The 3 C's of Resilience
HEAD
Control
Choosing carefully where you focus your attention is a vital skill of resilience. This means the ability to focus on the things that you can change and accepting those that you can’t.
We live in a time when we are bombarded by threats in all our forms of media for the simple reason that bad news sells. The result is that our stress response is permanently dialled up, mostly about things that we can’t control and perpetuating a negativity cycle and a feeling of powerlessness.
Changing our mindset by focusing on what we can control enables us to be kind to ourselves and to tune into the good, shifting our mood and importantly, empowering us to act.
HEART
Connection
Being able to build stronger relationships reduces loneliness, helps us to gain a better sense of who we are and builds higher self–esteem. Empathy, being able to stand in someone else’s shoes and see things from their point of view is a key relationship building skill and is built through listening.
When someone is really listening to you they are observing your body language, the tone and speed of your voice as well as what you’re saying. They are actually listening for what you mean. This is powerful because it gives us the ability to build stronger connection by showing compassion and communicating that we care.
GUT
Courage
Courage is facing into challenges and seeing them as an opportunity to grow. It is the ability to step out of your comfort zone by reframing or changing the story from negative to positive and to bounce back by seeing challenge as a learning opportunity rather than a threat and something to avoid.
Suffering is part of life, it’s normal. A key feature of resilient people is not that they have less failure, in fact they have more because building resilience means understanding that unless you get knocked down you can’t learn how to pick yourself up. In fact, courage builds on itself, the more you get knocked down, the easier it is to pick yourself up.
