Use the 52 Essentials for Developing Resilience Card deck to build emotional resilience, coping skills, and life well-being. These adaptive coping skills are essential for dealing with daily stress and major challenges in life. Think of developing resilience and coping skills as a muscle that needs to be practiced and strengthened over time, and under different training demands.

LEARN ABOUT EMOTIONS, RESILIENCE, AND COPING

This is a portable deck of cards in a sturdy tin can because it’s meant to be used and reused for a lifetime. This is not an activity that is done once and mastered.  

• Address difficult emotions such as anger, disappointment, jealousy, shame, and low self-esteem.
• Identify your personal triggers and learn how to respond. 
• Navigate anxiety, anger, disappointment, shame, guilt, jealousy, envy, daily stress, life transitions, healing from trauma, and a sense of belonging!

DEVELOPING RESILIENCE (a.k.a. COPING) GAMES & EXERCISES

The 52 Essentials for Developing Resilience Card deck is a fun and engaging tool to promote the development of socio-emotional competencies, and the playful format of the card deck creates a non-threatening resource to stimulate productive conversations. On each card, find...

• Topic labeled for easy retrieval. 
• Coping skills and exercises organized by Focus Area (found in the top left-hand corner, and labeled by suit characters)
  • A heart stands for self-awareness
  • A diamond stands for self-management
  • A spade stands for social awareness
  • A club stands for relationship skills
• Exercises and prompts that apply to the specific resilience/coping strategy.
• Actionable exercises that speak to the challenging situations that you’re facing and the goals that you may have on how you’d like to show up as a person.
• Color-coordinated by suits 
  • Internal challenges: Use red suits (hearts and diamonds) when you are having a hard time letting go of a thought or an emotion.
  • External challenges: Use the black suits (spades and clubs) when you are dealing with challenges relating to  others around you.

IDENTIFY YOUR COPING STYLE

• Understand current tendencies
  • Do you typically vent to others about your problems, or do you silently blame yourself for what happened?
  • Do you respond to an issue by taking action or you prefer taking a step back and give it time?
  • Are you responding to stress in unhealthy ways?
• For individual use, practice a little at a time
  • Don't try to do too much at once. Limit yourself and your group to 1 to 2 cards at a time. Each card is broken up into bitesize prompts, because our big emotions and lingering moods are a lot to process.
  • With practice, you’ll be able to call upon these useful skills and strategies in demanding situations.
  • Repeat resilience exercises for new insights. Revisit exercises as you are dealing with other circumstances and challenges in the future.

THE DECK

• 52 cards per deck
• cards measure 2.5" x 3.5"