Building Resilience

“More than education, more than experience, more than training, a persons’ level of resilience will determine who succeeds and who fails. That is true in the cancer ward, its true in the Olympics, and its true in the boardroom.” Victor Frankl

At AnExaminedLife we are aware that life requires you to build a toolkit so you can approach the adventures, challenges and sometimes ravages that may be encountered along your journey.  We skilled enough to empower you to build Resilience as part of that toolkit.  What is Resilience?

Resilience is the ability to overcome obstacles, using so called negative experiences by channelling them into a positive and not allowing difficult experiences to define your whole existence.

Resilient individuals see Stressors as potential opportunities for change, and undesirable events in terms of possibility rather than threat.  They tend to have a more realistic view of the world. Mostly they believe that if life gives you lemons you make lemonade.  Resilience has the following characteristics: a staunch acceptance of reality, a deep belief that life is meaningful.  Resilient people also have an uncanny ability to improvise.

We help you work on the following characteristics: internal locus of control, adaptive behaviours, finding and making meaning, regulating your attention and so much more.  It is intense work but with equally intense rewards if you are available to giving yourself permission to experience it.

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Work/Life Balance

We go to school to learn many things; to gather knowledge, to hold that knowledge in our brains and come summer to sit exams which require us to remember as much detail as possible to get good grades and pass our exams.  Whilst going through this process is great exercise for our cognitive capacities, it doesn’t teach how to create Balance in our personal life or work.

Creating Balance is a skill like any other.  Oftentimes you may read numerous books and articles on how to do this, but still the struggle remains.  Like I said before, creating Balance is a skill and skills require habits to be embedded.  I empower you to create Balance yourwork and personal life.  By using empirically tested tools and strategies you are enabled in a way that allows for continuous self-assessment so you can stay on track.

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Mental Peace

I teach Mindfulness practice.  It is the primary way I know of achieving mental peace.  What is Mindfulness?

Mindfulness is a basic human quality, a way of learning to pay attention to whatever is happening in your life (or life per se) that allows you a greater sense of connection to your life inwardly and outwardly. Mindfulness as a meditation practice is a systematic method aimed at cultivating clarity, insight, and understanding.

In the context of your health, mindfulness is a way for you to experientially learn to take better care of yourself by exploring and understanding the interplay of mind and body and mobilizing your own inner resources for coping, growing, and healing.

Numerous studies have shown that it is possible to change your brain connectivity and rewire yourself to support present-moment awareness.  Mindfulness practice has been shown to elevate positive emotions, to have stress reducing effects and pain-management effects.

More than three decades of scientific research at medical centres all over the world suggests that training in mindfulness can positively and often profoundly affect your ability to reduce medical symptoms, improve immune function, reduce blood pressure, cortisol levels and psychological distress while learning to live life more fully.  Mental peace can come from one or all of the above, but most importantly it is derived from your willingness to explore and embed your practice so you may live the life of your choosing.

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Habits – some are useful some are not.

We are full of them, whether we realise it or not. We say we have them, but more often than not they have us. What is this thing I’m describing? They’re our Habits, and they drive our lives to the Nth degree, sometimes brilliantly, but many times not so and root us in a quagmire that can rule us moment by moment. They are our regular tendencies and practices. They are often unconscious and automatic.
Although they can be impacted and influenced by Motivation (made up of Intention and Motion meaning to take action), they are more likely to drive Behaviour and Change than do Motivation by itself.
Habits are amazing when we are excited about learning something new and wonderful. They can enable us to cope with huge amounts of information, choices, decisions, goals and emotions. Many of these habits are unconscious, directing behaviour like a conductor does an orchestra, but we are often unaware of this. While good habits make it easier to achieve desired results without sapping our energy, undesirable habits make it difficult to achieve our wants, hopes and desires and will drain our inner resources.
Most of us do not worry too much about our habits unless and until they begin to create havoc and unhappiness in our lives. At the start of a new year, you will hear words like “goals”, “motivation”, “resolutions” being spoken about like it’s going out of fashion. It is a rare thing to hear others giving a platform to the idea of “Habits” and the role they play in keeping us stuck. Yet again. The emphasis is regularly placed on “willingness”,“motivation” and “resolutions”.
It appears to be a little-known thing that “Willingness” and “Motivation” are states of mind which can embed a habit OR NOT. The fact that they are used to underpin a habit, means that the habit came first! Indeed, Habits are known to change the structure of the brain and thereafter impact Behaviour. Willingness and Motivation alone are not known to impact brain structure, but Habits do. Repeated habits work like this; simply put, repeated actions cause your neurons to fire again and again, forming a stronger and strong neuronal circuit. Heard the term “Neurons that fire together, wire together”? This comes from an evidence based theory called Hebbian theory, which showed that repeated actions created stronger neuron circuits, allowing us to do things on autopilot.
Now autopilot can be good, but only if these habits are not undesired ones. The more a habit is performed, the stronger the neuronal circuits become. Autopilot speeds up the transmission of signals, in effect making it easier and quicker for the habit to occur next time.
We have now entered a new season and it is never too late to continue working on those resolutions you made in January. So, if you’re looking to embed new behaviours and release old ones, Habits are a good place to start looking.

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