My Resources: Recognize And Use What Is Already Inside You

Duration of the exercise: approx. 30 minutes

Utensils: paper and a pencil

The exercise "My resources" is about recognizing your own resources and thus strengthening your self-efficacy. Having a high self-efficacy means that you have the expectation to be able to solve new challenges (1). Having this expectation is a fundamental step in approaching and overcoming new challenges.

Resources help you overcome challenging situations. This can be an ability, like your ability to stay calm. But it can also be a person who supports you for example. Thus resources can be located on the inside as well as the outside.

If you consciously direct your focus on all the things that are going well in your life and on all the things that you have already mastered, a lot of things will add up. If you then think about which people or things in your environment can support you and have already supported you, your collection of resources grows even more and your self-efficacy increases.

Exercise guide:

What important events have occurred in your life?
What are you proud of?
What challenges have you already mastered in your life?

Please write down everything that comes to mind about these questions on your lifeline. Then answer the six questions below.

Choose one event from your lifeline at a time and go through all the questions below for each individual event.

How did you manage to master this challenge/life event?
What resources/skills helped you?
Who did you ask for advice? Who helped/supported you?
What did you learn from this experience?
What do you take away from this experience for future challenges?
(If you are currently facing a challenge.) What resources that you gathered from this exercise would you take with you for a current challenge?

Author: Anna Seger

(1) Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy: toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological Review, 84(2), 191-215. https://doi.org/10.1037//0033-295X.84.2.191