Kate's Nuggets

How to Maximize Your Resilience
Episode 23

Podcast Opening over Theme Music:
Hello and welcome. This is Kate's Nuggets, the podcast where I share bite-size nuggets of wisdom about self-leadership. I am your host, Kate Arms. I invite you to listen lightly, let these ideas wash over you. Take what you take and let the rest go. You can always come back and listen again.

Kate Arms:
In this episode, I want to talk about how to maximize your resilience.

Resilience is what happens when we bounce back from stress. A resilient item or person bounces back to where they were before. It is possible to bounce back better, to be stronger after you've been exposed to stress.

I refer to this ability to become stronger because of the stress that we go through extreme resilience or anti-fragility, to get better and stronger because of the stresses that we are placed under. As opposed to robust things which don't respond to stress, they just stand up to it, and fragile things which break under stress.

Extreme resilience and the ability to grow from stress are related to post-traumatic growth. But the hope with extreme resilience is actually to not go through trauma, to actually go from stress to growth. Trauma is an injury that we sustain if we do not process stress. And so, at the heart of avoiding post-traumatic anything is processing our stress.

What does it mean to process our stress? It means to notice it, be aware of it, incorporate and let pass through the emotions associated with the stress, integrate the memories and the ideas and the thoughts and the information of the stressful thing into our evolving personalities and into our sense of self. It means accepting what is, feeling what we feel, and letting ourselves evolve in response to having been through that experience. If we can do that, we are resilient and don't get traumatized even by very stressful events.

And I think that we can all accept that living during the time of a global pandemic is an incredibly stressful event.

The specific stresses that you are under of course depend on the specific circumstances of your life. Are you a worker who is out being exposed to other people or are you sheltering at home? Different stresses, different responses. Do you have kids? Are you worried about them? Do you have elderly family members? Do you have elderly family members who are in long-term care facilities? Do you have separation from your family in terms of long distances or borders that are closed or are you close to each other and able to walk and see each other?

Each of these circumstances will change the nature of your specific stress. And, of course, there are many, many more that I haven't mentioned. And if there's a voice in your head going, "But she didn't mention mine," that is perfectly true. There are so many different variations. I couldn't possibly mention them all.

But the tools for dealing with stress in a way that makes us resilient are the same. And no matter what your toolkit is right now, if you start using some of these tools, you reduce the amount of stress that you don't process. You increase the likelihood that you will get through this period without being traumatized by it, and that's huge because every piece of stress that we don't process now is going to have a negative impact on us later.

So, what is involved in maximizing our resilience?

The first thing is we need to believe that it is possible to grow from what we experience. This is captured in the quip, what doesn't kill me makes me stronger. Stress is an opportunity for growth, we only ever learn or grow through stress. And so here we are under a highly stressful situation and we're doing our best to take care of ourselves so that it doesn't kill us. So now how do we use it to make us stronger?

First, we believe that it's possible to become stronger because of it. We cultivate the awareness that we've gotten through tough times before. And even though this is new and different, and we haven't been through anything like this before, we have the resources and skills that we developed in previous tough times that we can use now.

We need a realistic sense of optimism. We don't need to pretend that everything is good or that everything is going to be good soon. Optimism is not about feeling good right now, it's not even about believing that the future is going to be great.

Optimism is about trusting that by paying attention and moving through the world consciously we can have a positive impact on how things go. We can be part of making things better than they are now. We don't need to despair. We need to take action and we can take action.

Exactly what action we can take is limited by our circumstances, but there are things that we can do. We can make choices about how we respond to the challenges placed in front of us. And it is in this belief that we can make a difference that optimism and hope lie.

For those people who are thinking, "I'm not an optimistic person," what I want to offer to you is hope that even that can change. I used to be such a pessimist by default. I suffered from depression, and I know that I followed the path of people before me who changed through forms of cognitive change, changing the way they think and see and behave in the world. That changed so that my default is faith and optimism now. It is possible.

The first thing that we need to do after a stressful event or in the face of a stressful event to maximize our resilience, is to recover back to a sense of optimism and hope, to invite our fear to stand down.

You have a version of yourself that is calm and compassionate and kind and creative. This part of yourself is the part of yourself that is always resilient, and whatever tools that you use to bring that part of yourself to the forefront, maximizing your resilience means using those practices and tools to bring yourself to feel that way.

It may be long baths. It may be getting enough sleep; it probably involves getting enough sleep. It may be forms of exercise. It may be meditation. It may be playing card games. It may be telling stories. It may be drawing. It may be dancing. It may be singing. It may be all sorts of things. It might be something that smells nice or a particular blanket you wrap yourself up in or a TV show that makes you laugh hysterically.

Think of what your body feels like under stress, and then think about what your body feels like when it feels the opposite of stress. And then make a list of all the things that make your body feel like it feels when it's the opposite of stress. Think about those things and make a list of the things that you can do very, very quickly.

Maybe five deep breaths. Maybe feeling the sensations of what you're touching very closely. Maybe making a funny face and making yourself laugh. Something you can do quickly because you will want to use those as soon as you have a disruptive event happen to help yourself come back to that calm, creative, compassionate version of yourself.

The next step is to know that you can grow from anything and from this perspective of yourself that is calm and compassionate and creative, let this version of yourself ask the most important question, what am I going to create from this? What is important to me? What do I want to see in the world? What do I want to create in the world? And how can I take one step forward towards creating that from what is here right now? What am I going to create from this?

And then start taking action.

So that's the basic process for being resilient. You get destabilized by an event. You find a tool for getting yourself calm and creative. You feel your feelings and decide what you want to do. Feeling your feelings is a really important part of the process. If we don't feel our feelings, they can't pass through us, and if they don't pass through us, they get stuck in our bodies. And that is why bodywork is often an important part of trauma recovery. Those emotions get stuck in our bodies.

Now emotions are a sensing system for us that tell us what we want more of and what we want less of. And so, when we feel an emotion, we should be watching the emotion and asking, what does this sensation want me to pay attention to? What would it be like to get the message of the emotion without getting overwhelmed by being in the emotion? That's what you want to try and accomplish.

Now, we are currently living in a time when the baseline of stress in our lives is really high. It is particularly important at this time that we not only have our emergency recovery tools but that we also have ongoing practices of taking care of ourselves. These are the things like getting enough sleep and eating healthily and going for a walk every day or having a meditation practice that we do every day or getting exercise every day where we're lifting weights or singing music that we like or playing music that we like to listen to, that we do them every day as a way of building our baseline that is the anti-stress feeling in our bodies.

So this is a very high-level overview of how to maximize your resilience. T

here are a few tools that can help you that I want to pass on to you. The first is that if you want some detailed steps on how to maximize your resilience, you can go to katearms.com and click on courses and you can get the Extreme Resilience Toolkit, which is a 40-day email series. Each day presents you with a different tool for cultivating extreme resilience.

Another tool that I highly recommend is the emergency stress relief process that I describe in episode 18 of Kate's Nuggets. So, you can go to wherever you got this podcast and listen to episode 18. And that is a process that you can take 2 minutes, 20 minutes, 40 minutes to go through the full body process, and it's a way of resetting when you are stressed, that goes very well in both the emergency recovery mode and the do this daily practice so that you are building your baseline of anti-fragility and extreme resilience.

This is a very stressful time. It is not a time that will necessarily create mental health problems for people. It is not a time that will necessarily traumatize everybody. This is a time where people who maximize their resilience have an opportunity to grow stronger and healthier. And even if you aren't as strong as you want to be and you fear that you are not able to process all the stress associated with this situation, undertaking these practices will maximize your resilience. They will set you up for the least amount of traumatic response to this situation.

I wish you all ease and I wish you all resilience and strength. May this challenging time be a time that brings out the best in you. May you discover in yourself resources and strengths that you did not know you have, and when you look back on this time from several years from now, may you say, "Okay, that time sucked, and what I got out of it was this thing for which I am grateful." I wish you ease and peace.

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Here's to Thriving! Catch you next time.
Kate's Nuggets is a Signal Fire Coaching production. The music is adapted under license from Heroic Age by Kevin McLeod.