Increasing Resilience

This members’ portal page is all about Getting in Shape, physically and mentally. Resilience is all about how effectively you deal with adversity in your life, and adversity certainly comes in the form of stressors in our lives.

This portal page will deal with ways that you can increase your resilience … things you can do to get in shape.

To kick things off, here are a few ideas to consider. And remember, as you take steps to build your resilience, nothing happens overnight. You need to develop a plan in each area and work your plan.

• Make sure you have positive supports and positive relationships with friends and family who really ‘have your back’. This doesn’t a few drinking buddies (or the equivalent) who will bail out as soon as they have to assume some degree of compassion and think about someone other than themselves.
• Develop good dietary habits and eat foods that have good nutrition and that help you become healthy and physically strong. The old adage … you are what you eat … rings true here. Pay attention.
• Get into good physical activity habits and remember that anything is better than nothing. Once again, start slow and work your way up to a reasonable level of physical exertion for your age. The worst thing you can do is to launch into a vigorous, exhausting and painful exercise session when you’re out of shape. I guarantee that you will not return … been there, done that. A short walk, a little floor workout in your living room, some stretches in your bathroom are great to start. Over a period of time your little exercise efforts will develop in to solid exercise habits and your routine will grow and become a regular part of your day. You won’t look at exercise as some kind of burden in your day, but as a part of your day when you can release yourself and feel the benefits.
• Learn to relax. There are many relaxation and guided imagery audio and video products around and many meditation instructional resources. Try them … they work! In fact, I have produced my own progressive relaxation session which, in conjunction with my visual imagery and mental rehearsal session, become practical and very powerful tools for you to use in your efforts to build your resilience. If you’re interested, go to my ‘store’.
• Don’t let life’s events control you — be proactive in controlling your life. Learn to predict possible day-to-day occurrences that require your attention, make a habit of acknowledging your problems and developing action plans, and when things don’t go your way figure out what you can do differently next time (learn form your past actions).

Of course, this list is not exhaustive and I will expand the list and the detail over the coming postings.

If you would like to contribute to this area, I imagine that many of you have your own stories about your efforts to increase resilience and I’m sure there are many readers who would like to learn from them. Please submit your story below. I read them all and those that are particularly educational or useful to other readers will be shared (with your permission) through my main blog pages. You will receive full credit. Please try to keep your post to under 1000 words (that’s about 2 single-spaced pages). Thank you and I’m looking forward to reading about your experiences.