Friday, 30 December 2011

Six Simple Resilience Practices - Week Six:  Commit Explicitly to Your Resilience

Below you will find Doug Silsbee's 6th and final installment of his resilience practices writings.  We hope you have enjoyed learning about resilience from a coaching professional and are able to find ways to apply it to your own life.
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Commit Explicitly to Your Resilience
Most of us, at least most of the people that are reading this, are very willing to invest in learning particular competencies and capabilities that allow us to produce what we want in our lives. Too, most of us understand the importance of eating well, exercising, and taking care of ourselves.
However, for many, it is a new and revelatory way of thinking to recognize that resilience itself is a capacity that we can invest in, that we can build. Resilience is essential and pre-requisite for maintaining our focus, energy, and persistence in life. And, at the core, resilience is virtually synonymous with the self-generativity that produces aliveness, fulfillment and joy.
Thus, I differentiate resilience from a mere coping strategy, or a set of tools that allows us to endure more for longer. Rather, a commitment to resilience is in fact the entry point to a life-long pathway towards your own integrated development, including physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual components.
In saying this, I'm not assuming that's what you were looking for when you decided to read this. Many people discover a need for resilience simply through a felt need to better manage what is on their plates. Yet, when we really move into it, and we commit to our resilience as an on-going project, we slowly wake up into all the possibilities that a committed practice of self-cultivation reveals.
So, now, you get to choose. Presumably, you've read the first five installments of this series. (If not, subscribe below for access.) Review them again. Remind yourself of which really spoke to you and opened something up. Choose perhaps two of these five strategies to really work with, and that complement each other.Then, create a plan. Be specific and concrete. In your plan, address:
·       What, specifically, will you do on a daily basis to work with that particular tool or practice? Weekly?
·       What structure will you build into your already busy life so that this keeps your attention?
·       For the sake of what are you doing this? How will you remind yourself of this?
·       Who will you make a request of in order to support you and hold you accountable?
·       What additional reading, coaching, or other resources will help you deepen your understanding of this and keep it fresh and evolving?
Notice your commitment. Is it firm and clear? Or, soft and gushy? If the latter, how can you mobilize your energy for this by re-orienting to your purpose for doing it? By being present with the real choice that it represents? By choosing a resilient perspective? By engaging someone else as a partner through making a request? By recognizing that, in a sea of commitments where you sometimes feel out of control, this is a place where you do have control?
Now, make it happen!



Doug Silsbee, PCC
Presence-Based Leadership Development
• Presence-Based Coaching for Leaders
• Training and Mentoring for Coaches
• Author, The Mindful Coach and Presence-Based Coaching

828-254-2021
http://dougsilsbee.com
3717 Bend of Ivy Rd.
Marshall, NC 28753

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