Everyday Resilience: A Practical Guide to Build Inner Strength and Weather Life's Challenges

Copyright © 2020 by Rockridge Press, Emeryville, California

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Interior and Cover Designer: Brieanna Hattey Felschow

Art Producer: Karen Williams

Editors: Seth Schwartz and Nora Spiegel

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Photography © Helene Dujardin.

Author photo courtesy of © Ana Matei.

ISBN: Print 978-1-64739-501-8 | eBook 978-1-64739-305-2

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To my son, a beacon of light, love, and goodness. And to LG, whose resilience allowed me to heal and move forward from tragedy to wholeness.

Contents

INTRODUCTION

Chapter 1: Cultivate Your Resilience

Chapter 2: Connection

Chapter 3: Flexibility

Chapter 4: Perseverance

Chapter 5: Self-Regulation

Chapter 6: Positivity

Chapter 7: Self-Care

Chapter 8: Resilience for Life

RESOURCES

REFERENCES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Introduction

Imagine for a moment that you have the resilience of a master. You go through your day able to weather whatever challenges come along. You go through your week, your month, your year confident in your ability to handle all the punches life throws at you. Imagine the circumstances of your life as they are now; what’s changed is that you have exactly the resources you need to remain whole, steady, and solid. Reflect on how good this would feel. Take in the sense of mastery and empowerment you’d experience.

I want you to know that this level of mastery is completely within your reach.

Whatever your age or life experience, it’s likely that you’ve experienced your share of challenge and difficulty along the way. Job instability, illness, accidents, loss of an important relationship, even a global pandemic—these events are part of the fabric of what we encounter in this journey we call life. And doesn’t it often seem that just when you move through one set of challenges and find stability, another one arises? That, too, is simply the nature of life.

At times you may wonder how you’ll cope with the difficulties you face, and whether you’ll have the resilience you need when the going gets tough. It’s true that resilience gives us the inner resources—courage, strength, wisdom—we require to deal with difficult circumstances. But resilience also provides the realization that how we fare in life has less to do with the particular challenges we experience and more to do with how we respond to those challenges.

It turns out that you already have resilience deep within you. Though we often consider resilience to be an exceptional quality, in fact it resides within every one of us. But most of us don’t know how to access our resilience, as we never learned that we each have a deep, unshakeable inner core of strength and capability. For many of us, rediscovering that buried core of resilience takes some thoughtful and determined excavation. That is just the journey on which this book is going to take you.

The tools to manage life’s travails and the inner core of strength you need are deep within you right now, waiting to be deployed. Modern neuroscience has revealed much about how we can tap into this core and sharpen those tools. In this book, we’ll explore some of these evolving discoveries to deepen your understanding of the capacity for resilience that we all possess.

In my professional life, I’ve worked with thousands of individuals going through all types of difficult life events. As a hospice physician, I was dedicated to helping those facing the end of their lives. I saw many of these individuals succumb to psychological pain and anguish. And I also saw many people mobilize their inner resources, enabling them to get their affairs in order, say goodbye to those who were most important to them, and spend their remaining time on what they valued.

Fifteen years into my work caring for the terminally ill, the practice of medicine entered a particularly challenging time. The advent of the electronic medical record, increased focus on productivity, and the emphasis on the bottom line left physicians feeling estranged from their calling, depleted and overwhelmed by administrative burdens that kept them from the important task of tending to their patients. I wanted to help and decided to become an executive physician coach. Over the ensuing 10 years, I’ve had the privilege of coaching over 500 physician colleagues from around North America. In that capacity I’ve also witnessed the tremendous ability individuals have to work with their own inner core to overcome the difficulties life has put in their path. Along the way I deepened my individual mindfulness practice and became a certified mindfulness meditation instructor.

I also have personal experience with building resilience. I grew up in a middle-class family, with well-educated parents. There was no alcohol or drug use, and to all appearances this was a happy and healthy home. But what went on inside the house was very different from the facade. Both of my parents had been severely wounded in their own lives, were not resilient from their own bruises, and as a result subjected me to significant abuse. I coped by focusing on schoolwork, by relying on friendships, and by escaping into books where good things happened, there was healing in the human condition, and happy endings were possible. I found the resilience to get through a difficult childhood, though it would take much more work—and tapping into my inner core—to fully process, recover, and move on from the experience. Much excavation was necessary for me to rediscover my strengths and goodness.

Everyone possesses resilience, and everyone needs it. Social media can convince us that everybody around us is doing just wonderfully, with no challenges, no crises, and the full support of their spouse and families. We wonder: Why me? Why do I have these difficulties in my life when others don’t? But we never really know what’s going on in someone else’s life. The reality is that we all have challenges and we all have hardships. We all need resilience.

I offer this book as a practical and supportive guide to help you connect with your everyday resilience and nourish and grow that inner well of strength and proficiency. In each chapter you’ll read about real-life individuals—their struggles, their growth, and their victories. And you’ll learn practical, easy-to-follow strategies that will enable you to draw on your resilience to cope with challenges big and small.

You’ll see a few key themes cropping up throughout the book. The first is the importance of mindfulness, that is, an awareness of what’s going on in our minds, and in the here and now. An incredibly useful approach, mindfulness enables us to see what’s real and true in our experience, and with that we can determine our next steps with much greater clarity. Second, we’ll explore the fact that what we focus on tends to become our reality: If we attend to what’s going well and our own strengths, we’ll become more likely to see the positive elements in our lives. Along with that comes the understanding that the human brain is highly malleable. Modern neuroscience shows us that our own brains are remapping and growing new connections every moment of our lives. There is truly little about our mind-set that’s fixed, and this good news sets the stage for many evidence-based practices that you’ll use to cultivate resilience.

Finally, always keep in mind that we have many choice points in our lives. It’s true that the challenges and adversities we face can be beyond our control. But resilience is largely about the choices we can make regarding that which is under our control. Far from being a passive endurance of life’s tribulations, resilience is an active process with which you can choose to engage. As we explore the key factors that cultivate resilience—connection, flexibility, perseverance, self-regulation, positivity, and self-care—you’ll gain clarity on the many choice points you have.

My hope is that this book will provide just the right mix of information and practical strategies. As you read, you’ll be reclaiming your birthright: your ability to enjoy life