Tag: resilience

Yelly Writes

Travel light

Yelly

Take a deep breath. And again. And again.

Close your eyes and carry only what is light enough to take into tomorrow. — Unknown

You can try, but you can’t really prepare for the future. You can try to plan so you’re ahead of the game, to anticipate and be five steps ahead. You can establish routines, be habitual, so your day is scheduled and more predictable. You can try, but you need to accept that, ultimately, the future will always be unknown and you can’t prepare for an unexperienced event. The only thing you can do is to learn to be adaptable, agile and resilient, so that when the unexpected happens, you’re able to recover from being blindsided a little quicker, and you find yourself able to pick up the pieces to gather yourself to move forward.

As with capsule wardrobes and minimalist packing, we need to learn to travel light, emotionally. We need to learn to carry only what will equip us to deal with the future and to learn to let go of the burdens of the past. As always, easier said than done. But as with everything, practice makes perfect, learning allows us to gain skills and slowing down and taking a breath allows us to actually think faster on our feet.

We’re always told we should be mentally resilient, but we’re not usually reminded to take care of our baseline physical health too. We need to take care of our bodies so that we can mentally and physically cope with the stress that anxiety puts us under.

Travel light and take care of you.

Yelly Writes

Holding space for anxiety

Yelly

It’s not about avoiding the anxiety or the difficulty, it’s about learning to sit with it, think through it and slow down the racing thoughts.

Is what you’re worried about something that is happening now, is it a real event in the future? Will it happen to you? Can you find a solution for it that will prevent it from happening?

If you answered no, then put the worry away (Yes, I understand; easier said than done if you’re a worrier!). It is beyond your control, and you can only make a difference if you can effect change. If you answered yes, make sure you can actually find a solution, then do something, instead of letting the anxiety create inertia in you. Do something, if you can.

It does help to feel the feels, to sit in the vulnerability (I love you, Brene Brown!♥️), but you need to make sure that the wallowing does not make you all pruney. The goal is to be familiar with the anxiety and the vulnerability, so you can slow the thoughts, find a solution if you can, or understand that you have no control over events, to shake it off so that you have energy reserves to deal with the fallout instead.

Yelly Writes

Positive is as positive does

Yelly
@yellycups

Positive thinking isn’t ignoring the bad things happening to you or around you. It’s seeing it, accepting that, yes, it’s bad, but looking at what’s happening and knowing you will get through it. Maybe wading through it will be easy, most times it will be difficult, or the very least uncomfortable. But telling yourself to just get through it makes you more resilient.

At the end of the day, resilience in challenging situations is the most important skill. The ability to sit in the discomfort of it all helps more than you know.

Yelly Writes

Choosing to sit

Yelly

When you choose to be positive, you choose your future. — Unknown

Woke up way too early again on a Saturday morning. I have been working through a lot of personal stuff and the thoughts are noisy and intrusive. I’ve always loved Brené Brown’s advice to sit in the discomfort of one’s vulnerability, because exposure to discomfort builds tolerance and resilience. So I’m choosing to sit with the head full of noise. Picking out the strands that I can pick out will help, and telling myself those that I can’t can stay jumbled. They’re for sorting out another day.

@yellywelly

We’re told these days that we can choose our future, that we can control what happens to us. If we manifest using specific words, if we behave a certain way, if we one day decide to radically change our lives in pursuit of the future we want, if we eat less/more of certain foods…it all boils down to controlling something we haven’t even experienced yet.

The only thing we can control is how we react to our environment. We react to our environment through small daily actions that become routine and habitual. When things become routine, they become predictable. This is how you can predict the future.

“But predictable is boring!” I’m sure a lot of you will say. And to that I say, NO IT IS NOT! When we habitually strive to find joy, when we routinely try to look for the positive, it becomes second nature, it becomes part of who we are, and that’s how we bake positivity and hope into our future. When we choose to view everything as potentially filled with light and joy, we choose a future filled with exactly that. The future will always be an unknown quantity, but if we sit with the knowledge that, whatever it is, there will always be hope that it could be shining, shimmering, splendid, that is the exciting part of it all.

What small thing will you do today that your future self will thank you for?