 The proposed guideline aims to facilitate communication and systematic development of research questions and models in the context of resilience by providing a checklist consisting of four questions. 1. Resilience of what? 2. Resilience regarding what? 3. Resilience against what? 4. Resilience how? The term sustainant is used to describe the feature of the system that should be maintained in order to call it resilient. This guideline can be applied independently of modelling framework or underlying theory and demonstrated through an application example of a potential climate tipping element, the Amazon Rainforest, which illustrates the diversity of possible answers to the checklist questions and their benefits in structuring the modelling process. This article was authored by Lee A. Tamberg, Jobst Heitzig, and Jonathan F. Dorns.