Resilience

How to cope when everything around you keeps changing

Liggy Webb

• Publisher: Capstone
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780857083845
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Small Business
• Index: Business

BOUNCE BACK FROM WHATEVER LIFE THROWS AT YOU

Stressful situations are a fact of life. Job insecurity, financial burden, relationship doubt are all too familiar. Some people approach them with confidence and poise, facing change and challenges head on. Others back away slowly into a corner and become quivering wrecks at the mere thought of them. So what is it that makes some people cope with these adverse situations so well? It's not about what is happening to you, but how you react to it. It's about your resilience. Happiness guru Liggy Webb is here to help us all find positivity and inner strength to cope with stressful situations. Arming you with a personal toolkit to handle day to day challenges, and providing strategies for thriving in uncertain times Liggy shows you how to increase your 'bouncibility' and bounce back from whatever negative things life throws at you.

• Timely topic with governments across the world promoting happiness on the one hand and dealing with vast economic uncertainty and austerity on the other • Easy to digest, anecdotal and practical guide with lots of common sense advice • Contains timely examples and tips tailored for coping with difficult times

1

Take a Journey of Self-Discovery

Promise me you’ll always remember: You’re braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.

Christopher Robin to Pooh (by A. A. Milne)

Whenever something happens in your life that may result in loss or change and pain, in whatever guise, something very special can occur at the same time. You are given an opportunity to reassess your position in life and to learn something new and potentially empowering.

Resilience very often is referred to as the ability to bounce back from adversity. The question to ask is:

Do I want to bounce back to where I am right now?

It may be that, through the apparent process of upset and upheaval, you can move your life into a far better position than it is at the moment. The situation that may be causing your current anxiety may well be a springboard for you to make some positive changes that you would never have thought of before.

Reassessing the relationship you have with yourself is very important because this will be the time that you need to tap into all your inner strength and work on any weakness. There will, of course, be people around you who can support you; however, you are ultimately your own salvation and developing your coping ability is essential to survival.

Feeling positive about who and what you are will provide you with a solid foundation and developing a healthy amount of self-respect and self-worth is a good place to start.

Be Your Personal Best

It is important first of all to take personal responsibility for being the best that you can be. So often it is easy to compare yourself to others and, if you do this, you run the danger of engendering two emotions: one of vanity or one of bitterness, because there will always be people you come across who you perceive as better or worse off than yourself. It is also pointless to benchmark yourself against others. Using yourself as your own benchmark is far more constructive.

My sister Jacky Pearson is a wonderfully talented watercolour artist who lives in New Zealand. When I first started writing, I lacked confidence in my ability to be as good as other writers, and she said that she had felt the same about her art. She decided one day, however, that she would no longer allow herself to do this, and her focus and ambition would be about being a better artist than she had been the year before, and use this as her goal and herself as her own benchmark. This was a great piece of advice, and certainly helps take away the weight of pressure that we can so unnecessarily put upon ourselves.

Just Be You!

Persons of high self-esteem are not driven to make themselves superior to others; they do not seek to prove their value by measuring themselves against a comparative standard. Their joy is being who they are, not in being better than someone else.

Nathaniel Branden

Imagine having no one to compare yourself with except yourself. What a sense of relief this would bring. You wouldn’t have to give yourself a hard time about not performing as well as your colleagues at work. You wouldn’t have to worry about not looking like the most attractive person with the smartest mind or having the most important job role and the biggest pay packet. You wouldn’t have to worry about your body not being the fittest or most beautiful and most sexy.

All you would need to ask yourself is:

• Did I do this better than I did it last time?
• Have I moved forward in my own definition of success?
• Am I feeling content?
• Am I doing my best for my health?
• Do I have an attractive mind and healthy interactions with other people?

In Neuro-Linguistic Programming, broad distinctions are made between predominantly internally-referenced people who are generally better at using their own referencing to measure their success and those who are more externally-referenced, who look for reassurance and confirmation of their abilities from others. Externally-referenced people are more likely to make comparisons with other people as a kind of self-affirmation, but no one lives in a vacuum and everyone has some kind of referencing system to people outside of themselves.

We all have an actual or imagined audience to our lives that gives our actions meaning. One of the first steps in improving self-esteem is to learn where we currently position ourselves on the line of continuum between being internally-referenced and externally-referenced. Nobody is entirely one type or the other and different patterns will play out with different people at different times. In the workplace, for example, the quality and nature of the relationships we have with colleagues will be coloured by the degree to which we are externally-referenced and the number and strength of comparisons we make in relation to job roles, personality types and status.

Our behaviour will be determined by these perceptions and, for example, a conversation with a team member might be very different from a conversation with a line manager. The outcome of the interaction cannot be viewed in isolation from our perceptions of who we are, the boundaries of our role, who our colleague is, the boundaries of their role and the value of our role compared to our colleague’s role.

In addition, the perceptions we have and comparisons we make will be based on what we see and hear. However, we see and hear only a small range of other people’s behaviour and we need to take this into account when we examine our perceptions.

To pull all of this together, we are making assessments based on a small chunk of information that is internally processed through a system coloured by our own perceptions of self, role, status and personality type! It is no wonder that many people find success a difficult concept to grasp and find it easier to use other people’s measures of success than find their own!

The most powerful place on the continuum is in the middle: having a faith in your own perception and judgement but still being open and receptive to others’ feedback.

So, in addition to recognizing your referencing systems, and to fully understand personal success, you will need to take a good, deep look into the essence of your being and see what it is that makes you who you are.

Ask Yourself the Following Questions

• What qualities make me feel good about myself?
• What can I offer to the world around me?
• What is my personal success gauge?
• What is my own definition of happiness?

You can then accept that your definition of success might look completely different from someone else’s. What you think of you is the most important opinion.

The more clarity you have around your definition, the more you will have demonstrated personal honesty and the creative imagination to think outside of other people’s referencing systems. This will help you to take responsibility for your own perceptions and definition of reality. This then will become the place that you will want to bounce back from any adversity that you may have to deal with.

What Value Do You Give Yourself?

Something else to consider is how much you value yourself. This will provide you with something to think about.

• A bar of iron costs £5
• Made into horseshoes it can be worth about £20
• Made into needles it can increase its value to £3500
• Made into balance springs for watches, its value can leap to £250,000.

Remember, your own value is determined also by what you are able to make of yourself.

We are all people in progress which is very exciting because we have the ability to make improvements every day of our lives and keep adding value to our pot of self-worth.

Appreciating and valuing yourself is the most important component of self-love. However that sounds, it is hugely important, because if you don’t love yourself, how would you even begin to expect anyone else to?

Many years ago I met a young woman called Megan, who made a huge impression upon me, whilst I was working on a commu­nity project for homeless people in North London. I was so impressed by her vitality and passion for life. She was a beautiful and vibrant person who always wore beautiful bright scarves and had a great sense of humour. She also had a very deep scar that ran from her forehead across her eye to her lip and she seemed totally unselfconscious about it even though people used to stare at her. As I got to know her, I realized that she had worked very hard to cultivate her attitude and indeed her sense of self-worth.

Megan was born in Trinidad and came to London when she was five, with her mother and brother, to escape an abusive father. Initially they lived with the grandparents, and then moved to a council flat in Camden. Her mother soon became involved in yet another dysfunctional relationship, and Megan and her younger brother were regularly physically and mentally abused. Eventually they were taken into care after they were both subjected to a severe beating that left Megan’s face badly scarred and partially sighted in her right eye.

She was frequently bullied by people who were prejudiced about her background and her apparent disfiguration. She said that she grew up with very little self-esteem and believed she was ugly and worthless. When she was fourteen she was fostered by a wonderful Irish family who helped to restore Megan’s self-esteem and she became passionate about helping others with disability and trained as a school assistant to work with children with special needs.

Megan was encouraged by her foster mother Mary to see her experiences in life as something that would help her to empathize with other people who may have suffered too. If this vision remained strong, and she followed her dreams, it would inspire and encourage others to do the same.

I remember Megan telling me that when she looked in the mirror that she didn’t see her scar or her challenged past. What she saw was a bright, colourful woman who was beautiful in her own right and who lived a meaningful life which meant that she added value herself which helped her to feel really good about herself.

Fear and Desire

It is important, at this point, to understand that human beings are essentially driven by fear and desire and, very often, fear can override our ability to want to make changes. Fearful people get stuck in what they perceive as their safe zone and any upheaval appears insurmountable. The fear of the unknown can be quite scary and the danger sometimes is that we can allow our minds to imagine all sorts of negative outcomes. This is where you need to work at turning these situations around and focusing on what you want the outcome to be and take control of where you would like to get to.

Learn to Trust

Trusting yourself and others is key and to really trust is something that requires a certain amount of confidence and also the ability to occasionally move out of your comfort zone. Being able to trust someone is a real gift; however, it is a gift that brings with it vulnerability.

Positive relationships are built on the cornerstone of trust. Sometimes it can be difficult to let go of the paranoia and fear that tends to attach itself to trust, especially if you ...