Plan B works when major changes come into your life – a new business, a failed relationship, health issues. However, in today’s volatile world, many changes don’t emerge clearly, but you must navigate the uncertainty and stress that inevitably follows.
Resilience expert and best-selling author Adam Markel teaches you how to develop resilience to accept change and capitalize on its opportunities.
He focuses on the “four realms” of the human character – body, mind, emotions and spirit – for building habits of resilience to help you thrive in the face of change.
Anticipate constant change in your life
Constant change has become part of people’s lives. Uncertainty makes individuals feel anxious. In the past, you could often attribute stress and anxiety to major one-off events – a new job, a failed relationship, or the onset of a health issue.
You pivot with these changes; you create a plan B. Now in addition to these macro events, you constantly encounter small hiccups with your job, children, and relationships. You cannot plan ahead for these micro pivots, nor can you avoid them.
Cultivate a mindset that flows with the uncertainty life offers and find opportunity in the disruption. To do this, you must develop resilience.
Pause Ask Choose contd.
Pause – When you stop fighting change, you gain the space you need to observe and learn. Acknowledge the energy you expend when fighting change. Like rebooting a computer, it takes a minute to reset.
Ask – Reframe your situation, and reset your perspective. Ask yourself how you want to ride the change. Find your purpose.
Choose – Take what you’ve learned and recover. In the midst of daily uncertainty, control your reaction to change and choose your next step. Resiliency doesn’t return you to your former self, but by choosing to move forward, you learn the essence of being change-proof.
Resilience does not ward off change, nor does it shield you from the pain change can cause. Instead, by pausing, asking, and choosing, you can navigate the stress of change.
Developing Resilience
Develop resilience when you don’t need it, so you have it when you do.
Most people seek balance between their professional and personal lives. Yet, like children on a playground seesaw, when the pairs balance, they stop moving. When they move up and down, they create harmony.
The ocean teaches harmony in its constant movement as tides come and go, and shows you the fragility of the status quo. Leaders must create such harmony within their organizations to flow in the midst of the constant motion of business.
Like harmony, resilience is dynamic. It ebbs and flows as you weave in and out of uncertainty. When you develop resilience, you create harmony among the “four realms” of the human character: body, mind emotions and spirit.
Mental resilience isn’t a life free from the twin wolves of worry and anxiety. It’s about harnessing our energy in creative ways.
Uncertainty has become the new certainty
Many people believe that being resilient means fighting off stress and bouncing back to how their lives were before the disruption. Yet resilience takes on new meaning in the face of constant change and uncertainty – even with positive change, since that, too, causes stress.
Instead of resisting change and trying to reduce uncertainty, accept change as a constant to gain a renewed perspective on stress and to become change-proof.
The 3-4 Method
When your emotions spiral downward, try the “3-4 Method,” during which you use your breathing to pause, ask, choose:
- Inhale – Do you like feeling this way?
- Hold – Do you want to let it go?
- Hold – Are you willing to let it go?
- Exhale – When will you let it go?
Pause Ask Choose
When caught in an ocean’s rip tide, your instinct tells you to fight for survival. However, the only way to survive is to stop fighting and let the current take you. Likewise, when facing unavoidable changes, focus your energy on swimming with them.
You become resilient in a sea of uncertainty by adhering to three principles: “Pause, Ask, Choose.”
Appreciate what you can control with mental resilience
As you accept change as the new normal, you need not accept the worry that follows. You have a choice. Those who successfully leverage uncertainty control, not the inevitable change that comes their way, but how they respond to it.
With mental resilience, you think your way through unexpected challenges and tasks. Mental resilience does not suggest you avoid thinking. Pause, however, to avoid any negative thought spiral that may take hold. Ask and reframe the situation.
Practice spiritual resilience by appreciating the world around you and connecting with others
Your spirit grounds you and carries you through your successes and failures. To grow your spiritual resilience, pause, reflect and connect with others. For example, those who show resilience in the wake of a traumatic event share characteristics that help them survive, and in many cases, thrive. These people:
- Appreciate life and see its possibilities.
- Improve relationships with others and connect with them spiritually.
- Demonstrate personal strength.
When uncertainty hits, many people naturally pull inward. But to find your spiritual resilience, you must connect with others. Focus on what you have, not on what you don’t have; focus on a future endeavor; and believe things will work out.
You can’t stop the rain, but you can make sure you’ve got the best and biggest umbrella.
Resilient people aren’t thermometers, which can only respond to the changing variables of temperature; rather, they’re thermostats, setting the temperature around them
The reason for Stress
Stress without rest leads to burnout; stress with rest leads to growth. For example, when leaders continually push their employees to perform at their maximum without giving them time to recover, workers will, eventually, underperform and burn out.
If you regularly give them time to recoup, they achieve harmony and come back stronger.
People build resilience by adopting the daily foundational habits of pause, ask, choose. Your approach to stress determines your outcome, and when you build daily resilience habits, you become stronger.
Heed the signs of chronic stress and its impact on your physical well-being
Chronic stress has a negative impact on performance as well as physical well-being. Sled dog owners, for example, must pause their dogs when running races before they tire to maintain top performance throughout the race; dogs will not pause on their own.
Farmers must allow the soil to pause and rebuild its nutrients to maintain high yields over the long term. Humans, too, must pause to rest and recover. Yet many people believe that they constantly need to fight, to not give in, but this approach creates diminishing returns.
You lose motivation, suffer from fatigue and withdraw from your circle of support. You no longer enjoy your passions, your activities, your accomplishments; these activities shift in your mind from aspirations to obligations.
