Joanne Smith argues you can't control what happens, but you control how you respond. By choosing empowering language, like acknowledging a parent's health crisis while affirming your own safety, you rewire your brain's response patterns and shift from fear to resilience.
And it seems so simple, but honestly, because we can't control what happens around us, we don't know at what point that things are going to change in our lives, we don't know what tomorrow is going to bring, but how we respond, we have got a lot of power, agency over that. Like, how I'm going to respond when these things are happening. So we can actually, um, Begin doing a whole new way of responding, which actually our brains are capable of learning. They're capable of doing things differently. So we can just bit by bit start to tell ourselves a whole new story. It's a mindset shift. So we could be— I'll give you an example. It could be, life is pretty, pretty colourful right now, it's pretty stressful, whatever words you want to use. Don't scare yourself with your words, but— Okay, I'm dealing with a parent that's got a really— having a difficult health issue, it's not easy right now, but I'm still safe, like, I don't need to hurt, I don't need to suffer, I can handle this, I don't need to be scared. Those kind of— that seems so simple, but that really will take you in a whole new direction.
