​Accept, Adapt, Move Forward – Developing Resilience

I’ve worked with the concept of resilience for many years now and lately I realized that I often used the phrase “bouncing back” to describe what happens after experiencing a challenging situation. 

But now, my thinking on the topic has shifted.  We don’t “bounce back” from adversity, struggles, or difficult situations.  “Bounce back” carries a certain connotation that a person returns to where they were – back to being exactly who and how they were before whatever incident it was knocked them sideways and in some cases, may have taken them to their knees.  But, that’s just not accurate because every situation we experience, especially the challenging ones, have a direct impact on us and change us at a core level. 

Resilience isn’t something we’re born with and developing it does not mean that we are no longer going to experience challenging, and at times core-shaking, situations.  What it does mean is that we can mindfully hold a space to process what is happening, draw on our inner strength that has developed from navigating difficult experiences in the past, and remind ourselves that “this too shall pass”.   

What has helped me hold on during times such as these is developing a practice of Radical Acceptance.  In the book Radical Acceptance – Embracing Your Life With The Heart Of A Buddha, by Tara Brach, she writes, “Radical Acceptance reverses our habit of living at war with experiences that are unfamiliar, frightening, or intense.  It is the necessary antidote of years of neglecting ourselves, years of rejecting this moment’s experience.  Radical Acceptance is the willingness to experience ourselves and our life as it is.  A moment of Radical Acceptance is a moment of genuine freedom”.

Now this does not mean that because we are accepting the reality of our circumstances, we intentionally stay stuck in situations that are difficult.  It does not mean that we choose not to strive for better in our lives.  It does not mean that we passively accept things that make us unhappy or unfulfilled, and give up our power. 

It simply means that, in the moment, we breathe and accept the reality of what is – that we understand that we don’t always see the big picture and that perhaps this very difficult situation is a necessary lesson to propel us further along in our quest to grow, evolve, and create our ideal life. 

As humans, we love to label situations as “positive or negative”, “good or bad”.  But, ironically we never know if a positive situation will somehow lead to negative consequences or alternatively, that a situation that seems challenging and difficult is not actually a blessing in disguise.  If we can choose to lose those misleading labels and consider circumstances as just that, we can take all that emotional energy we’re investing in fighting against or resisting the situation and put it towards taking positive action and developing a growth mindset.  Basically, we accept it while we’re “growing through it”.

You may be thinking, “well, that’s easier said than done!”  And it’s true, it’s not easy to shift our thinking in this way because our deeply unconscious belief system and lightning-quick thought processes are dictating our perception and interpretation of what is happening.  Our brains are programmed to look for things that will hurt us and focus on them.  But the goal in self-work is to learn to catch those conditioned impulses and reactions, take a mindful pause and then respond, from a more conscious place, rather than reacting in a habitual way that often causes more stress, pain, and problems than were already attached to the initial situation!

So the next time you hear yourself saying some version of, “but this isn’t fair. I shouldn’t have to be going through this. I hate this!”, remember to pause, take a deep breath, and harness all the energy that is being directed at what it is you are resisting. 

At that point you can use that energy as a launching pad to propel you forward into problem-solving or taking action to address your concern.  Of course, it takes practice to develop this approach, but I’ll leave you with this quote from Theodore Roosevelt, “Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty… I have never in my life envied a human being who led an easy life. I have envied a great many people who led difficult lives and led them well.”

Want to work on developed Radical Acceptance?  Learn more about Mindset Coaching