Just in case you’re feeling it right now too, here are 6️⃣ Rs in my Resilience Toolbox 🧰 - ONE TO SAVE for tough days!
These dark, cold, grey ☁️ days can weigh on me, especially when my Antipodean bones are aching for sunshine ☀️ and long balmy evenings.
1️⃣ RECOGNISE what’s there.
Don’t just hope it goes away and ignore it!
When you suppress unpleasant emotions they get bigger through a process called ‘amplification’. As mindfulness teacher Lotty Roberts says, “when you avoid difficult emotions they go to the gym and lift weights”.
2️⃣ REMIND yourself that you can do hard things.
This draws upon Dr Carole Pemberton’s Resilience Recycling work, where you use your learnings from past adversities to support you with current challenges.
In this case, I know that I’ve made it through the last 13 winters in the Northern Hemisphere.
3️⃣ REACH OUT and get support.
My friend Ali, a brilliant therapist at Tilia Therapy, delivers such a powerful “ooof” in response to some of my messages, that she doesn’t need to say any more.
In those four characters, I feel heard and seen.
4️⃣ REMOVE the “it’ll always be like this” feeling - find a manageable end state.
This gem came c/o my pregnancy yoga teacher Amelie Creswell of First to Fourth who told me “You can do anything for 90 seconds”, aka the average length of a contraction. And suddenly, it wasn’t about steeling myself for the entire labour, but just for each 90-second increment.
This week my son and I counted down the days until the Winter Solstice, when the darkness reaches its peak. From then on, the days get lighter again!
5️⃣ REFRAME - the positive opposite switch.
In this case, asking myself - what is GOOD about this time of year?
This evening, my kids and I brainstormed how we could have “the cosiest evening ever” - not something you could hope to achieve when it was sunny, warm and light. We had so much fun executing this vision.
6️⃣ RAMP UP your strengths - the things you do well AND that energise you.
Trudy Bateman, the Director of Strengths Profile is a big advocate for this.
What does this look like in practice? I shifted my to-do list around to focus on connecting great people today. Connector is one of my top strengths and it sure does fill up my tank.
What would you add?
What do you have in your resilience toolkit 🧰?
If you found this interesting - maybe you’d like to bookmark this post for a future tough day, send it on to a friend or perhaps chat to me about taking a Strengths Profile assessment to discover your unique Strengths Profile - or maybe you’d like to book me to come and chat to your team about their resilience toolkits, with our workshop The Resilient Leader?