Stoic Training Can Increase Your Resilience

"Training in CBT and related psychological skills works well to build emotional resilience, with one drawback. People tend to forget about or stop using the techniques after a year or two unless they’re given booster training sessions. That’s what makes Stoicism so intriguing: people tend to get into it long-term or even permanently. Stoicism is for life, not just for Xmas, you could say. People simply identify with it at a deeper level, as though it were a religion or philosophy of life like Buddhism or yoga" (Donald Robertson).

Following up on what Donald Robertson has said there, I think resilience ought be based on one's core Stoic beliefs.

These are _my_ core Stoic beliefs:

"Happiness (eudaimonia) is to be found exclusively in Virtue." *

"The only things we control are inner events such as our beliefs, desires, and acts of will."

"Virtue (or virtue and certain things that can be attained only by those with virtue) is the only genuine good, and vice the only genuine evil."

"Ergo, since virtue and vice are types of acts of will, they are in our control."

"Ergo, things not in our control [externals] are neither good nor evil."

"Emotions (or passions, if you prefer) arise from (false) beliefs that externals have value."

"No-one should be distressed by any external occurrence."

* The quoted material is from Grant C. Sterling.

How Stoicism Could Help You Build Resilience