Retiring soon? Changing jobs? Going off to college? Getting married or divorced? Having a baby? Diagnosed with a new disease? Life is full of challenges.
A huge life change creates huge challenges. For the past two years I have been studying neuroscience findings about how our brains and bodies process stress and produce happiness. I would like to share a brief checklist of personal resilience skills that can assist you to sail along with your next big challenge/adventure. Let the wind blow freely!
1) Live deeply in the moment. Learning how to focus on life through the senses includes really tasting good food, feeling textures, and seeing beauty. Use of the senses grounds us in the body, which reduces anxiety and improves pleasure. This skill can help us block out the “noise” in our heads that includes negative self talk and worry. The good news is this skill can be cultivated; the bad news is it is a skill that needs practice. You can Google “mindfulness techniques” as a way to begin.
2) Focus on the positive. It is not naive or stupid to be positive and optimistic. IT IS HEALTHY! “Positivity” is a word coined by Barbara Frederickson, a Harvard researcher. She found that when you experience more positive than negative emotions, you are happier. Seems obvious, but we choose what we notice. The skill is to focus on happy feelings and thoughts, while limiting cynicism, resentment, and self-criticism. The positive side includes being amused or feeling silly, and letting yourself feel awe and amazement, gratefulness, appreciation, hope, inspiration, joy, love, trust, and serenity. These positives should occur at least twice as often every day as negative thoughts and feelings like guilt, distrust, sadness, shame, frustration, blame, etc. Barbara’s free online positivity test will ask your quick questions and calculate your daily “positivity ratio”. It can be done daily to measure your progress. You can find it at http://positivityratio.com/single.php
3) Respond versus react . Reacting is a survival skill, but when faced with a complex challenge its’ emotional impulses and rapid decisions can dig us into deep life holes. I often see people who are reactive and take “just any job”, date “a warm body who seems nice”, or begin “any volunteer work that fits my schedule”. Responding, on the other hand, is a series of choices made after the clarity of combining your passions, your values, and your vision of what you want in the future. It is intentional, not reactive.
4) Ramp up your skills. Doing research and increasing skills in hard areas for you, and working with an experienced mentor who can help you set a realistic plan, will increase your odds of success. A good life is more than luck; it is also focused work. Building resilience skills and getting more life balance are ways that work and lead to high performance.