In recognition of Well-Being Week in Law, which takes place May 4-8, 2026, BARBRI is highlighting tips and ideas to help those in the legal profession become more aware of mental health and improve well-being this week and throughout the year.
Resilience is the ability to keep going and growing in the face of adversity or change. It’s about the ability to handle life’s inevitable setbacks or unexpected developments without being sidelined by them. Resilience allows you to encounter difficult work and life situations like receiving criticism, being passed over for a promotion, losing an important case, or a divorce, and respond to those in a way that allows you to move forward in a positive way.
While resilience may not come naturally, it can be learned, as explained in the SkillBurst, a BARBRI company, Well-Being module “Cultivating Resilience.” Here are some practical tips to build resilience and to think of it as part of your legal education.
- Start by rethinking and reframing how you view specific events
Perception is a key part of resilience—and you can change and reframe your perceptions. You can view the same situation as either an irrecoverable failure or a temporary setback. It’s all about perspective. One way to do this is by refusing to catastrophize failures and instead viewing them as temporary, local, and changeable. That promotion you didn’t get? You can always try again.
You can also look for opportunities and change your perspective. An event might be the same, but it matters what lens you view it through. For example, if you are criticized about a brief you wrote, you can view it as proof that you can’t do your job–or you can decide to learn from that interaction and keep improving.
- Learn to take feedback well
Even one critical comment can send people into a tailspin of doubt. But it doesn’t have to. Learning how to take feedback well will increase resilience. That starts by identifying and managing the feelings that negative feedback causes. Negative feedback may feel like an attack, but that feeling often leads to reacting with automatic defensiveness. Once you’ve identified and managed those feelings, learn how to extract value from that feedback and view it as potentially helpful advice. It’s important not to personalize it; instead, see it as helpful information that can allow you to grow.
- Bolster your sense of self-efficacy
No matter the challenges, you always have a choice and can make positive changes in your environment. This self-efficacy is a key to resilience, assuming personal control and responsibility is a critical part of a resilient mindset. You cannot expect others to change, so you must focus on what you can do to change situations. Instead of thinking about how things happen to you, think about how you can make things happen.
- Develop self-compassion
Everyone makes mistakes, and being imperfect is part of being human. That doesn’t mean you should ignore mistakes. In fact, taking responsibility can help you feel less defensive. But everyone fails, and experiencing failure doesn’t make you a failure.
We often extend more compassion to others than we do ourselves. So one way to practice self-compassion is to think about how you would talk to a friend who has made a mistake and apply that to yourself.
Difficulties are inevitable, and you can grow from each one. Cultivating resilience is one way to do that, and the SkillBurst Well-Being series can help.
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