Begin small. Remember a single, not too overwhelming occasion when things went wrong and you were still able to discover something right in the situation: in your response, in other people’s responses, in an outcome you never could have predicted. This may be something as simple as realizing, "If I hadn’t missed my flight, I wouldn’t have run into an old college friend at the airport." Or "If I hadn’t been looking for my lost wallet, I wouldn’t have discovered Timmy’s old teddy bear under the bed." The gift or the right doesn’t have to be as large in scale as the mistake or the wrong – just a small, previously unrecognized beneficial outcome or lesson learned. Sometimes the learning is that there can be gifts even in disasters.
Recall another time when things went wrong and you honestly didn’t think any good came out of it at all. Even from this situation, look for lessons you could learn now, and think about what a different response might have been then. Could more response flexibility have changed the outcome or your feelings about the situation? Find the learning in the AFGO [another frickin’ growth opportunity], and gain confidence that you can learn.
You can now reframe past events to see more response flexibility in them. Even if you can’t change what happened, you can shift your relationship to what happened, and that change in your response can enable you to see yourself differently, more resiliently, now.
— Linda Graham in Resilience