The world we inhabit is in a state of monumental flux. Our sense of safety and wellbeing is being challenged from so many angles. AI is making it difficult to know what careers will exist in the future. Climate change is creating natural disasters that are changing where we live and how we structure our lives. Wars and gun violence are a rising threat. Attempts to control what our kids have access to learning are alive throughout the US. It’s no wonder our collective anxiety is on the rise in a profound way. Managing this anxiety is a critical piece of building resilience.
There are many approaches for building resilience. Learning to rest, developing a practice of saying no, spending time in nature, eating nutritious food, spending time with friends, making time for creative endeavors, learning a new skill, meditation, exercise, and cold plunging are just a few methods from a list that can go on and on. I practice several of these resilience building methods in my own life, but none of them are good enough on their own and the same thing doesn't work for everyone. I love paddle boarding on a quiet lake, it makes everything in my body relax and my brain can focus. My son finds his mental clarity while rock climbing. My close friend is a fan of using watercolor painting as a form of meditation. It doesn't matter your method, what matters is that you find a way to consistently calm your nervous system so you can stay resourced and avoid burnout. The key is finding something you enjoy. One way I make my regulation habits more enjoyable is to do them in community. When I engage with a group it feels fun, supportive and I find I'm less likely to talk myself out of doing it.
As the times we live in began to feel more heavy I found the methods listed above were important, but they were only part of the equation for building resilience in the face of enormous change. As I dove deeper into the world of resilience training, I found some tools that have had a profound impact on my ability to stay in creative response. The Wayfinder, Narrative Change, Positive Intelligence and Immunity to Change trainings I've completed have supported my resilience building in unique ways. In the Wayfinder approach, I learned a lot about the power of intuition and the wisdom of the body as a teacher. When we dial into the wisdom beyond our mind, we start to make decisions that keep us in integrity and that does a lot for accessing our creative energy and calming our nervous system. With Positive Intelligence the focus was on identifying behavior patterns and doing the reps to build up our mental fitness so that we can carve new neural pathways. With Narrative Change the focus moves beyond the personal stories we tell, into the broader cultural narratives that shape our personal stories. Learning to clearly see what is reinforced in our collective narrative supports the flipping of scripts in our personal lives and in the systems we are part of. The focus of Immunity to Change is a very compassionate look at the self protective big assumptions we hold that have helped us in certain situations, but don't always serve us and therefore create competing internal goals that keep us stuck.
