Resilience
Resilience is quite a complicated piece because whilst there are many things that contribute towards being able to bounce back from life’s pitfalls, there is no single surefire way of making you resilient. However, there are plenty of things you can do but the point is this. To make yourself more resilient, you have to take action before your reserves are called upon.
We know this is a physical training sense. I do amateur triathlons and half marathons (or I do when I’m not injured!!) and the amount of training versus time spent on the event is approximately 25:1, without including cross training hours. And I don’t train as much as most of my fellow competitors which is why my race time is slower, so their rates are, conservatively, probably closer to about 30:1. And that’s just over a 3 month period. We build all the reserves and strength ready for the day we need them.
But we don’t always do this for other events that cause us to call on our reserves. Admittedly, we have no idea when they will happen, but let us be bleakly honest here. At some point in the next few years we will probably all have to deal with at least one of the following: serious physical or mental illness ourselves or within our family, job/career uncertainty, relocation, emotional crises such as losing a friend or partner, death of someone we know or death of someone close to us. That isn’t a pessimistic view, that is reality. We know that events happen that cause us to have less time to take care of ourselves. And the time to prepare for these is when we are feeling great. For instance, how many of us know that meditation is a great way to calm our minds and use it on an ad-hoc basis when we most need it? 🙋♀️ And how many of us use it on a regular basis to build a capacity for greater calmness in times of trouble? Yeah, not me either.
***Angharad is the founder of bright rebel coaching. She coached a wide range of people, in a wide range of situations - leadership for Officers, young women entering the job market for the first time, mothers who want to change their work/life balance post maternity leave, small business owners and people working on relationship issues.