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The Seven Skills of Resiliency
The Seven Skills of Resiliency
By Georgia Feiste
Resilience is the ability to persevere and adapt when the twists and turns of life go amiss. We all need resilience. It is the key to success at work and satisfaction with your life. Some think it is the basic ingredient to happiness and success, preparing us to emotionally or psychologically handle adversity, which means facing our situations bravely and with confidence, rather than giving up and feeling helpless.
Research has shown seven major factors contributing to the development and strengthening of resilience.
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Pay attention to your thoughts. If your thoughts about the situation you are facing are inaccurate, your ability to respond effectively will be severely compromised. It's important to identify your "self-talk" when faced with a challenge, and understand how it affects your state of being - your behavior and feelings.
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Shun thinking traps. Aaron Beck, the "father" of cognitive therapy, revealed seven thinking traps that make people particularly vulnerable to depression. a) Jumping to conclusions; b) tunnel vision based on a biased view of the entire situation; c) amplification of negative events and diminishment of positive events, or vice versa; d) making things personal, automatically blaming yourself when things go awry, or the flip side; e) blaming others when things go wrong, becoming the angry victim; f) oversimplification - always and everything generalizations; g) mind reading - assuming you know what the other person is thinking. Let's add an eighth - h) emotional reasoning, measuring reality against the emotions you feel at the moment.
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Deeply held beliefs. These are ideas about how people and the world should operate, who they are and who they want to be. Often these values guide us in behaving in ways true to ourselves, but sometimes they get in the way of our ability to live the kind of life we want and explain why we react the way we do.
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Problem solving abilities. Your thinking style may lead you to misinterpret the causes of a problem, which then causes you to pursue the wrong solutions. We all need the ability to test the accuracy of our beliefs about problems, then find solutions that work.
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Gaining perspective. This is monkey mind at it's best! We often have a tendency to "what if" ourselves into abject misery, rather than recognize the obstacles that REALLY exist or are most likely to occur, and then determining solutions to get around/through those obstacles.
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Gain focus. When your emotions overwhelm you, or you can't concentrate because your thoughts keep wandering, it is helpful to find activities that allow you to calm your mind so that you can focus on the immediate task. These could be contemplation, positive imagery, prayer, meditation, yoga, controlled breathing, progressive muscle relaxation, etc.
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Intentional change to counter-productive beliefs. Utilizing your new found skills in problem solving and perspective to intentionally work on situations immediately. You will ask yourself one of three questions.....
a) A more accurate way of seeing this is.........,
b) That's not true because.......,
c) A more likely outcome is.....and I can....to deal with it.
Once you learn and practice these skills, you will face situations that once might have thrown you with confidence and clarity. Your composure will improve, and you will have the inner power to create the life you want for yourself. Georgia Feiste, owner of Collaborative Transitions, located in Lincoln, NE, is a business, career and personal life coach, writer, and workshop facilitator. She has more than thirty years experience as a corporate executive in the insurance industry. Georgia currently writes columns for the Lincoln 55+ Senior Newspaper and Touche, a local magazine. Her website is http://www.collaborativetransitions.com
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