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Ep40 Resilience

Hello and Welcome to the Way of the Emotional Warrior Podcast. My name is Kai Ehnes and today we will be answering the question of: How can I be resilient?

Resilience…seems like an obvious concept right? So what does it mean to be resilient? Its really about knowing where you are on the continuum of your own actions. Are you reactive? Do you find that life happens to you? How can you tell if this is you? You find yourself having to constantly fix something. This could be something tangible like a car battery to your relationships, to your health. Things happen and you have to deal with them, usually from a place of being under or a victim.

Jumping to the other side of the continuum…you try to preempt and control everything. In order to not be in the position of being under, you take the “bull by the horns” and go all out in terms of trying to control everything. The reason is that if you control it then you can determine what happens and how they will impact you.

The issue with both of these extremes is that they simply do not work exclusively. If you are a controller, how has that been going? How much anxiety do you have? How often does all of your controlling simply leave you at odds with events because even with all of your manipulation, things don’t work out according to the plan? There is a tremendous amount of frustration with this approach. It might feel like you are always fighting with people and the world.

So, not caring leaves you a victim and caring too much leaves you ill and frustrated. Is there a middle ground?

This is the Way of the Emotional Warrior. It really starts with working on yourself. How can you get right and solid? It begins with Heart-Based Resilience. This means that you set your life up to function from your heart vs your head. You absolutely have to take the time to center and activate your heart. This means you have to start with taking some time for yourself. Start with 15 minutes a day. What should you do in these 15 minutes? You place your hand on your chest by your heart. Breathe deeply, in and out. Try to count to 5 in each direction.

Next, keep a journal and set yourself some heart based resilience goals. The middle of the road means that you know the extremes and find a space in between where you feel you can live sustainably. You are Right with the ebb and flow of life.

Each day you find something to work on, set it into your mindset by bringing it to yourself by way of the heart. Why no the mind you might be asking. Well, the mind is obviously included but remember the brain’s job is survival programming. The extremes mentioned earlier are the result of brain thinking vs heart thinking. Brain formulates strategies for survival, reaction or preemptive control. The heart seeks unification, sustainable living.

What does any of this matter? I would think it has to do with living, more particularly, living a good life. This might seem pie in the sky but the extremes around this lead to strife and dysfunction.

What can you work on in terms of resilience? 1. Resilience means that you can identify the actual issue and 2. That you can adapt to deal with the issue. So the idea is this: Let’s work on 3 things. Your health, your relationships and your finances. Of course each one is super important but just for a cursory look, here we go.

Your health…heart-based resilience means that you value your life, not just once a year but at all times. You don’t live in fear. You work on your diet, your exercise, your mental well being. Address each area by creating solutions. Maybe you elevate your diet. How to start? Maybe its just by eliminating some unhealthy choices.

Your relationships: You most likely have a good list of what someone else should be like. Depending on your age you have had experiences that leave you seeing how others don’t measure up. Heart based reliance would be that you set aside finding something for a bit and work on yourself....