How Resilient Are You?

I’m officially in remission for a month now but have still been feeling really tired. I keep wondering what it will take to address this fatigue and just how much longer I’ll be struggling. I look so forward to the days where I don’t need to have an afternoon nap to survive as it really does take time out of the day. I’d love to do yoga a few times a week and be relaxed about going out more than once a day.

I’ve finished reading the book The Resilience Factor and I found it to be really helpful. In the design of a happy life, resilience is really vital. No-one can have a life without adversities, and it’s how we handle them that defines our happiness. The book provides a range of strategies to combat flawed thinking and poor responses when things go wrong. I found it to be really practical and powerful in helping to manage life’s blows, although I cannot say that I have mastered all the skills.

The book states “First you must become aware of the kind of person you are, and that means examining your deep beliefs and values about yourself, your world, and your place in it.” The authors urge us to identify the thinking patterns that are holding us back and to challenge our limiting beliefs.

As I’ve mentioned before, in designing a happy life and pursuing your passion, it is imperative that you know yourself first. Knowing yourself in this book’s context is about how you think and getting to understand your beliefs. By listening to the narrator in your head during adversities, you can uncover why you are reacting the way you are, and challenge beliefs in order to have a more appropriate response. Examples of how we think is whether we attribute problems to ourselves or to others and whether we feel that the issue affects everything in our lives and will always be there. How much control we feel we have over the problem plays a role, as does our level of optimism and our ability to accurately assess the situation. Resilient people are able to derive meaning from failure and feel empowered to take action.

Some of our beliefs are well-known to us but many are deep-rooted and difficult to uncover. Some of the self-development work I have been doing lately involves challenging beliefs that do not serve me. There are a few healing modalities such as Theta Healing® that help you to uncover these beliefs and even replace them with more constructive ones. As I’ve mentioned in previous blogs, the negative self-talk and our inner critic can be really harmful and needs to be addressed if you want a happy life.  

The person who has helped me the most in my healing journey has to be Meryl. She is skilled in a variety of healing modalities that appear quite complex to me. I must confess that I am confused about all the modalities that she practices but this time we worked on limiting beliefs, those that lurk far beneath the surface and that are affecting my energy levels.

The relief that I felt and still feel after visiting Meryl is nothing short of magical. In a one hour session she seems to have lifted a great burden and I feel far less fatigued. I must admit that if anyone said this kind of thing to me I’d probably roll my eyes and think them a little loopy. But nevertheless, that was my experience. I am yet to fully understand what she does and I’d love to write a blog post on it to give you more details but that will be for another time.

Boosting our resilience through challenging limiting beliefs remains a powerful method of personal growth, regardless of the method used. Since our beliefs govern our behaviours which can have dramatic impacts on our relationships, it’s worth knowing under what context we are acting. Knowing yourself allows you to be better equipped to handle life’s challenges and to manage the stress before it becomes serious.

Do you understand your thinking style? Do you tend to jump to conclusions in your thinking, or to mind read? What beliefs are holding you back from being the best you can be? What are the beliefs costing you and are you prepared to challenge them?

Two Steps Backwards

Just as I thought I was approaching being in remission, my health has been deteriorating. The reason is achingly clear to me: I was not being true to myself. It is truly amazing to me how thoughts can create such an effect on the body. I have been under a little more strain at home with my husband being away recently. But the main issue has been that I have realised I simply cannot go back to my business, even in its altered form.

I have been on a medical sabbatical for three of the agreed four months. My business is transforming into a new entity, with new people and focusing on offering services that are more aligned with my interests than the previous company was. However, it’s still not my passion. It has made me wonder if I should ever have entered the corporate world and if I should have entered the IT industry. They seem quite far from who I am now, in a few short months of being away. As much as I appreciate the shareholders rearranging and accommodating me, I simply cannot enter a business that does not energise me. And it is not fair and honest to string them along for another month once I know that it’s not my future. It’s not fair on them and it’s causing internal discord with me, resulting in stress.

Once we have acknowledged that we require meaning in our lives, there is no turning back. Once we realise that we need to be congruent with our thoughts, words, family, friends, work, leisure and decisions, we cannot go against our true self. I have read The Alchemist this week and what perfect timing for me on my journey to fulfil my destiny. Once we have that hunger for our ‘treasure’, there is simply no alternative course of action. “The boy and his heart had become friends, and neither was capable now of betraying the other.” ~ Paulo Coelho

I know that my health has been improving since last year and I have started to measure  progress by how many hours of productive work I can do per day. I’m now able to do about three hours a day of meeting or writing until I start to feel fatigued. So with such limited time available, there is no room for people or activities that drain me. If I’m spending my only precious three hours per day on something that I don’t enjoy, I will never be well. And I will never have the strength or energy for the things that I do enjoy i.e. writing.

I will completely sabotage my recovery to date if I give into the need to make money and please others. How can I write this blog about following your passion, and spend hours a day doing something I hate? It would be too incongruent and would literally make me sicker.

As I have mentioned in a previous blog, I love Gary Chapman’s book The Five Love Languages. The book discusses the concept that we all have a ‘love tank’ that starts to diminish if we are not receiving love in the way we require it. The tank eventually gets empty and that’s when relationships break down. I think this wonderful concept can be extended to our own energy tanks too. I have given so much in the past that I am completely depleted. 

The stress of the past week has caused my energy tank to be so empty that I’m cancelling social engagements. I have to stay home, care for myself and start to fill the tank.

I have decided that I simply cannot return to my business. I am sorry to let the other shareholders down but I’m really in no position to give of myself for anyone else’s benefit. I need to fill my tank and I can only do that by doing things that I enjoy, like writing and creative activities that I can do at home.

I do find this set-back enormously disappointing and it’s hard not to feel completely despondent. What makes it worse is that people cannot see it. I still have people asking me if I’m doing any exercise. Would you ask someone with Cancer if they’re doing exercise? This illness is no joke, it’s not imaginary and I’m really struggling. Do I have to roll around on the floor to make people realise just how bad it is? That sounds like too much effort for someone with an empty tank.