I am going to talk about resilience this week: the ability to keep going, in spite of what is happening, which has also been inspired by some of the stories of our Olympians.
Do you ever feel that life is throwing stress after stress at you? It can be work related, family related, money related, physical related, and sometimes it can feel like
all these stressors are coming at once. When this happens it can become a challenge to maintain mental well being, so I want to share something that was shared with me this week.
We all have a base line for dealing with stress, where we feel we are managing, dealing with life and generally functioning. Unfortunately, when more and more stressors are thrown at us, we start moving away from the base line. And it's when this starts to happen that we begin to lose the feeling of
managing. We might struggle to sleep, to eat, don’t feel able to see people, communicate with people, we might start to have physical symptoms such as headaches, joint pain, energy levels go down and we start to lose sight and feel incapable of doing the things that would normally help us to manage.
Let's compare this to going up a set of stairs. The bottom step is the base line — where we manage quite well. The next step up however we collect 5kg of weight — an extra
stressor. So it's starting to build up and feeling more difficult to manage. Every step up adds another 5kg of weight, another stressor, so it all starts to weigh us down.
So how can we get rid of that extra weight so we can slide back down the bannister to our base line?
Here are some things that I am working on and you could too:
- learn to let go of control — we can’t control every situation. Some things happen that are
completely out of our control, so let go of the responsibility and focus on what you can do
- learn to be more open and accepting of things that come along that might surprise you — situations, conversations, people
- learn to recognise what it is you don’t want — go and find what you do want
- remember who you are — discover the essence of who you are, the funny side and laugh
- be open to experiences and what tomorrow will bring.
As Josh
Kerr said in his post-race interview after his silver medal win the other day — if you are going out to win, you have to be prepared that you could lose. You know what you have done to get to this point, but you can’t control everything about the race, and the more you accept that you could lose, the more dangerous you become to the other competitors.
I love this and think this reflects how we can all manage those stressors and build our resilience. We don’t have
to be Olympians, but we can learn to be better at managing those stressors.
Have a great week folks — keep looking, moving and feeling good.
With love,
Jane xx
