The Road to Resilience Starts with Self-Awareness

Today, we face constant pressure and daily challenges at home and in our professional lives, creating enormous stress and a sense of overwhelm. Uncertainty about the future and the need for change call for flexibility, adaptability and acceptance. 

How do you cope? How do you thrive? 

More than ever, it is important to flex and train our resilience muscles. 

A critical building block to developing your resilience is increasing your self-awareness. Resilient people have the ability to stop their negative thoughts and focus on positive outcomes. They can self-regulate their emotions, and thereby their thoughts and actions. 

Self-awareness means awareness of your body's responses including feeling, desires, urges to act and awareness of your thoughts and thinking patterns. The key is how these relates - the mind-body connection. 

How your body responds to your thoughts; how feelings drive your thoughts. 

We are what we think. 

Pay Attention

Be mindful. Stop and take a breath. To build self-awareness, you need to be in the moment. Not worrying about the past nor living with anxiety about the future. 

We are all in uncharted territory anyway, and the future is uncertain. 

In the middle of a challenge or setback notice what you are thinking. Notice how you are feeling. What was the trigger? aybe write those feelings down. Do some journaling to capture what is happening. Try to notice thought patterns. 

How are you reacting to those thoughts and feelings, positive and negative? What decisions are you making? 

Did you make a mistake at work and turned that into "I suck at my job!" I am prone to make those leaps of logic. I have to check myself. 

Listen to your self-talk when you are facing a new challenge. What do you tell yourself? 

Self-Regulate

Resilient people have the ability to stop negative thoughts. Building resilience involves getting control over your thoughts, behaviors, and actions. If you can regulate your emotions, you can regulate your thoughts, and, therefore, you can respond positively and grow from challenges. 

How do you stop them? Hare are a few ways. 

You need to insert a mental break. Put an elastic on your wrist and every time you find yourself having a negative thought - snap it. This is a quick break but can be powerful. Or, carry a stone or paperclip, or wear a specific piece of jewelry and when you start having negative thoughts start to rub it. 

Take a 5-minute break. Do some breath work. Get up and take a walk or stand outside for a few minutes. If it's freezing (we are heading into winter!!) just get up and walk around the house. Do some stretching. Say some mantras that work for you in the moment. 

Anything to focus your mind on something else entirely. 

Outside Looking In

Emotionally distance yourself from the situation. Try not to personalize these moments. Take a step back. 

Resilient people don't view setbacks and challenges as a negative reflection of their abilities and self-worth. They look at the circumstance for what it is and call on their strengths to navigate. 

Think about it form an outsider's perspective, as someone who is watching the situation unfold. Would that person understand why you are so upset, scared, angry, or [insert emotion]? Would they be able to see other perspectives? What might they do differently, what do they see as the options (if they didn't come with all your head trash)? This is where you might run into some of your limiting beliefs (for another day!). 

Rather than getting so caught up in the negative, if you can regulate your thoughts and feelings, you can redirect yourself to respond to tough challenges in a positive way. Rise to the occasion. Resilience is about making choices. Choices that will be fueled by feelings and thoughts so get a handle on them if you want to build your resilience.