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Day 1 of 7
Resiliency Framework: Becoming Resilient
Getting Started
Today we will jump right back with why building resiliency is so important. Parts of this will hopefully seem like a review and is meant to re-focus your attention to your own self-growth.
- The best time of the day to engage with this course is in the morning before the day gets going. This will be most successful to set aside about 15 minutes each morning.
Most importantly, increasing resilience takes practice.
This course is meant as a personal jumpstart. I intentionally include daily options to take a deeper dive into a specific content area after the initial 7-days to better explore an area you way want to learn more about or increase skills in that area.
Ability to be Present
A key component to improving your daily resiliency is increasing your ability to be present. When beginning each day’s lesson, start with 1 minute to look around the space you're in and settle into what you're doing. Visually notice what's around you. This contributes to a sense of safety which is at the core of being resilient. Notice details. And notice your breath.
Resiliency Roadmap-Downloadable workbook pages for Day 1
Each day you'll be able to download a new set of pages from our Resiliency Roadmap to assist in working through many of these exercises. On day 7, you'll have access to the complete workbook to retain for future use.
Pick One Area of Life to Focus On
While the skills you'll develop over the next 7-days are aimed to be utilized in many aspects of your life, for the exercise of learning in this course, I recommend picking one area of life to focus on.
A few examples can be:
- Reducing stress at work
- Increased patience at the end of the day
- Better mental clarity under pressure
Reintroduction to Resiliency
In today's lecture, we're diving back into a brief overview of what resiliency is, the components of resiliency, and how to begin to connect each of these to grow your resilience.
Two ways to think about resilience:
- The ability to bounce back from negative emotional experiences and by flexible adaptation to the changing demands of stressful experiences (Tugade & Fredrickson, 2004).
- The ability to expand our Range of Resiliency to grow our capacity while limiting the negative impact of stress. This is best understood as the ability to do more with less mental, physical, and emotional energy. When we primarily stay out of, or limit, a state of overwhelm, chronic doing, or chronic input in the form of work, relationships, and technology. Basically, never giving ourselves time to rest.
In thinking about your own resilience, here's our first challenge:
Name 1-3 times in your life you've successfully been resilient. Write a few words on what contributed to these.
End your day with 3 Good Things
We will further review the importance of this exercise on our final day when covering optimism. However, it's important to build a foundation for this so you can take your optimism to the next level by then.
3 Good Things
1. Find a dry erase marker to write on bathroom mirror for the next 7-days. If this isn’t possible or feels too vulnerable given your living situation, feel free to get a journal, notebook, or paper to keep near your bed and adjust the next steps accordingly.
2. At the end of your day, before starting your bedtime routine, write “3 Good Things” with the numbers 1-3 below.
3. Then imagine three things from your day or life that you’re grateful for. Often we quickly turn to areas like family, friends, or health but this exercise has a greater impact the more specific we can be. For example, instead of just writing “family”, we could be more specific such as “watching my kids jump in puddles”. The more personal these are to us, the greater the feelings it elicits.
4. Once you’ve completed all three, continue with your evening routine, keeping these 3 Good Things in mind. This better primes us for a good night sleep and reduces our focus on things that cause worry.
TIP: try not to engage in technology after this exercise as it can limit the focus on good things you just completed
5. Upon waking, review the 3 Good Things from this previous day. This reminds us that there were at least 3 good things from the day before. After getting ready for the day, erase the 3 Good Things from the previous day, leaving the header “3 Good Things” and the numbers 1-3. Leaving this written increases the likelihood you’ll remember to complete the exercise each day.
To take a deer dive
Dr. Sapolsky marvelously explains why animals in the wild don't suffer from the same chronic stress we humans struggle with. Dive in if you'd like to know the science behind all this from a human operation standpoint.