Resiliency is the ability to bounce back and stay more centered through life’s difficult events. It is our capacity to manage change, using it to feed our souls, even after it feels like we’ve been drained dry. Remembering this, especially when it’s hard, helps us make sense of our worlds when they feel chaotic.
Your personal resilience (or lack of it) reveals where you are taking an honest look at your reality. Challenge will create a tension of opposites. and this tension is designed to support you being true to you. This intuitive resilience is built in to all of us and is tied to the magnificence of your Soul. Its job is to ensure that you honestly, actively identify and honour your own needs as you take care of others and life’s responsibilities.
What’s important to remember about resilience, and the “tension of opposites?” Our commitment to personal resilience will always help us grow from challenge or adversity. Just as “need is the mother of invention,” challenge is the mother of resilience. Making peace with these apparent opposites is where our power to excel gains quantum fuel. What makes a magnet so powerful is the opposing forces that result in a powerful magnetic energy field. The same is true of resilience:
- Confusion leads to clarity
- Boredom creates innovation
- Pain can feed productive purpose
- Anger reveals where change needs to happen
- A lack of energy can reveal the need for more creativity
- Challenge can feed enthusiasm
- Creativity transforms resistance
- Difficulty can reveal easier ways of doing things
- Struggle births flow
So the next time, you go through something difficult, and start experiencing the “opposite of resilience,” which would be a lack of energy, or not feeling creative or capable, try a “One-Minute Resiliency Recharge.” Your true desires are being revealed; you need to find out what they are! Set a timer for one minute and:
- Be Curious: How could this current challenge compliment, rather than oppose or contradict what you’re trying to do?
- Be Aware: Where are you losing energy? What will help you gain it back?
- Be Wise: If the tension of opposites supports resilience, what is the new insight or action that is being revealed here?
- Be Creative: How is this showing you to think, be and act in more empowered ways?
- One of my all-time favourite “Mindful Minutes” is to ask myself…. “what would happen if…”
I chose to be ____________________ about what’s happening (and drawing from my favourite list of words, like: enthusiastic, creative, bold, daring, smart, cheeky, happy, peaceful, confident, successful, enlightened), etc.Robert Fritz echoes this in his book The Path of Least Resistance:
“From this choice the meaning of the word desire changes for you, from “idle wishes and hopes” to “true vision of that which is the highest in human aspiration and vision… as you learn to master your own creative process, you develop a capacity for truth. Good, bad, or indifferent, you will still want to know accurately what is going on.”
The more accurately we can “read” our own lives, complete with strengths and shadow, the more we grow our awareness, intuition and confidence to act.
Call to Action: How will you use the Tension of Opposites to recharge resilience? Email me, I’d love to hear about your experience!
About Cheryl Brewster, B.Msc., Transformational Speaker, Intuitive Consultant and Life Coach: Under every difficulty is a greater inner potential that our intuition accesses. My expertise is inspiring my clients, whether individuals or organizations to re-frame difficulty as a path to tangible, measurable results. If you’d like to learn how my intuitive consults, coaching programs or speaking services, can support your success, please contact me for a complimentary exploratory call. As an interfaith ordained minister, I also offer spiritual counselling and officiate ceremonies for life’s most meaningful moments.