This week, I delivered three workplace training sessions on building resilience with mindfulness. It seems many people feel their resilience has been eroded in recent times.
It was nice to have a refresher, myself.
Here are three insights from the large body of research on psychological resilience:
1. Resilience is the ability to bend not break through adversity, maintaining wellbeing despite challenges. Resilience is not just about bouncing back, it’s the potential to bounce forward from adversity through learning and growth, finding yourself in a better place thanks to the challenges you’ve faced. Resilience is not fixed, it is a capacity we can strengthen with practice.
2. Key components of resilience include emotional regulation, optimism, a strong support network, and reframing challenges as opportunities, all of which can be developed over time.
3. Self-compassion is a super-power and powerful tool to reduce stress and distress through understanding and self-care. Self-compassion soothes the Stone Age stress/survival impulses and reactions of our brain and nervous system, enough to gain clearer thinking in times of difficulty.
Learn to meet stress and distress with self-compassion.
Self-compassion is an essential first step in emotional regulation. Borrowing from Assoc. Professor Dr. Kristin Neff’s 3 Steps to Self-compassion, here’s what I’ve been sharing with people this week about practicing self-compassion as a strategy for facing life’s challenges with resilience:
(1) Mindfulness: Observe ‘negative’ emotions, stress, anxiety, anger, sadness, overwhelm etc with curious eyes, without ignoring or exaggerating anything. Name it to tame the experience. Then notice, how does it feel in your body? Let go of the story and feel it to heal it. Can you acknowledge that this is your reality, right now? Can you give these feelings space to be as they are? Without resisting, denying or suppressing them?
(2) Common Humanity: Remember, you are not alone and not wrong for feeling this way. This is a common human experience many people feel at times, with many feeling also this way right now. There is no fault or failure here, rather an expression of our shared humanity. And a problem shared is a problem halved.
(3) Self-kindness: Give yourself the same care and understanding you would offer a loved one in this situation. Train yourself to do this, if you have to! And fake it until you make it. It’s so worth it. Ask yourself, what do I need right now? What does this mad/sad/stressed/afraid part of me need right now? Reassurance, love, connection, healing, distraction, fun …?
Thoughts? What is your experience with self-compassion?
(image by Amie Roussel, @amieroussel)