Resilience is a quality needed more than ever on the cusp of the roaring 20s. Why do I call it the roaring 20s? Well, humanity has this habit of coming back really strongly after setbacks, such as we have experienced in recent times. It’s our survival instinct that has kept us alive for millions of years. So when challenging times occur humans tend to become creative and resilient and pull rabbits of out hats. Its a great, great quality.
Resilience is defined as “the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties, toughness”. Resilience therefore really does not mean that we don’t feel negative, or that we don’t fall down, or that we don’t question our choices and our lives. Rather, it is the ability to have that setback, that feeling of hopelessness and to recover and move on again. We are allowed to fall off the horse, resilience means we get back on.
How can we have more resilience in our lives? More resilience means that we can access that creativity of our minds that is so important in our ever changing world. The next ten years and beyond will belong to those who can get creative and take massive action, but to do that you need to be resilient.
Resilience is it’s basic form is hanging in there. You need to at least be still in the game to have any chance. So there is a big part of resilience that is about not giving up. In order not to give up we have to tap into whatever it takes to lift our spirits. That might be music, friends, hobbies, listening to positive audios, reading – whatever takes us out of that feeling of being “stuck” and back into a mind space that allows creative thinking. You can’t creatively think when you are feeling negative, fearful, or highly anxious.
Once our minds are at least somewhat free to think again the component that is most important to extend your resilience is taking action and focusing on the right areas of your life. Taking action does not mean instant success, and this is really important, but the more actions you take the more you get a sense of achievement and a better idea about what works. Planning your actions then become important. Think through the actions you want to take to achieve goals for the next week, the next month, the next three months and so on.
In hypnosis the way we work is to build into our sessions the mindset of resilience. While the client is in hypnosis we use simple expressions like “you are feeling stronger and stronger every day, you feel a sense of pure resilience building”. We help the client to visualise themselves overcoming obstacles with ease. Instead of negative interpretations, we create stories based on the clients experiences and then help them to re-frame the story so the strength and reslience of those experiences are available to the client. These are powerful techniques for change.
The three keys to gaining a resilient mindset are: what are you focusing on? What are you thinking about what you are focusing on? What actions are you taking about what you are focusing on? So it makes sense to avoid the negative and focus on the positive. Many people are seduced by the negative, it’s just easier sometimes to drift into negativity, criticism and victimhood. However, if you can resolve not to focus on negative issues and make a choice that at least for 70% of your time you will focus on what you can do, what you are thinking about what you can do, and what would bring positive results in your life and make that your focus you are really on the pathway to strong resilience and good results.
What are you going to focus on today?