Resilience

Last week was a treat to learn about resilience, and to learn how Kathleen Fanning (Ireland’s Coach of the Year) uses coaching and resilience together.  Thanks to everyone who came out for the workshop!  We learned that resilience is bouncing back better after an adversity.  While the other three components of PsyCap are proactive, this aspect is reactive.

 But rather than wait around for adverse events, we can practice increasing our resilience now.  One of the biggest links to resilience is mindfulness.  Mindfulness allows us to see a gap in our thinking and allows us to understand that our mind chatter is just that – mind chatter.  Meditation helps us build the mindfulness muscle of being able to be aware of our mind and not just blindly led around by each impulse and thought.

 Once we have a good mindfulness practice, we can then begin to talk back to some of our irrational beliefs that we take as truth.  When we are judging ourselves or the situation harshly, we probably are in fixed mindset, and can lean on some learner questions.  We can also use “hit back” statements such as, “Another way of seeing that is …” and “That’s not true because …”.

 When we are worried about the future, a great “hit back” statement is: “The most likely outcome is … and I can ….”.  Sometimes I have people go through the very worst case scenario and then the very best case scenario to get them to the most likely scenario.  This practice is difficult to do in the moment, but that is the goal.  In order to do that, we have to practice when it isn’t the heat of the moment to build up the habit to handle the heat of the moment.

 We had a lot of fun trying these out with a partner.  I encourage you to write down some of your beliefs about adverse events in your life and give it a try.  Let me know how it goes in the comments.

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