Hi, I’m Rick Sessinghaus. Are you resilient? Are you? I don’t know. Sometimes, I don’t feel very resilient. I feel like stress is now taking over.
Resilience is the capacity to recover quickly from challenges and difficulties, that mental toughness. As I study resilience and I look at that as the opposite of stress, stress now gets to me, resilience is my way of dealing with those obstacles that are in front of me.
The first thing is, be in the reality that it’s challenging. So often, we try to run away from our difficulties and wish things were different. They’re not. So, the first part of being resilient is dealing with what the reality truly is.
The next things is, sometimes when we are stressed out, we lose control of our thinking and our emotions, so we have to regain that control through breathing. I’ve done other videos, certainly, on breath and stress reduction, but resilience is about thinking clearly, to now being able to move forward, taking those deep, smooth, rhythmic breaths. Now, you can regain control of how you’re thinking.
Once you’ve done that, you have to now understand, “What are the actual challenges that I’m looking at?” Can you reframe? Can you look at them in a slightly different way? Reframe doesn’t always mean making it positive and making it rosy. It’s about looking in a situation of, “What is in my control, right now?”
Sometimes, when we get stressed and we have to overcome some of these obstacles, we start thinking about what’s out of our control, and that keeps bombarding us. We have to now reframe the situation of understanding what it is and, “What is in my control, now?” Once you’ve identified that, it’s easier to move forward.
Now, start focusing on, “What are some short-term goals that I can actually accomplish that will minimize these challenges, to help overcome some of these challenges?” Once I can see focused on them, you got to now take action. Again, it’s easy to run away from your problems, run away from the obstacles, but when we’re in that, in the moment, we have to refocus and now take action, even if it’s one small action that is under your control.
One of my favorite things about building resilience, that we’ve all done, is thinking back to when you’ve had tough times. Think back when you’ve gone through some of those challenges, that in the moment felt like they were going to stay with you forever, but you got through that. What were you thinking? What were you saying to yourself, what were you doing, that got you through that? I believe that we’ve all been through some crap. If you can use those same skills, which was probably great self-talk, which was probably being able to reframe the situation, was probably, “Hey, what can I do right now, and not worry about next week?” You were already building that resilience muscle.
So, let’s start today by, in a way, embracing the challenges that are going to come our way, yet we’re going to have the skills to be able to not only deal with it, but move through that, and become more resilient in this age of chaos and stress and overwhelm, is that now you have some tools to help you perform for success.