Resilience: Four Ways to Cultivate More
Resilience.
If ever there were ever a time when we needed more resilience, it’s now. So many things seem to be changing in our lives. Cultivating resilience can help us find our way through those changes. We may even be able to thrive through changes when we become more resilient.
Merriam-Webster.com defines “resilience” as, “an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change”. It’s not just the changing of seasons, the changing of careers, it’s the changing of the world in which we live in and the changes within our hearts.
Internal changes and external changes, when faced with resilience, can become opportunities. What would life look like for us if we saw opportunities in change?
When I was faced with changes and challenges, I learned a lot about resilience. Below are some of the things that helped me during changes and challenges that resulted in resilience.
Four Ways to Cultivate Resilience.
1. Take Nothing Personally. Nothing. Everything that someone says or does to you, is a reflection of them not you. Their words, their reactions are what is inside of them, it’s part of their thoughts, their conditioning. It has very little, if anything, to do with you even when it’s directed towards you.
The next time someone says something to you that triggers a hurt or angry feeling in you, remind yourself that it’s about them, not about you. What they said is based entirely on their beliefs and their knowledge, and it’s likely their opinion. It has nothing to do with you so don’t take it personally.
2. Stop Listening to Your Inner Critic. Most of us have one, some of us have more than one, the inner critic that chatters away in our heads. That inner, often self-critical, voice lies to us to keep us small and prevents us from growing into who we are meant to be. It’s made up of all the conditioning that we received from outside sources and it’s likely no longer serving us.
When we stop listening to our inner critic, stop giving it our attention, or even talk back to it and shut it down, we stop feeding it with our energy. We can start to shed it and move forward in peace and quiet.
3. Be Open to Whatever Comes. What is meant for us will come our way. For that reason alone, it’s worth exploring what comes into our reality with an open mind. When we openly embrace challenges, we can more clearly see the opportunities in them. We then learn to reframe every challenge as potential opportunity.
When the next challenge arises for us, remember there will be opportunities as well. Look for those opportunities, focus on potential opportunities. Be open, even if the opportunities don’t seem obvious at first. They are there, waiting for us to notice.
4. Release Attachment to Outcome. It’s important that as we move forward through life that we don’t hold so tightly to our goals that we lose sight of opportunities that come our way. If we are concrete in our hopes, “it has to be this way, they have to be that way”, it leaves no room for things to happen for us. We may even block blessings that are there help us get to where our soul wants to take us, towards our purpose.
Do your best, know it’s your best, put it out there and let whatever happens, happen. Release attachment to the outcome and just see what comes. Trust that what is meant for you will happen for you.
I’m sure there are many ways to cultivate resilience. If you look back on your life for the past year and a half, I bet you have become more resilient. Give yourself credit for the resilience you’ve already created. Give yourself credit for every time you made lemonade out of lemons. You’re more resilient than you think you are.
The picture I used today, is from my walk this morning. The huge, old trees that have weathered so much are reflective of the resilience that was on my mind today.
Be well,
Nikki