Building Resilience For A Fulfilling Life

I’ve decided to build on what I was talking about last week in regard to resilience and dive a little deeper into building resilience. Although it is interesting to know how resilience and endurance fit together I am sure you would also like to know how you can build resilience in your own life. I have a tool I share with my clients which I will give you later in this blog. 

The practice of building resilience is a bit like the difference of dieting and eating healthily. Eating healthily is a life choice and dieting is a momentary solution of a perceived problem. Eating healthily will mean you are healthier throughout your life but fad diets very rarely work in the long term and can actually cause your body harm. The same is true of resilience. If you streatch yourself in one area and have not been consistently working on it you will find that it causes you harm. However if you build resilience in all areas of your life when you are asked to streatch you will be far more able to do so without too much stress to yourself. It is also important that you not only build in resilience but that you also build in ways for recuperation in each area. As athletes know building in rest and recuperation activities is as important as their exercise regime. It is essential to a healthy body that it is allowed to recover from the demands placed on it and so it is in all areas of  your life. 

In case you have not read last weeks blog let me remind you of the six areas of resilience. 

1. Financial Resilience 
2. Spiritual Resilience; which as I explained last week is not about any belief system but rather it is about your personal growth. Ensuring you have a high level of self belief,  You are aligned with you purpose and are fulfilled in your life. 
3. Emotional Resilience 
4. Social Resilience 
5. Physical Resilience 
6. Mental Resilience 

The tool that I am going to share with you is something that you can use to build capacity across all of these areas of resilience. I don't profess to know where you in any of these areas, only you know that, but the tool I am going to share with you can be used wherever you are in your own development of resilience.  You might find that you have already built some resilience into some of these areas but that others are much weaker. It is natural to favour some areas over others and this will line up with your values in life. Personally I know over the last few years my physical resilience has gone downhill quite a lot. I am aware of this and am currently working on building it back up again. Even thought you might favour certain areas over others it is important now that you know about them to ensure that you maintain resilience in all areas. Life is unpredictable and the challenges we face are not always of our choosing. For instance if you were physically very fit and had your finances in order but had been ignoring your spiritual resilience and your emotional resilience you might have found the lockdown situation very stressful and might have even become quite depressed by it. However if you had been focusing on developing your spiritual resilience and your emotional resilience the lockdown might not have been too much of a challenge in terms of being on your own and isolated but you might have found that you were financially stretched and that you might have become ill due to your lack of physical resilience. 

What I am going to share with you, you can use on all the different areas;

1. Firstly it is important for you to accept where you are in each area. There it no point thinking you should more or better than you are.  I know this myself as I made myself very wrong for being so unfit and as a consequence pushed myself harder than I was able to physically go. This led me to injuring myself which meant that I fell even further behind in my fitness. I learnt the hard way that I needed to accept where I was and build from there. I now have a fitness regime that challenges me and continues to increase but does not injure me. And this brings me on to…
2. You should be looking to streatch yourself by at least 20%. This will ensure that you are growing that area. You only need a 20% streatch to ensure you are growing an area. You are welcome to streatch yourself more than that if you choose to but make sure that you can maintain a greater streatch (remember we are going for long term growth not a quick fix) over time and that you will not harm yourself by asking more of yourself. I am not able to tell you what 20% looks like for you in any of your areas as I do not know where you are starting from and 20% now might look different to what it looked like a year ago or what it will look like a year from now. When I was really fit 20% looked like a lot more than it looks like now. When I was at my most unfit 20% looked like a 5-10 min workout routine. I know this sounds completely ridiculous, but it was a start and starting from there has given me a platform to build from and I now feel quite strong in myself and my 20% looks quite different now. It also means that I was never over faced and that I looked forward to it. 
3. Lastly make this part of your life. Book some time into your diary every month so that you can go over each area and ask yourself what you need to be doing to streatch yourself at least 20% in each area. You will be amazed in a years time how much you have improved in your whole life. 

Finally I am going to give you a few ideas for how to grow each area and build in rest and recuperation although this is by no means exhaustive so please add in your own where you feel moved to. 

* Financial Resilience - I am sure this is an area we are all aware of and the ways I am going to share with you will be no surprise. You can build resilience by 

• Increasing your savings
• Increasing your investments 
• Increasing your earnings
• Decreasing what you spend your money on 
• Making sure you live within your means 
• Decreasing debts 
• Find ways to create passive income 
• Have some money that you use to just enjoy yourself 
• Build space in your finances to treat yourself and to enjoy the money you have 

* Spiritual Resilience - This is about understanding what it is to be human and understanding your spiritual evolution. I focus on this in my coaching and training by helping people to shift from being in the ego/automation state into a more self aware and conscious way of living. 

• Increase your self belief (I will share how to do this next week) 
• Find out what your values are and how to honour them 
• Find out what your purpose in life is and how to ensure you give focus to it. This does not mean that you have to change your whole life and pack in your job. Once you know what it is you might decide to give a few hours a week to it depending on what it is and how you feel. 
• Find out what makes you fulfilled and ensure that you make time in your life for this 
• Develop a gratitude practice 
• Be of service 
• Do random acts of kindness 
• Personal development 
• Conscious development 

* Emotional Resilience - This is important because our emotions trigger our actions and these create our lives. Our emotions can also effect our wellbeing and becoming more emotionally intelligent will help quite a few areas of your life.   

• Understand what your emotions are trying to tell you. Emotions essentially are a feedback mechanism of your experience of life.  
• Learn how to express yourself without projecting your emotions but so that you are really heard 
• Learn how to acknowledge and let go of your emotions so that you can act consciously rather than react to situations. 
• Learn how to engage with others who are emotional 
• Learn to act in spite of how you are feeling when you have committed to something. 
• Find time to have fun and do things that make you happy. 
• Laugh 
• Be child like. I love rollercoasters because I feel alive when I go on them. 

* Social Resilience - as I am sure you can guess this is to do with your social life. Before I go into how you can grow it is important for you to know if you are introverted or extraverted and to honour this in your self. You will need to adjust your social life accordingly depending on where you are on the introverted - extroverted spectrum as different amounts and types of socialising will either energise you or drain you and only you will know. 

• Know how much socialising you need to feel energised and build this into your life
• Have a group of friends who energise you when you spend time with them 
• Have a support group of people you can turn to when life hits a bumpy patch. It is important to make sure that you give to this group as well as receive. You will be more likely to receive support from them if you have been there to support them too. If you find you are always the giver and they are not there for you when you need support you might need to find new connections. 
• Develop friends to have fun with 
• You might prefer to have a group of friends or to have lots (or a few) separate friends neither is right or wrong it will depend on who you are as a person.
• Develop good communication skills 
• Take responsibility for the relationships in your life and when they go wrong reflect to see how who you were being created the situation 
• Learn to be fully yourself 
• Learn how to handle disagreements 
• Learn to share from your heart 

​* Physical Resilience - I would imagine most of us know what might be required of this area but I hope I add a few things that might streatch your expectations. When looking for ways to streatch yourself in this area it is for anything that will enable your body to be more healthy and energised. 

• More exercise 
• Less exercise 
• Eating a healthy diet that suits your body don’t take someone else word for it 
• Drinking lots of water  
• Pamper your body 
• Relaxation 

* Mental Resilience - this is anything to do with your mind and will often be finding ways to get out of the thoughts in your head as they are the cause of a lot of stress in peoples lives. My grandfather used to religiously do sudoku puzzles because he believed that this would ensure that he kept his mind agile and he was mentally agile right up till he died at 95. 

• Learn something new 
• Do brain exercises 
• Journal to help you process life events
• Create a plan for your work as this will create space in your thoughts for other more enjoyable things 
• Mediate to reduce stress and learn how to get out of your thoughts 
• Learn how to be present as this will allow you to get our of your thoughts 
• Let go of limiting beliefs 
• Understand your subconscious programming so that you can change it and chart your own path in life 
• Do puzzles 
• Make time to enjoy peace ad quite in life be it out in nature or in a temple 

I hope that you can see the benefits of building resilience into your whole life and that you have found value in this blog. 

I have a lot of resources on my website should you want to explore them I have left my website link in the first comments below, and I also offer a free chemistry call to anyone who thinks they might benefit from coaching with me. You can contact me through my website to set that up. 

So much love from me to you.

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