Success is said to be the result of two elements that must meet: talent and opportunity .

This famous maxim, however, does not give merit to the work and the discipline that sharpen the talent waiting for the occasion, and work and discipline can make the best only if there is an ideal psychological substrate for the flowering of these elements, both necessary and not so then common and discounted.

In fact, there are many cases of wasted talent, also known in the news, high promises of art, sport or other fields that are lost on the road.

This also happens in everyday life, we all have to make contacts with the defects of an uncultivated mentality, not refined, as instead much more often happens for the body, for which we generally spend time to make it well done, attractive, healthy, handsome.

But what would be the characteristics that a successful mentality must have, meaning success to live well, taking satisfaction from our life whatever happens? What should we work on?

Resilience

Let's start with an observation on adolescence and adolescents. Adolescents are individuals still growing, both physically and mentally, in terms of personality and temperament.

As we often do, we tend to identify adolescence as a period of poor wisdom, dominated by hormones and moods, while older people who know how to avoid life problems are considered wise.

Is it all reduced to a lack of experience or are there evolutionary reasons behind this difference in behavior?

Why does it always seem that teenagers go looking for trouble ? The reason is soon said: the brain, still growing, is structured by creating many more neuronal connections through strong experiences and not excessive traumas, so there is a sort of need for shock to grow.

This can be explained by the fact that traumas have a potential positive value and resilience is exactly the art of knowing how to deal positively with this kind of inevitable events in everyone's life .

Instead of being crushed by pressure, the resilient mentality pushes the person to exploit the energy of traumatic events to transform their point of view, thus creating more neuronal connections, and a structured and complex brain is able to positively exploit all types of pressure, not being tied to mental or emotional patterns and being ready to reorganize and redefine one's personality.

Obviously resilience must be cultivated over time, especially in children: educating with a good example, not hiding mistakes and failures in their eyes but showing how to get up from falling, making it a valuable experience, thus improving, discovering new resources and reorganizing, in an elastic way, with ability to adapt.

The mechanisms of resilience

The alternatives to resilience are passivity and over-reaction, tendencies that bring further problems as a result of the problem that caused them. Feeling victim or blaming others because of our problems are two symptoms that our state is not at all resilient .

Fear, anger, anxiety, stress, despair are all results of a state of negative consciousness, the immune system suffers and a tendency to disease grows.

Resilience begins with a correct evaluation of oneself, without underestimating or estimating oneself more than necessary, so as to focus on realistic and reliable strategies on how to solve life's problems.

This results in improved communication skills and the ability to act under stress .

The result is a set of positive emotions, a sense of satisfaction, increased self-confidence, optimism, self-irony, and even the immune system is strengthened . The passion for one's goals and the ability to face challenges is growing and slowly developing.

This leads to healthy relationships with colleagues, friends and relatives, the ability to contain crises, the ability to accept adverse conditions, the ability to set realistic and therefore satisfying goals, the ability to take responsibility, become reliable .

Growing nursing children is especially important to counter and neutralize bullying, to deal with separations and divorces, cases of heavy family economic crises, sexual identity crises, deaths. The role of the family?

In any case, support the children, offer the necessary affection, communication, do not hide weaknesses and problems but show the right way to face them, consider error as a necessary element of individual and collective progress .