Resilience...

What do do when we need those extra reserves…

Resilience as a Verb…

It often looks as if there is a ‘thing’ called resilience which we can acquire, or train ourselves into, and we become ‘resilient’. But I like to see it more like a capacity for recovery, just like I have a capacity for healing when I cut my finger. (you probably had to be on the call for this to make sense ;-) ).

If this perspective is true, then life kinda works like this:

1. we generally do OK and we go about our day-to-day;
2. life gives us a knock;
3. it hurts; sometimes a lot;
4. our innate healing capacity kicks in and takes over the process of ‘doing something about it’;
5. at some point we feel better.

OK, there are a few pieces to this, but the overall process was summed up by one of the participants who said,

I usually know, if I’ve had a bad day, that I’ll feel better the next day.

It sounds simple, and obvious perhaps, but the ‘knowing’ part is critical.

Because she knows this, she doesn’t ‘do’ anything other than what occurs to her to do-some soothing tea, a restful evening, a refreshing walk, or even just ignoring it and doing whatever work or household chores…