Energies4Life Newsletter - August 2009

What exactly is resilience? To be resilient means to be able to “spring back” into shape after being deformed. To be emotionally resilient means to be able to spring back emotionally after suffering through difficult and stressful times in one’s life.

Stressed people experience a flood of powerful negative emotions, which may include anger, anxiety and depression. Some people remain trapped in these negative emotions long after the stressful events that have caused them have passed and this can lead to poor general health and even chronic illness.

Emotionally resilient people, on the other hand, are far more quickly able to bounce back to their normal emotional state. How do they do it? What is it about emotionally resilient people that makes them more effective at managing stress than less resilient people?

The key difference appears to be that emotionally resilient people have a specific set of attitudes concerning themselves and their role within the world that motivates and enables them to cope more efficiently than their less resilient counterpart.

Resilience is not a quality that you either do or do not possess; there are varying degrees of how well a person is able to handle stress and major life changes or upsets. Still, there are certain characteristics that particularly resilient people tend to share. These include:

 * Emotional Awareness: They understand what they’re feeling and why.

 * Perseverance: Whether they’re working towards exterior goals or on inner coping strategies, they’re action-oriented. They trust in the process and don’t give up.

 * Internal Locus of Control: They believe that they, rather than outside forces, are in control of their own lives. (More on this important quality later)

 * Optimism: They see the positives in most situations and believe in their own strength.

 * Support: While they tend to be strong individuals, they know the value of social support and are able to surround themselves with supportive friends and family.

 * Sense of Humour: They’re able to laugh at life’s difficulties.

 * Perspective: Resilient people are able to learn from their mistakes (rather than deny them), see obstacles as challenges, and allow adversity to make them stronger. They can also find meaning in life’s challenges rather than seeing themselves as victims.

 * Spirituality: Being connected to your spiritual side has been linked with stronger emotional resilience. This doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with organised religion. An inner spiritual connection comes from within and can be obtained in a myriad of ways: through close contact with nature and the natural world, meditation, practising mindfulness, reading eastern philosophies etc. These can all be relevant in adding a strong spiritual dimension to your inner landscape.

So, how do we learn to become more resilient? The good news is that emotional resilience can be developed by all of us and in this article I’m going to discuss two learning strategies in particular.

 1) The Internal Locus of Control

You may not be aware of the term “locus of control”. It refers to whether you feel that your life is controlled by you or by forces outside of yourself. Those with internal locus of control feel that they have choice in their lives and control over their circumstances. Conversely, those with an external locus of control feel more at the mercy of external events, which they believe they cannot change.

As you may have guessed, those with a more internal locus of control tend to feel happier, freer and less stressed. They also enjoy better health and are more satisfied with life in general. Not surprisingly, those with an external locus of control are more susceptible to depression as well as other health problems. They tend to keep themselves stuck in situations, feeling powerless to change their own circumstances, which of course just adds to their stress load.

Here are some simple steps you can take to create a more internal locus of control and begin to re-empower yourself:

 *Realise that you always have a choice to change your situation. Even if you don’t like the choices available at the moment, or even if the only change you can make is in your own attitude, you always have choice.

 * When you feel trapped, make a list of all possible courses of action. Just brainstorm and write things down without evaluating them first.

 * You may also want to brainstorm with a friend to get more creative ideas than you may have originally thought of. Discount nothing for the moment; just put all the ideas on the list.

 * Once you have a list, evaluate everything on it and decide on the best course of action for you, keeping the other ideas in the back of your mind as possible alternative options. This exercise will open your eyes to the amount of choices you actually have in a given situation. Seeing new possibilities will become more of a habit.

 * Repeat this exercise when you feel trapped in frustrating situations in your life. With repetition you will be expanding your mind to new possibilities in both major life problems and more everyday situations. It will become an automatic response.

2) The Lightning Process Training

The Lightning Process is an innovative training program designed to teach you how your brain and body can work together and how you can use this connection to powerfully influence your life and health. As it is a comprehensive training and not a treatment, it is completely up to the individual to apply and practice the Lightning Process methods. If properly and regularly applied, the Lightning Process is a complete strategy for success.

As with the internal locus of control, the Lightning Process teaches that we all have powerful options and choices within us that can be used in so many different situations for resilience and positive change whenever we need it. As part of the 3 day training we learn the following:

 * The power of our beliefs, both positive and negative, and how we can quickly and easily abandon old beliefs that are no longer relevant or useful to us.

 * The importance of language and our own inner dialogue

 * The importance of body posture

 * The difference between responsibility and blame

 * How our expectations directly affect our physiology

 * The enormous influence we have over our lives and health and how to harness this properly

 * The simple but highly effective strategies for interrupting old negative patterns and installing powerful, new and positive ways of thinking and behaviour.

Using the Lightning Process’s technique of combining particular body movements and postures with a set of precisely targeted questions, many people have surmounted health and emotional issues that were keeping them stuck and had troubled them for years.

The 3 day training program teaches, step by step, how to influence key body systems such as the immunological, neurological and musculo-skeletal system. It is derived from Osteopathy, Neuro-Linguistic Programming, Hypnotherapy and Life Coaching. For more information on this amazing new training, please go to the Lightning Process page on www.energies4life.com

Thanks for reading our monthly Energies4Life newsletter. Please do feel free to contact me with your feedback; it is always welcome. Enjoy the rest of the summer.

Until next month,

Michelle Clemons