How to Be More Resilient: 7 Simple Steps

Hi, I'm Charlie Hugh-Jones, creator and founder of Living On Purpose, unlocking the power of inspiration, imagination, and innovation to live a richer, more fulfilled, and more abundant life. Welcome to this video. I help people who recognize they want something to change in their life make powerful decisions and then follow through on them so they experience more clarity and focus, more energy, greater contentment, and often Financial freedom. In this video, you're going to learn how to be more resilient by following these 7 simple steps to build your mental and emotional strength so that you're better equipped to manage the adverse events of life. People often think that my hopefulness and optimism is a result of what my life looks like now. I live 200 yards from the beach in South Florida. I'm married to the most incredible woman. I get to help people every day be the best version of themselves, and I'm recognized in a number of industries as someone who has something worthwhile to say. But I'm not sure most people would envy the journey I had to take to get here. You see, my journey to where I am in life and who I've become is a journey that includes loss, trauma, heartbreak, betrayal, financial ruin, depression, and more. In learning to get up time and time again, in learning to move forward with positivity and hope when my world was dark and hopeless, in learning to trust, in learning to heal, and in learning to connect with my life purpose, I've acquired tools and strategies to become more resilient. And now I get to share those with you. Nobody escapes adversity and hardship. Bad things, bad things just happen to some people at some point in our lives. But why is it that some people just seem to handle them better than others? How come some people don't fall apart? How come some people don't become bitter? And how the heck do some people come back even stronger? Psychology Today defines resilience as the ineffable quality that allows some people to be knocked down by life and come back stronger than ever. Many people make the mistake of believing that resilience is something that some people just have and others don't. It's a character trait of superhumans, those with DNA that helps them cope. You know, the kind of people who become Navy SEALs, ER surgeons, Arctic explorers, and astronauts, etc. But resilient people aren't luckier or smarter. They make a practice of doing things that keep them afloat. Extensive research has shown that our capacity for resilience is not fixed in our genes, nor are there limits on how resilient we can become. So whether you're dealing with unemployment, divorce, a nightmare job, personal tragedy, or one of life's other curveballs, you can become more resilient too. So here are 7 steps that you can take to help build your resilience today. Step 1, acknowledge your emotions. Identifying and naming what's really going on, how scared or angry we really are sometimes, is an effective tool to help us accept and process our emotions. Not doing so leaves us exhausted by bottling up those emotions, and in some instances we run out of that energy and everything eventually explodes, usually with negative consequences. A really powerful way of identifying and naming our emotions is to write about them daily for 4 days. 20 minutes each day. Just try it and see how much lighter and energized you feel, even in difficult times. Step 2: Build optimism. Our repetitive thoughts, the 60,000 or 70,000 of them that we daily have, build patterns and habits of belief. The majority of them are pretty negative, which doesn't help when something really bad happens. But we can reprogram them. Why not check out the work of Martin Seligman? His work on changing your explanation style, the way you think back over an event and reframe it, is a great tool for building your optimism muscle, to see the world in a more hopeful manner. And a quick way to impact our thought patterns is to choose gratefulness over cynicism. Cynicism. This is a daily practice to adopt. Evidence has shown that by naming 3 things that we're grateful for each day and repeating this for 7 days is powerful enough to begin to reduce depression, anxiety, and increase happiness. Step 3, connect with others. Often we retreat into ourselves when things go wrong. We isolate ourselves. But reaching out to others for help, for distraction, for community, for purpose, for opposing viewpoints, has a huge impact on the speed with which we bounce back from adversity. Loneliness makes stress more debilitating, but community, often with other people who are going through the same thing, increases our ability to move through the pain and lessens the associated anxiety. And even if you can't ask for help, give it instead. Studies have shown that offering help to others will naturally increase our capacity to deal with stress and the many hurts and disappointments of life. Step 4: Decide to laugh. Finding the funny is essential to managing the darkness that's ever-present in our lives. Laughing really is the best medicine. Clinical research has demonstrated the psychological and physiological benefits of laughing, how it changes our energy, enables us to deal with stress and trauma. So perhaps be ready to challenge your perspective on your own adverse event by deliberately seeking out comic sketches and stand-ups that parody or make light of of the situations that you're going through right now. Step 5, explore what can be changed. Resilient people don't try and change what can't be changed. They use their curiosity and powers of observation to get a more detailed and refined picture of the situation. Our mind is a natural storyteller, but it isn't always very accurate and often builds in many incorrect assumptions, and our emotions often get in the way of forming a realistic perspective. So we need to challenge these assumptions and improve the accuracy of the picture in order to know what can be changed and what can't. But to do this, we sometimes need to get out of our own way. By using a few simple questions, we can become both more realistic about a situation and feel more in control of ourselves within it. Questions like, what can I learn from this? How would someone who is not me describe this situation? What advice would I give someone who's not me about this situation? Who do I know who's also been in this situation and how did they handle it? Step 6: Face your fears. Hiding from fear makes it worse. Neuroscience has shown that when we avoid scary things, they get more scary, but when we face our fears, they become less scary. Scary. And we all have fear-conditioned sensations in our bodies. Our breathing becomes more rapid, our heart rate goes up, and we begin to sweat. Many people also feel nausea or energetic sensations in their forearms or a hollowness in their chest. Finding a way to be exposed to them in a safe environment and then pushing through these sensations strengthens our ability to identify them and deal with them when they come up in other situations. The trick is first to recognise the sensations and to acknowledge they're familiar, to get comfortable with them— the sensations, not the fear. And you can do this by creating an action plan to face one of your lesser fears. Then add a couple of your friends in on your plan, people you trust. This builds both accountability and support. Then just do it with your cheerleaders alongside you. It doesn't matter how significant the fear is. Once you've conquered one fear, once you've logged the experience of having the feelings and sensations and doing it anyway, the energy to overcome the next one grows. And this way you can build momentum and capacity. Step 7, get active. Just do something, anything. Physically moving, walking, running, stretching, some form of exercise is crucial to being resilient. Research has shown that we think, behave, and function more effectively when we use our bodies for what they were designed to do— move. A whole host of hormones and brain chemicals are released that better regulate our emotions, increase our focus, reduce fatigue, and speed up our metabolism. There's even some evidence that more intense exercise puts the same stress on the body as does Faster heart rate, sweating, rapid breathing, and this can desensitise us to the physiological symptoms of fear. But I recognise that sometimes we're so anxious or stressed out and have so many negative thoughts that we just can't follow something like these 7 steps to build our resilience. We're just trying to get through the challenges of today. So I'm going to be exploring ways to reduce stress and manage anxiety in another free video that I'm going to release soon. But in the meantime, I hope you got value from this video. If so, please like it and make sure you subscribe to my YouTube channel. Feel free to share this video on your favourite social media platform and join me at charliehughjones.com where you can stay connected and sign up for exclusive email updates and get access to more content from my Living On Purpose programme. Thank you so much for watching. I look forward to continuing this journey together in the next video. But until then— Bye for now.