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Session 2 of 6
Finding Yourself: Becoming Resilient
Start Your Day With You
Many people start their day by checking their phones before their feet hit the ground. This habit allows the outside world to come rushing in before having properly woken up. This also creates an elevated stress response in the brain and body. Most importantly, this makes it difficult to identify how you are truly feeling, both in your mind and body.
In order to remain resilient and limit potentially negative consequences such as emotional exhaustion, we need to take better moments for ourselves, but starting early in the day.
It is important to set aside time in the morning to begin to build the habit of starting the day with yourself. Many cultural and religious traditions have historically done this, but we now have the science to support why. There are a number of reasons I suggest people have a morning ritual focused on themselves:
- Ask how you're doing today.
- This leads you to ask how you need to best take care of yourself today.
- When you start each day checking in with your physical self, emotional self, and thinking self you are better prepared to respond to what the day brings in a more thoughtful way.
Self-awareness
Self-awareness is the ability to identify your own thoughts, emotions, behaviors, and physiology. Increasing your self-awareness is the first essential step in building resiliency. Most importantly, the goal is to develop a better understanding of what your needs are at any given moment.
Download and Print the Session Two pages of the Workbook.
Read and complete pg. 8 in the Workbook.
Today's Challenge:
Name 1-3 moments throughout your day that you choose distraction instead of simply being with yourself.
Think about what a brief plan might be on how to replace these with just being more present:
- Externally
- Internally
- With others
Complete the activity in the Workbook beginning on pg. 9.
Noticing Your Self
After you increase your ability to be present with the outside world, you can begin to move inward. There are three different components of self that you'll need to develop a better relationship with.
- Your Physical Self
- Your Emotional Self
- Your Thinking Self
Try to develop a practice this week of taking time (if only a minute) to get in the habit of noticing one of these, and ultimately, all of these.
Noticing Your Physical Self
Your body and internal physical world hold a wealth of untapped information. This is one of the most important takeaways from this course. It's also often the most uncomfortable for many. Developing the ability to scan your body and internal experience is essential for deepening your resiliency. For today, you're just noticing.
Refer to pg. 10 in the Workbook and notice your physical self.
Noticing Your Emotional Self
First, let's get rid of the assumption that we are only feeling one emotion at a time. It's important to sit with ourselves to better uncover the variety of, sometimes conflicting, emotions we can be experiencing at any given moment. Starting the day by reviewing our emotions, we can better understand what our needs and capacity for that day might be. For today, we're just noticing.
Refer to Pg. 11 in the Workbook and notice your emotional self.
Noticing Your Thinking Self
When most people think of mindfulness, they think of tracking their thoughts. It's important to not only be able to notice your thoughts but to understand the quality and themes in these. For today, you're just noticing.
Extended Activity for Today
Think about 3 times during your day to pause for 1-2 minutes and review each of the following:
- Physical Self
- Emotional Self
- Thinking Self
Often, setting a reminder on a calendar is very helpful. I might encourage you to have that be the same time for each reminder for the rest of this week. Maybe further.
Complete the final activity in this section of the Workbook.
Take a Deeper Dive
This is far from the definitive book written on meditation. However, what this does offer is its accessibility. This was written by the founder of Headspace, Andy Puddicome. Headspace is a meditation app and this workbook pairs well with the use of the app. If you feel like an outsider, or in any way intimidated regarding meditation, this read won't make you feel bad about it and there is help here overcome that.