Cultivating Resilience During COVID19
Before you roll your eyes and close the page, stick with me for a second.
In the hustle and bustle of normal life, many of us have taken our basic needs and core values for granted. Many of us have been using our busy lives as a shield to protect ourselves from, well ourselves. The busy shield protects us from sitting with our emotions, assessing our underlying needs, understanding our core values, and keeps us safe by keeping our authentic self-hidden from the world
However, by doing so, we have greatly hindered our ability to cultivate resilience, or our ability to withstand or recover from difficult conditions.
This pandemic and the mandated shelter-in-place policies have not only threatened our basic needs but have also tested our ability to be resilient.
This applies to you. Whether you are a:
working mom who is now also responsible for childcare and schooling
stay-at-home mom who now has extra bodies in the house during the day
full-time office employee who is now working from home
social butterfly or an introvert
small business owner or entrepreneur
wanderlust traveler
a medical professional or public servant who is working around the clock to keep our communities safe
or any other living, breathing human reading this blog….
… this has tested your resilience.
Why? Because the Coronavirus took our world and our country, by storm, and it has threatened our ability to feel safe and secure. It has popped our comfort bubble and simply stated when our bubbles pop, our default reaction is to respond with catabolic energy or fall into survival mode, which greatly impairs our ability to think clearly, manage our emotions, and take control of the situation.
But, this pandemic has also forced us to stop. For everything this pandemic has taken away from us, it has given us back the one thing people used to long for. More time.
This pandemic has given us the opportunity, and the time, to slow down, breathe, and check-in with ourselves. It has given us the opportunity to ask critically important questions like:
What do I need to survive?
What do my neighbors need?
What am I grateful for?
What are my core values?
What can I do to help?
What is my purpose?
It has also given us the opportunity to re-write our rule books in a way that better serves our families, our organizations, and ourselves. What’s a rule book? It’s the self-laid guidance that helped you navigate life right up until the moment the pandemic hit. But, those rules no longer apply. We can no longer abide by rules that allowed us to go to work, send our kids to school, and order take-out without worrying if the driver has COVID19.
But how powerful is that?
How powerful is it to know that you can take this opportunity to structure your days, and your life in a way that works best for you? To create new rules that enable your family to be under the same roof for an elongated period of time without killing each other. Rules that give you the space you need to process your emotions and to receive the support you need as you learn to navigate the new normal. Rules that allow you to learn and grow, to gain comfort in the discomfort, and to practice cultivating resilience.
Cultivating Resilience
I am fortunate enough to be a member of the World Happiness Foundation Community, and they are currently offering an 8-week series on Cultivating Resilience, led by Sandro Formica, Ph.D. My intent is to take everything I learn and reshare it out with my personal community of followers, including self-made tips, tools, and tricks, to not only help you “survive” COVID 19 but to have you thrive by being stronger and more resilient than ever before.
According to Formica, the 8 steps to cultivating resilience are:
Assessing and understanding your needs
Assessing and understanding your values
Rediscovering and celebrating your talents
Changing your beliefs, storylines and brain filters to serve you
Connecting to your deeper emotions.
Discovering our Life Purpose
Practicing imagination and play
Creating a life plan
Step 1: Assessing and Understanding your Needs
All human behaviors are geared toward the satisfaction of one or more needs. Taking it a step further, it’s our need to feel safe and secure when we show our authentic self. Our need to be approved of or in control of any situation to ensure said safety and security.
When you think of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, basic needs such as food, water, toilet paper, security, and safety are being threatened. Furthermore, our psychological needs of belongingness, feeling loved are at risk due to heightened societal judgment of actions (I can’t believe they are still going for a walk in public, just STAY HOME), and our inability to maintain a full-time job while also caring for our children threatens our feelings of accomplishment. With nearly all of our energy buckets (the SMEPSEs) being drained, our ability to achieve our full potential and self-actualization seems to be completely out of the question...
But is it? During the first webinar on Cultivating Resilience, Formica stated: “Self-awareness is self-leadership.”
It is through the lens of self-awareness that we can start to realize that happiness is not a means to an end and cannot be provided by others. Happiness, rather, is the outcome of a process and is achievable when our basic needs are fulfilled, and we are living a life that is in alignment with our core values.
So, while our old Maslow’s Pyramid of needs may be in ruins, this forced slow down period is the perfect opportunity to step back and reassess what our needs truly are.
How?
By taking the time to answer the following three questions (free guided workbook available!):
Do you know what are the needs that you are expecting to be met at home, with your family, at work, and with your friends?
Do you know you rely on to fulfill those needs?
Do you know to what degree you are currently meeting the needs of those around you?
From there, you can choose to take control back of this crazy situation. You can choose to create a plan that will allow you to achieve higher need fulfillment and satisfaction rates. You can start to live a life created for you, by you.
Click “Download now” to receive your free Cultivating Resilience: Understanding Needs Workbook!
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