Increasing our inner resilience is essential for well-being and happiness. In this excellent post ‘Resilience: De-Coupling State from Context‘, Doug Silsbee explains very well how to improve our inner resilience.
The aim is to be less affected by external events and the automatic triggers these events create in our mind. Doug Silsbee proposes a 4 step decomposition:
- Sense, and name, what is happening in your context.
- Sense, and name, your own reactions to this context. Bear witness to how your identity is challenged, how you are taking on the stress of the system, how your thoughts are racing and shoulders hunched and attention span decreasing. Take a balcony view of our own experience.
- Consciously direct your attention in order to interrupt the automaticity of your own nervous system’s response to triggering.
- de-link your internal state from the context around you. This is liberation.
Of course this will take some practice and the author recommends regular meditation to increase self-awareness. Still we certainly need to practice these steps to improve our response to external events. When do you start?
