Are you feeling depleted?
Do you find yourself disconnecting from those you love?
Are you more emotional than usual?
It might be that you could benefit from focussing on building some resilience.
Last week I was having sidewalk drinks with some friends, the new way of socialising within the COVID19 distancing measures. As I have my Radically Reconnect programme on my mind 24/7, I was, of course, talking about it and explained that one of the components is building resilience. One of my friends straight away answered, “Virginie, I keep seeing and hearing this word, but what does it actually mean?”
There and then I realised that I needed to write an article on resilience.
Let's start with the assumptions that we coaching professionals work from: all of us have the incredible ability of dealing with whatever life throws at us, we have the capacity to adapt and change and we are inherently resilient.
Going back to my friend’s question: what is resilience?
The American Psychology Association defines it simply “as the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats or significant sources of stress — such as family and relationship problems, serious health problems, or workplace and financial stressors. As much as resilience involves ‘bouncing back’ from these difficult experiences, it can also involve profound personal growth.” (1)
But as with all human conditions, resilience isn’t a simple trait. A person able to bounce back from a high stress job at a particular point in their life may be unable to adapt to problems in their personal relationship. There is more complexity to resilience than meets the eye. Pietrzak & Southwick add some important nuances to the definition and look at resilience from a systemic perspective by stating that “Determinants of resilience include a host of biological, psychological, social and cultural factors that interact with one another to determine how one responds to stressful experiences”. (2)
Now that we have defined it, how do we cultivate it?
Since resilience is, in fact, something we all have, the ‘muscle’ builds naturally as we experience adversity in our lives. Starting from the simple difficulty when a little friend takes away a toy to the more complex, such as the death of a loved one.
We can also intentionally build our ability to adapt to stressors. “It involves developing thoughts, behaviours, and actions that allow you to recover from traumatic or stressful events in life.” (3)
More practically put, there are four key areas we can pay more attention to that will help increase our resilience: connection, wellness, healthy thinking and meaning. (1)
Connection to others and nature is one component of cultivating resilience--think of serving others, joining groups, working with animals, floating in a body of water. Focusing on our mental and physical wellness is another area we can choose to work on, like introducing mediation or physical exercise into your lives. Finding what deeply moves us is important in resilience building too. We can also consciously concentrate on the way we interpret our experiences and reframe our thinking towards helpful perspectives. For example, drawing lessons from what happens to us, or maintaining hope in the face of challenges.
We, of course, each have our own preferences and specificities. Trial and error is part of our pathway to finding that which works for us.
Finally, part of resilience is the ability to acknowledge when we need help because we are unable to adapt sufficiently to the adversity we are facing.
Just be, don’t override
I do have a bee in my bonnet when reading that we need to ‘bounce back quickly’ and that we need to ‘just’ become more resilient, as if we are meant to be tough, hard, move on fast and override what we are experiencing. This is not what resilience means to me. In fact, for me resilience is also accepting and being with our adversity, our grief, our pain, or whatever else we are experiencing. It isn’t about ‘putting it away’ and there isn’t a right time span for bouncing back. Honouring what our experience is and being fully aware is the first step towards building that resilience muscle.
If you find yourself feeling a bit depleted or unable to face your challenges and need to reach out for support, we will be exploring and supporting your resilience in our Radically Reconnect online programme.
Radically Reconnect starts 1 October 2020.
If you’re curious, you can reserve your space now.
For questions or individual coaching please contact me.
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