Five Steps to Developing resilience
Posted on February 19, 2018 by Patricia Magerkurth, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.
These steps will help you overcome and thrive after a tragedy or difficult setback. Your level of resilience can determine your successful recovery.
Tragedy strikes without warning and, if you are human, you will experience one or more difficulties in your lifetime. For many, it knocks them off course and they may never recover. Adversity may include the loss of a job or the death of a loved one. Everyone encounters adversity and the extent to which you are resilient determines your response and successful recovery.
Resilience is the capacity to overcome, reengage, and thrive afterwards. The extent of your resilience determines the success with which you return to your everyday life in the face of setbacks. You can develop and strengthen resilience with some effort and a conscious awareness of your own internal processing.
1. Become aware. This may sound simple, but it requires consciously exploring your inner world and emotional being. Learn to recognize your feelings and name them. Naming your feelings allows you to bring them to the surface, examine them, and make a decision about your response. After a job loss we may feel shame, fear, and anger. Each of those emotions has a separate impact on our potential response. You cannot control how you feel, but you can control how you response.
2. Recognize that the sadness, shame, and fear are not permanent, but need to be felt and processed. When adversity strikes the recovery from the effects are processed using grief. Recognize that this is not a permanent state of being, you will recover and be okay.
3. After experiencing the emotions, which may take some time, explore what happened and how you were within the situation. Do you want to do things differently in the future? What can you learn from the experience and how can you implement those lessons into your life.
4. Reach out and find support. Your resources (family and friends) can help you through this time. They care about you and want to help. If they are silent or not present, tell them you need their support. If that isn’t possible, find professional support in the form of a coach, counselor, or support group.
5. Engage in the world. Find something new and different to do that will give you a different perspective. If you have never hiked, go on a hike. If you have never golfed, go golfing. The important thing to do is to find something different that doesn’t relate to the past. This initiates a new beginning or a new normal.
Finally, remember that you can honor the experience and the people connected to it. If you lost a loved one, know that eventually you will be able to remember the joy and wonder that they brought to your life. If you lost a job, you can connect to the friends you made during that time. Each experience builds on your resilience and capacity for joy in your life.
Coaching can help you build resilience and navigate these difficulties successfully. Pat offers a wealth of experience, training, and a compassionate ear. Contact her for a free consultation session to determine if coaching is for you at pat@inviaconsulting.com
