I recently hosted my first Resilience Workshop which saw a room of wonderful women share their experiences, issues and struggles with stress and overwhelm in challenging times. Together, we shared learnt top tips and insight as to how to build resilience in both our personal and professional lives.
Before you read on, if you're interested in looking at your own resilience levels you can check out my FREE resilience building guide here.
How do you cope with stress and do you recognise the signs in yourself that you are struggling?
In our daily lives, nearly all of us have to deal with a level of stress, and recent events mean that we are all dealing with a new degree of uncertainty.
Many people don’t recognise the early signs of stress or indeed acknowledge that they stressed but for many reasons just carry on as before. The key way to counter stress and ensure that we are not pushing ourselves to breaking point is to build resilience.
Being resilient is about being able to bounce back from setbacks, maintaining a positive attitude and being able to more than cope in the face of adversity. Easier said than done, I know.
In these challenging and uncertain times, the need to be resilient is needed more so than ever as people are working in different ways, facing uncertain professional futures, dealing with setbacks and cancellations and entering a new world of social isolation. In order to ensure you don’t derail when things get tough, there are measures you can put in place to survive the stormy seas.
A key area is self-awareness. This might sound obvious but how in tune to yourself would you say you really are? A lot of us are so busy being, doing and acting that we lose the true essence of our being and don’t pay enough attention as to what is really going on inside us.
Through my work, I coach people on creating more resilience in their lives and we use an eight-part model to build resilience across a wide range of areas. If you'd like more details on this, do check out my free resilience building guide here
One of the areas I particularly focus on is taking back control of your mindset. As Tony Robbins says “choose to stand guard at the door of your mind”. Every day, every moment, we make decisions on what to focus on – where do we want to put our attending and what deserves thoughts or action.
When you're stressed, you’re filled with negative thoughts
When you're stressed, you’re filled with negative thoughts and your reaction mode is set to fight or flight. And how we respond to this is a decision we really need to make. It’s not about ignoring reality or not seeing things as they are but making a conscious decision where we put our energy and focus. For me, over these coming months I want to focus on:
how I show up: positive and supportive
be the voice of reason: stop catastrophising, educate myself and focus on helping others
be emotionally intelligent: be empathetic, collaborative and optimistic
be connected: finding different ways to work and connect virtually, be there for my clients, friends and neighbours.
And in the short term, day to day, I’m focusing on mini goals (like eat breakfast, get my steps in, drink 2 litres of water, stay away from too much media and try and connect with 2 people virtually each day). These mini goals are supporting my mental health and overall wellbeing and aren’t too ambitious they feel overwhelming with everything else I need to focus on.
What about you? What will you focus on this week?
We run regular in-person and virtual workshops on building confidence and resilience for individuals. We also provide 1-2-1 support to help you feel more resilient and calm in your day to day life. Find out more about our confidence and resilience coaching.
Liked this article? You might also like to read my newer post about why resilience is your superpower.
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