a dancer's perspective, working towards a performance requires dedication, motivation, practice, skill and hard work. As ballet dancers are always working towards some sort of goal and reward, and constantly trying to be better, the performance can be seen as the next ultimate goal to be better at. Challenges along the way are always part of the package. Physically they need to overcome these challenges, but what is as important is to be mentally strong. The core ingredient to providing this strength is resilience. And the foundation of this feeling of resilience comes from your emotions and feelings, as they are what drive you to act a certain way, and react to certain situations. This drive sparks up motivation and inspiration, positivity and a healthy positive mind-set towards work and life in general.

Therefore in all stages of the build up to any performance, it would seem understandable that keeping that resilience (emotionally) going is vital in order to solve the various challenges that will in turn create a dancer to improve in every aspect of their work and life. From the experience, and knowledge, they will learn how to cope better. 

Principles to cope successfully:

Believe- believe you can cope, have the potential to be in control and ‘influence the situation’ If you don’t belileve this then initially you won’t cope!

De-stress- stress is the source of negative emotions. Negativity influences your perception of the situation to seem difficult/impossible, and the feelings are hard to resist.

It is always possible to influence and change moods to more positive. For once, exercising does lift ones mood up. Therefore, when injured, it easier to get yourself into a bit of a rut as you are not at all as active as you re used to, which lowers the level of endorphins, thus lowering your mood.

Resilient people are able to understand this possibility, and use the knowledge intuitively. 

Mills, H., Dombeck, M., June 2005. Emotional Resilience, MentalHelp.net (online). Available at: 

http://www.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=doc&id=5780&cn=298