Personal resilience is your individual capacity to handle shocks and stressful situations robustly, and to bounce back and grow through them. There are several dimensions to this:
– Physical: both your own physical fitness and stamina, but also the resilience of your home to such issues as extreme weather, power cuts, food shortages.
– Emotional: the ability to cope with intense, painful feelings and grow through them is a big factor in overall resilience.
– Soul Resilience: research shows that a sense of meaning and purpose contributes a lot to overall resilience. See more at my website www.soulresilience.net.
– Community resilience: mutual support and resource sharing in groups contribute a lot to our individual capacity. See more here.
Resources
Resilience Toolkit: Some Basic Methods
This Toolkit offers what I call back-pocket methods: simple enough that you can hopefully remember them and call on them when things get stressful. The Toolkit includes the 5-step Calmer for in-the-moment help; Communications 101; and 14 Tools to Try. Read more
Er, um: Seeding our Future’s Guide to Assertiveness
Assertiveness is the art of clear, straight communication, even where difficult feelings are involved. It is based on respect: both self-respect, believing that you have a right to your feelings, and a right to be heard; and respect for others, believing that they have a right to their own free will and their feelings. Assertiveness is not about getting your own way. It is a vital element in resilience, as it helps you and people you engage with to handle difficulties more effectively. Read more
Conflict Resolution
This is a 3-step process to de-fuse a situation, develop understanding, and find constructive solutions. What I am describing here is a self-help process. However, some people and some situations are so difficult that you would be wiser not to try and sort it out yourself. You might get informal third-party help from someone you both know and trust, or in really difficult cases, you may have to bring in and pay for a professional mediator. Hopefully, using the skills in this guide may prevent the situation getting that bad in the first place. The three stages are:
COOLING CLARIFYING CONSTRUCTING
The Work that Reconnects: a way to face the future
The future really is hard to face: it can easily feel bleak and overwhelming. Many people feel pain and despair about the state of the world and the environment, and blank out to avoid these feelings. The Work that Reconnects process, created by Joanna Macy, is a well-proven way to face into our pain and move through it to face the future constructively. Read more