CBT Worksheet

Building Resilience

Discover the resilience skills you already have, build a personal model for getting through hard times, and apply it to the challenges you face right now.

“The strongest steel goes through the hottest fire.”

💪

Find Your Strength

Identify an area where you already show resilience — you have more than you realise

🛠️

Build Your Toolkit

Map the actions, thoughts, images, and feelings that already help you keep going when it gets hard

🔄

Transfer the Skills

The resilience you show in one area of life can be applied directly to any other

🌱

Take It Forward

Apply your personal resilience model to the real challenge you are facing right now

How to use this worksheet

We all have resilience — but we often overlook it. This exercise starts somewhere you already feel capable, maps out what already works for you, and then transfers that same model to a harder situation. Work through each step thoughtfully. The toolkit you build in Step 2 is the heart of this exercise.

1
Identify Your Resilience Skill

Choose one area or skill in your life where you are successful and feel reasonably capable. It doesn't need to be impressive — everyday skills count just as much. This is your starting point for building your resilience model.

Doing crosswords Cooking Playing tennis Car mechanics Playing music Looking after a pet Running Jigsaws
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2
Map Your Resilience Toolkit

Now imagine you are struggling in that area — it becomes genuinely challenging. What do you do to keep going? Identify everything you draw on: the actions you take, the things you say to yourself, the images, feelings, sayings, and music that help you through.

Example — if your skill is crosswords When you can't find a word: you leave it and come back later, phone a friend, look in a dictionary, sleep on it. You might tell yourself “I always get there in the end.” You might picture a finished grid. You might feel determined or curious rather than defeated.
⚡ a) Actions & Strategies
💬 b) Thoughts & Self-Statements
🖼️ c) Images
📜 d) Sayings & Quotes
❤️ e) Feelings
🎵 f) Songs & Music
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Everything above is your personal resilience model — your action plan for when the going gets tough. Now apply it to what matters most.

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3
Apply It to a Real Challenge

Think about a genuinely difficult challenge you are facing in your life right now. Using everything you identified in your toolkit above, build a resilience plan specifically for this situation.

Questions to guide you Which actions from your toolkit could you use here? What could you say to yourself when it feels impossible? What image or picture helps? Is there a saying, quotation, or piece of music that captures how you want to feel?
💪 Remember: Resilience is not about being unaffected by difficulty — it is about knowing how to keep going despite it. You have already shown you can do that. This plan is the proof.

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