Here we are knee deep in a pandemic. Who saw that coming?
Of course, it has raised all sorts of mental health issues – from anxiety and depression to cabin fever and the negative effects of isolation. I will probably go into those and what to do about them at some stage, but for now I think resilience might be a pretty handy topic.
You can never be too resilient.
And, to be honest, no matter what happens from here, you are probably still going to need to be resilient. Because as we’ve seen, life brings many unforeseen changes.
What exactly is resilience? I think for most of us it’s bounce-back-ability. Overcoming adversity and keeping our composure.
There are actually quite a few definitions in the psychology world but rather than complicating matters, I’m going to stick to the definition from the Driven website.
He talks about resilience having 6 domains:
Vision – having a purpose and goals
Composure – emotion regulation and keeping calm
Reasoning – problem solving, planning, being resourceful
Health – making sure you look after it
Tenacity – persistence, being able to bounce back
Collaboration – being supported by your social world
All of these work together to see us through difficult times without being brought to our knees.
So basically, the plan is to keep focused on what’s important to you, keep yourself calm enough to deal with the crap, look for creative solutions to the problems, persist with the solutions, turn to your social supports and make sure you’re healthy enough to keep it all going. That is you being resilient. Ta – da! Doesn’t sound too hard does it?
Obviously that’s a lot of ducks to get in a row. But it’s always good to have a plan and a direction to go in.
A good place to start is to think about what your vision is.
You can ask yourself these questions:
What goals do you have for the future?
What are the important things in your life?
What do you need to stay focused on to be happy?
What goals have you let slide because of Covid-19?
What goals have you not pursued? Can you pursue some part of them or do something towards them?
If you don’t have any external goals, can you set some goals around your personal growth?
You want to make sure you have something inspiring to move towards.
We’ve had a lot of the things we would normally have to look forward to taken away like holidays and lunch with friends and visits to family so we need to have new or refocused things to look forward to.
Even just thinking about these things may be inspirational and a little bit exciting.
Next time we’ll talk about how to keep calm and be resilient.
