All of these nuanced differences contribute to another major difference between the two mindsets; resilience. Resilience is an individual’s ability to cope with hardships, adversity and stress. A resilient person can gracefully manage tragedy and heartache; they can learn to flourish after the death of a spouse, or being made redundant in their job or evicted from their own. People without resilience will collapse like a tower of cards in the face of a slightest struggle. Resilience is a spectrum and people rarely fall on either end but somewhere in the middle.
With that being said, being more resilient is highly desirable and therefore methods of improving resilience are being intensively researched. Currently studies have demonstrated that high resilience acts as insulation against depression and the concepts seems to be inherently related to positive thinking.
As positive psychology research continues to innovate, however, it also seems that the topics of resilience, positive thinking and a growth mindset are all connected. If you believe you can improve yourself and your circumstances and that your position in life can change, positive thinking is a natural result, which in turn enables you to deal with problems and hiccups in your life.
If you think that everything is fixed and your life is inherently limited, negative thinking is also a natural result and adversity becomes even bitterer.
