Exercise your Resilience
Resilience is an innate human capacity.
When a major crisis comes, it’s time to awaken our innate capacity to bounce back and resist.
Resilience, what?
Resilience starts with the ability to accept a new reality. Resilience is the ability to change and adapt to a new reality. Resilience happens when you face a crisis or a difficult and challenging context. A major crisis will force you to face your fears, as well as question your habits, your cognitive biais and your assumptions. It’s painful but it can reveal to be powerful if you manage to bounce back.
Why Change is so painful at first?
Resilience implies a change in behavior, your perception and your way of life. Most people don’t like change and there is a very good reason for it. Change hurts at first! It is that simple. You have to quit, exit or cancel… which sounds negative. Especially in a society that keeps telling you to be a finisher, keep going and never quit… Yet to allow change, you need to quit first, then you go through challenging times and struggle. Finally you may see the light at the end of the tunnel and get to start fresh.
Change is not an instant process
Moving from your comfort zone isn’t exactly pleasant at first. You have to quit the safe nest and go swim in deep water. You first need to face your fears. Then you feel lost, start to explore and learn. Finally you can move forward, make projects and find a new purpose. Each step is challenging.
Change requires more than just Learning
We learn by direct and constructive feedback, to enable change we need to go further back, reflect on the situation and question our vision, our assumptions and our belief system. We need to RE-FRAME, to challenge the status-quo and what we used to take for granted. Old models don’t apply anymore, we need to reinvent our lifestyle, values and principles.
Key Elements for Resilience
- Reach-out, connect or stay in touch with friends, relatives and your tribe.
- Cultivate Empathy. Thinking and helping others help to forget our problems, issues and worries. By motivating others and sharing positive energy, you will end-up boosting yourself.
- Remain calm during the crisis. Learn to stop worrying about what you can not control.
- Don’t take yourself too seriously. Cultive optimism, visualize and imagine better days.
- Self-Care matters! Sleep, rest & recover has to become your first priority. Second, stay active… Being physically active helps to keep your emotions in check and helps to deal with your tendencies under-stress. It is also a simple way to get tired and sleep better. A “new you” means figuring out a new lifestyle.
- Exercise Self-Discipline. First you need to feel better, then secondly you can help others. By being strong on your feet, you are already helping others.
- Be pro-active, manage your time like a pro and get things done. Any small accomplishment helps feeling good. Each small steps counts.
- The ultimate element for resilience is self-awareness… learning as you struggle, as you challenge your belief system, as you keep moving forward. You will bounce back, smarter, aware of new capabilities that just have been revealed by these challenging times.
Dark Times in Life call for Resilience
Sometimes life shows some adversity as a rough reminder of our vulnerability and ephemeral journey. When everything looks dark, complicated and compromised… Wait, Breath & Relax… Let go the storm and the dark clouds to watch the sun coming back, the blue sky clearing the horizon on the sea. Listen to the birds, enjoy the peaceful morning light. Celebrate the sunset. Life gets easy again. We have to accept impermanence and go with the flow. Things change constantly. Nothing is permanent. Good or Bad. Face your fears, spot the recurring mistakes, accept your limitations.
Time for Resilience
Keep dreaming, exploring & playing! Adopt a quiet ego. Stay humble, calm. Let go what you don’t control. Focus on what matters, what you can control and listen to your intention. Dive in & enjoy the process, the work, the thinking… Deal with the unknown as well as the doubts, the hesitation, the struggles. When you are not pleased with outcomes, just blame yourself, evaluate the scale of the problem, look at ways to fix it or move on.
Try to learn from any challenging situation. If you can and if your are ready to question your previous assumptions… What doesn’t kill you, can make you smarter and happier.
Suerte, Forza y Vino Tinto
If you need help to imagine how to bounce back after a life or work crisis, don’t hesitate to check my webpage and reach out. — Christophe
