The secret to building great mental resilience

“I was a litigator for 20 years, then a judge for 20 years – and I’ve been an executive coach alongside those two things for 17 years”, explains resilience expert, Emma Bell. “As a litigator, I acted for people who had been through adversity and trauma and noticed that some had been thriving in the face of that, while others were very much caught up in the victim narrative.”

As a young child, Emma herself went through significant family trauma, and saw those around her react and respond in different ways. “You could say that it was really integrated in me as a human being to be curious about why some people thrive and why others barely just survive”, she muses. “I started to wonder whether there was a blueprint that people could follow so that they know exactly what to do when facing challenges and traumas.”

Such a blueprint didn’t exist. So, Emma gave up her judicial role and went on a journey that took her three years and over 35,000 miles to interview 50 people across the globe. All of these people had faced different adversities, but all were thriving. 

“I wanted to understand whether they had used the same resilience strategies to thrive”, explains Emma. “They had.”

Emma’s ‘nine secrets of thriving’ are the blueprint she had been searching for. In her Vistage webinar in late January 2025, she covered one of these nine secrets: mental resilience. 

“Our brains are counter-resilient”

As human beings, we have a built-in negativity bias, as Emma explains. “Of course, this has kept us alive for millennia as a species”, she adds, “But it’s not all that helpful in our everyday lives.”

Not only is two-thirds of our thinking negative or redundant, but we also have a tendency to see the world in the same way every day. In her webinar, Emma explored how we can retrain our brains to support resilience, rather than undermine it, introducing five key strategies for building and maintaining mental resilience. 

“If you apply these strategies in your life, there’s an absolute guarantee that you will both build your resilience and learn to thrive”, she says. “You’ll see it as an opportunity to grow and be better than before.”

Tackling small, everyday challenges

Emma’s ‘50 thrivers’ describe how their resilience is built from the way they respond to the small challenges that occur every day, rather than the large challenges they face. 

In a workplace context, this may be receiving an email and being triggered as soon as you see the name of the sender, or a habit of rehearsing or ranting about a conversation that has gone poorly with a customer or prospect.

 “These are the kinds of challenges where we need to use these resilience strategies to shift the narrative and become more resourceful in how we respond”, explains Emma. “It’s literally the hundreds of things that happen to all of us every day. The emails, the difficult phone calls, the unexpected resignations, the difficult team dynamics, the disappointment of an unsuccessful pitch. All of these things – and more – are the areas where we need to manage our response in order to build our resilience.”

The power of self-belief

Building resilience is possible for everyone – under one condition. “People need to want to change, and believe change is possible”, says Emma. “It doesn’t matter whether you have perfectionist tendencies, you have low self-confidence or you’re a gregarious extrovert. If you want to change and you believe change is possible, these strategies will work.”

Emma’s five strategies for building mental resilience are designed to help you shift towards living the life you want, showing up in the way you want, being able to influence effectively and being able to build solid relationships. “It starts with you.” finishes Emma. “You can control and influence everything that will help build your mental resilience. Rather than looking towards your external environment or other people in your lives and waiting for them to change, be aware that there are things you can do immediately that will radically shape how you show up.”

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