How to Build Resilience in our CHANGED WORLD
Resilience is the tool that helps us navigate CHANGE
Resilience can be built through self-reflection, shifting and refocusing your goals.
Let’s get real ....you can plan for everything to go a certain way, but the true test of resilience is in acknowledging your emotions and responding to change as a learning experience RATHER THAN BECOMING THE VICTIM OF CHANGE. The current landscape of our world has brought up intense emotions for people across the globe. When experiencing chronic stress and distress, it can be difficult to focus and you may feel as though your energy is drained.
When facing challenging situations, such as staying safe and healthy amid a global pandemic, your body is only focused on survival. The energy we muster may be the bare minimum to get through the day and will not necessarily be geared toward being productive or positive. Learning how to becomes a resilient human being – is the key component to building inner strength that will allow you to tackle whatever comes our way.
Resilience is an important trait that can be learned and applied when going through any difficult experience. This is what can help us RECOVER from unexpected changes or losses that have happened in our life. Resilience is dependent upon our unique combination of experiences, environmental agents, and genetics. By understanding these factors, we can discover how to build and strengthen your inner resilience.
Can you believe that our genes can dictate the way we respond to adversity? DNA studies have found that variations of genes regulate your sympathetic nervous system, the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, and the production of serotonin – all systems that control your body’s biological response to stress. These systems dictate how you perceive happiness and sadness, and understanding the role your physical body has in responding to difficult situations can help you fine-tune the external tools needed to regulate your stress response and build resilience.
Here are 5 ways to help nurture resilience
Reevaluate your goals to find a sense of purpose
High-stress circumstances, like a pandemic can encourage you to reevaluate many areas of your life. Decide where you are focusing your mental and physical energy. This is an opportunity to challenge your goals, leading you to find your “personal why and your purpose” – which can help you create a more meaningful and fulfilling life.
You can start with something as simple as writing your goals/ future dreams on a piece of paper. Write out these scenarios to see how they fit into a greater future for yourself.
Try a passion project like cooking, painting, and figuring out how you can better serve yourself and others. By reevaluating how you want to spend your time and energy, your goals will be more specific and actionable, better allowing you to act on them. Learning how to go through this process is resilience in action, creating a path out of a difficult situation toward future success.
Let yourself feel and process your emotions
t’s important to allow yourself to feel your emotions!
This is a healthy process that can help you understand yourself better and learn what is causing you to feel a certain way. Emotional resilience is created by allowing yourself to “float” through the ebbs and flows of emotion and facing the feeling head-on. This will be uncomfortable, but it’s necessary to the larger goal of building resilience and can also be extremely “releasing” physically.
Let’s take an example: Examine the way you react to a disappointment, such as getting passed up for a promotion at work. Your initial reaction may be anger or resentment, however, this is a moment where you can choose to pause, take a breath, and reflect.
Ask yourself why you didn’t get the promotion – were you not going above and beyond in your work? Were you showing up late to meetings?
When you take a moment to use effective coping tools, you can reevaluate your performance and change your behaviour for a better future result. This is how you build resilience because you’ll inevitably face disappointment again and again, but you’ll rewire your thinking to ensure you don’t immediately react negatively.
Let go of the need to “be in control”
Life isn’t always going to go your way. There are going to be speed bumps that derail you! The challenge is to accept and learn from these disappointments and recognize that some matters are simply out of your control. Once you embrace this concept, you can begin focusing more energy on what you can control.
Our energy is often clouded by a focus on the negative or an obsession with fixing things that are out of our control.
Resource: Steven M. Southwick, professor emeritus of psychiatry and author of Resilience: The Science of Mastering Life’s Greatest Challenges, notes that resilient people “reappraise a difficult situation and look for meaningful opportunities within it.” This means accepting reality at face value and learning to direct your energy and mind-set toward seeing the positive.
Nurture yourself
Nourish yourself with positivity.
This can include everything from the foods you eat, the rituals you take part in, and the people you surround yourself with. The rituals and the relationships are considered “primary foods”- the things that nourish you off your plate. This nourishment is key in learning how to heal yourself and recharge in response to setbacks and disappointments. Nourishing yourself with primary food can help you cultivate a resilient attitude and a sense of inner peace and acceptance that translates into your interactions with others.
Nourish yourself with:
Meditation
Physical Movement
Fulfilling Work
Spiritual Connection
Passions
Self-care
Fun
Be giving and kind to others
Resilience is strength and perseverance, but there is also a degree of selflessness that can be acquired from building and refining this skill. When you push yourself to find a sense of purpose or commit toward participating in causes that serve the greater good and other people, you are working toward becoming a more giving and inclusive person. That in itself makes you feel resilient and productive.
Love Tania
xo
