Double Your Personal Resilience

You need personal resilience – the strength of your body, your mind, and your spirit – to help you take on the big challenges that lead to achieving your goals, in work and in life.

Learn how to create, and stick to, Resilience Rituals, that allow you win, no matter what life throws at you.

I just love this chapter and the principle of personal resilience. The question is:

How good are you at making time for the things that build and maintain your resilience both for your body, your mind, and your spirit?

When I say spirit, it doesn’t mean spirits. Spirits are usually indication that you’re off track. If you’re finding you need to drink more – or that you’re drinking and you haven’t before – or you’re drinking to put yourself to sleep or anything like that, that’s an indication that your resilience is probably off – and you’re starting to rely on coping mechanisms to try and make it through the day. Not a good scene. Probably an indication you need to dig into this chapter.

Here’s a great quote on personal resilience: “A good half of the art of living is resilience.” I think that’s what it’s all about. Some people talk about grit, which is having strong determination – and that’s good – but grit alone can get you into trouble. You need the resilience, the strength of your body, your mind, and your spirit, to help you to take on these big challenges that lead to what you want, in your work and in your life.

Work on this if any of these are true:

• You continually run out of energy, feel tired, or get sick
• If you get sick more than once a year, you need to work on your resilience. Human beings normally live in a natural state of health
• You’re not enjoying the challenges or the wins at work, or in your life. Things just start getting blah
• You regularly allow other people’s priorities to bump the activities you want to do for your own wellness, and things that make you feel good and strong
• You’ve stopped doing the activities that bring you a feeling of reward and inspiration, and maybe you don’t even know what they are anymore. This is extremely common and one of the biggest symptoms
• You feel you need to escape from your work or your life, and just kind of run away from it.

When you stay true to your personal resilience rituals, you set yourself up to win no matter what life throws at you. And we know life will always throw stuff at you.

Your Personal Resilience Rituals

The challenge in this chapter is to figure out what the heck your resilience rituals are: what are those things that make you strong, resilient, and actually feeling great?

In the book you’ll see my Resilience Rituals Grid.

You have to think about your body:

• What is it you need to do for your body to be strong and energized, and an asset for you? What’s the frequency you need to do it?
• When in the week, when in the day, does that need to happen for you?

And your mind:

• What are the things that are going to help you to be clearer and maintain focus on the most important things?

It seems to be that as people get past their 30s, the mind starts to weaken, if you’re not managing it in some way. It could be exercise that helps you, meditation, or writing. You may have your own routines. Whatever it is, what are the things you need to do?

And then spirit:

• What are the things that keep you inspired?
• What are the things that make you love life?

I love playing with cars, going to the race track (my son involved in cart racing), doing driving tours. You can have all kinds of opinions on what I do, but it makes me feel wonderful and lights me up inside. It just brings out the best in me.

Key point: figure out your personal resilience rituals and when do you need to use them.

An interesting side note on the spirit. I mentioned cars, which is a big thing for me. In addition, for my family, playing games is huge. As a family game nights light us up and brings the best out of us.

Let’s go back to Chapter 2 (Forget Work-Life Balance). What happens if I use all my best passion at work, or for myself during the week?  Then, on the weekend I might not have anything left in the passion tank. And not having the energy to pull out a board game, for example, impacts my family.

So it’s really simple. We know that it works as a family, but it takes having the energy and the passion to pull these things off. When we do, things are great. Unfortunately, we just don’t do it enough.

Going back to the tools – when you look at the quarterly review and the quarterly reset, the entire center Self column is all about your resilience rituals. When you’re evaluating how you did and what worked well, it links back to your resilience rituals. When you plan your goals for the next quarter, most of those goals for Self are around your resilience rituals. This helps make you strong, vibrant, and looking forward.

Figure out what your resilience rituals need to be for it to be a great quarter for you.