How to Improve Resilience
Regardless of your situation in life, resilience is necessary. Personally, professionally, relationships, athletically, or spiritual journeys all require it.
It's challenging to teach resilience and the older we get the harder it is to break free from old patterns and habits, but it's absolutely possible for anyone to improve it. Here are some suggestions and tips to utilize when learning to be resilient. 1. Focus on results: Understand where you are going. Acknowledge there may be obstacles, but look to the horizon over the obstacles to the finish line. It's there and you can reach it. Focus on the end result, and handle each obstacle one by one. Keep your 'eye on the prize' or end goal and it helps keep the challenges along the way in perspective. 2. Turn failures into lessons: There is no such thing as failure. Everything is really just a temporary setback, and sometimes they are brutal.
First, own it and accept that something went wrong.
Give yourself time whether it's 10 minutes to be upset, a few hours, a couple of days, even weeks or months depending on the situation.
Give yourself a wallowing watershed, and even put it in your calendar. "No more feeling bad about ____." You will be surprised just putting it on the calendar actually starts to make it feel better right away.
3. Choose to move forward - Moving forward is a choice. Nobody is suggesting you cannot be bummed out for a while. The world keeps moving whether you want to or not. At some point you have to make a decision to move forward with lessons learned or stay stuck in misery. 4. Support Others - It's simple, pay it forward There is something amazing that happens when we help others (often called the "helper's high"). When we stop and help others it makes us feel better too. Helping others helps us get beyond our own challenges. Additionally, the good deeds don't have to be big projects. They can be as simple as holding a door open and looking someone in the eyes when you say, "thank you". Lastly, I wanted to share a neat technique that came from my daily Enneagram emails. I never thought about the tension in the face, but it's a very interesting concept: If we remember to come back throughout our day and breathe and practice centering ourselves, we can begin to explore where the tensions are in our bodies. It is a whole practice in itself. We will begin to become aware of the tensions that we have in our face. We carry a lot of our personality in the tensions of our face. If we become aware of our face, we will see how much without realizing it, we are grimacing, squinting, tensing muscles in our jaw or neck, brow, ears, scalp. Our entire facial area is an ever-changing mass of tensions. If we could allow them to relax more, we would actually begin to experience the dropping away of some of our personality features. This sounds farfetched, but it’s true. If you allow your face to relax, even put a slight smile on your face, it would change your entire mood, and possibly create a new opening with someone. Have a great week!
