Archive for Resilience
Not a rampaging bulldog bear in sight – what next?
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What needs to happen when you’re no longer in any real danger of being consumed by what you saw as the raging bulldog of adversity?
In the last blog we talked about the effects on your body and mind in not finding ways to turn your innate stress-response mechanism to the off- position once it’s no longer needed. Now, we’re going to look at some of the ways to do just that.
One of the very first steps to take is to become aware that the stress you’re feeling may be a result of not allowing your body and mind to come back to a level of equilibrium after the life-event that knocked you out of whack is no longer any real threat.
The next step is to realize that the level of stress you’re continuing to experience is tipping your optimum performance and optimum life scale way out of whack. Read More→
What happens when the raging bulldog bear of adversity charges into your life?
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In the last blog we talked about having the ability to ‘bounce back’ from the adversity and challenge that comes and goes in all of our lives. However, since posting that blog it occurred to me that, in psychological terms resilience is more about ‘bouncing forward’ rather than back. Our lives are in constant motion so going ‘back’ to the way things were with respect to how we view ourselves, others and the world at large is not an option.
More correctly the ‘bouncing back’ refers to your physiological rather than your psychological state.
What happens to your body when you sense danger, whether real or imagined, causing upset and stress? Well, in the first instance, your body’s innately natural defences rapidly kick into high gear. This is called your stress-response, which is a normal physical (body) response to an event or events you perceive (mind) as dangerous to your life. Read More→
Resilience in the face of adversity
Posted by: | CommentsLife is not about how fast you run or how high you climb, but how well you bounce - Anonymous
One of the ideas explored in the last blog was the notion that every experience in life is an opportunity to learn and expand the relationship we have with ourselves, others and the world in general – in other words, a gift.
It was also acknowledged that some of those gifts are really, really, really BIG ones. However, if we succumb to the seductive helplessness that some of our experiences taunt us with then we give up our power and vitality to those experiences. We run the risk of allowing ourselves to be sucked into an emotional vortex of thinking about ‘what might have been’. We focus on what our life isn’t or doesn’t have rather than focusing on the abundance of possibility that are lives could be. When we are held in the grasp of feeling powerless we continue to mourn the loss of what our lives might have been instead of taking the nuggets of learning from those less than desirable experiences and moving into a more robust way of feeling and thinking about our lives.
Of course, how we relate to the challenges that life offers up to us is our choice. The decision of if, when and how we bounce back from adversity is ours to make.
“Adversity is like a strong wind. It tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that we see ourselves as we really are.” Arthur Golden
Resilience is defined as a dynamic process. It speaks to our innate capability of bouncing back from significant incidents of adversity, trauma, tragedy and physical or emotional threat. Read More→
