Seven Years On, Reflections on Your Oxygen Mask First: Double Your Resilience

“A good half of the art of liv­ing is resilience.”

-Alain de Bot­ton, author

Once iden­ti­fied, resilience rit­u­als (Chap­ter 3, Dou­ble your Resilience) are fair­ly straight­for­ward, but when peo­ple are over­bur­dened, tired or on the verge of burnout, they are chal­lenged to keep doing them. They do less of the things that make them resilient or stop altogether.

When that hap­pens, the going gets even harder.

Watch the Video: Dou­ble Your Resilience

Make Rit­u­als Your Own

It’s been fas­ci­nat­ing to hear about all the dif­fer­ent things peo­ple do for them­selves to build their resilience, out­side of exer­cise, which is typ­i­cal for 90% of people.

These are the hob­bies, pas­sions or activ­i­ties that take their minds to a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent place. One of my favourites is an A Play­er exec­u­tive, in India, who waters his grass by hand to see how green it can be (ide­al­ly green­er than his neigh­bours). This small, reg­u­lar act is his ver­sion of a media­tive break.

Resilience rit­u­als seem to be much hard­er – although poten­tial­ly even more impor­tant – for fam­i­lies with young chil­dren, espe­cial­ly when they are involved in their very active years with sports and after school activities.

Two things seem to make a dif­fer­ence for people:

• Doing rit­u­als either ear­ly in the morn­ing before their day gets going or at the end of their day, before they go to bed.
• Over­com­ing a sense of guilt or self­ish­ness when they take time for them­selves. This is one of the biggest obstacles.

What­ev­er the obsta­cle, the main thing to do is to fig­ure out those few things that mat­ter most to you and do them con­sis­tent­ly – espe­cial­ly when times are challenging.

The Chal­lenge

• Cur­rent­ly, how good are you at con­tin­u­ing to build and main­tain your resilience?
• What one thing can do you do be notably better?

Your Oxy­gen Mask First Resources

• Page 51: Five Steps to Resilience Mastery
• Your Oxy­gen Mask First Workbook

Oth­er Blogs

• Build­ing a Cul­ture that Sup­ports Men­tal Health
• What is Your Hol­i­day Recov­ery Rit­u­al or Plan?
• Are You Get­ting Sev­en Kinds of Rest?

Old­er Podcasts

• Exec­u­tive Burnout: Build­ing Your Resilience