You take pride in your one-of-a-kind Resilience Pie, so you want the result to be the best that you can make it! Your high-quality ingredients and skills will go a long way to making it good, but how can you rocket your Resilience Pie to masterpiece level?
You’ve got resilience factors within and all around you, but to reach your resilient potential, you’ll also need to address what’s holding you back.
In Step 3 of our Easy-As-Pie Resilience Recipe blog series, you identified what already makes you resilient and practiced amplifying those areas of existing strength. In Step 4, you will shift your focus to what’s holding you back. You started by working on areas of strength because it revs up your energy, motivation, and self-esteem to grow your resilience. Thus fortified and excited, you’re ready to turn to weak spots. In other words, you need to taste the filling to make sure no key ingredients are off or missing. Even if you use the best apples in the orchard, your apple pie can only be but so delicious if you forgot the sugar!
Resilience Pie Recipe, Step 4: Attack what holds you back (taste what’s missing).
The factors that inhibit your resilience are the things that threaten to stop you from coping with adversity, growing in the face of challenge, and reaching out for opportunities.
Here’s how to attack what limits your resilience/taste what’s missing:
- List what gets in the way. Write down the things that interfere with your resilience. These could include your patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. They might also include situations, relationships, memories, or past history. Try to write each one without assigning blame e.g. instead of My parents taught me that it’s not okay to fai,l you can say I experience a fear of failure that often keeps me from taking risks I want to take.
- Know the hurdles. Rank the top 3-5 factors that you think most challenge your resilience, with #1 being your greatest resilience hurdle.
- Strategize how to clear the hurdles. For each of your top resilience hurdles, brainstorm how you could clear them. Could you adjust a pattern that isn’t working by doing something in a new way, or shifting how you think about it? Could you tweak your environment, make a choice, or cultivate a relationship that would increase rather than undermine your resilience?
- Pick a hurdle and train for it. Pick one of resilience hurdle. I recommend starting with the strategy you think is mostly likely to succeed. Observe how it goes. Set mini-goals, and celebrate when you achieve them. Trying to move from 6 to 8 hours of sleep each night? Celebrate when you increase to 6.5 hours, celebrating every time increment you add until you reach your big goal.
By acknowledging and targeting what most threatens your resilience – asking What’s missing? from the pie filling – you can break through your resilience plateaus. More tips on how to make your winning resilience pie, coming your way soon!
