In our opinion, resilience is often presented as a quick fix or a way to make people stronger so they can endure a toxic environment. We’ve seen this countless times in hospital settings, and it got to the point where many nurses felt almost allergic to the word.
Resilience is defined as “having the capacity to withstand or quickly recover from difficulties.” And also, “the ability of a substance to return to it’s usual shape after being stretched.” These definitions talk about resilience like recovery or returning to baseline.
Here at Well and Whole, we think about resilience a little differently. For us, it’s not just mental fitness or “toughness.” It’s not just fancy hacks or techniques. And it’s not simply about returning to baseline. We’re going for so much better than baseline.
The Well and Whole Formula
We think about it from a holistic perspective, and you guessed it, we go deeper! For us, resilience has a few key themes.
1. Regulation
Assess your current state. For us, the idea of Regulation includes balance and flexibility in your mind and body, as well as your emotions. When you’re Regulated, you have more bandwidth and capacity to take on personal and professional challenges.
In our experience, many leaders who deal with high levels of stress and burnout tend to downplay them. They often feel that their situation is “not bad enough” to “count” because they know others who have experienced stress and burn out in more extreme ways.
Reset
If you’re burned out we’ll start with the concept of Reset and tailor a plan that fits your unique needs. We want to ensure a foundation of safety in your mind and body. We will address specific mindset challenges and patterns that tend to occur in this phase, as well as really get back in tune with the body. We’ll help get you out of survival mode so you can progress to Resilience.
Emotional and Nervous System Regulation
Emotional regulation means you can be present with and allow yourself to feel and move through your emotions. High achievers often block their own access to certain feelings so this is something we work through delicately. Understanding and feeling your emotions is crucial in being aware of how they play into decision making and leadership.
Being regulated in your nervous system means you have a sense of awareness and balance between the sympathetic (fight, flight, freeze) and parasympathetic (rest, digest, recover) nervous system states. You know when you’re in each one, what can bring you into or out of each one. You’re in tune with tension in your body. We also assess and work through ways to decrease overstimulation.
Increasing Your Capacity
We work on managing stress and optimizing your relationship with it. Next we create a toolbox of positive coping mechanisms and self care using our 5 part Well and Whole framework (think, breathe, move, be, enjoy). We’ll discover your unique needs based on our own measurement system.
2. Mindset
Change your thoughts, change your life. You’ve heard it before and you know it’s true. Knowing why you think the way you do and then making a very intentional choice about how you want to think moving forward is one of the most powerful keys to resilience and flourishing.
Patterns and Programming
We’ll do a deep dive into the patterns and beliefs you currently hold and see whether they’re supportive to creating your most resilient self. For example, Patterns like overwhelm and urgency, perfectionism and people pleasing, and difficulty slowing down. And we’ll look at your Programming around things like your identity, motivation and success, time and energy.
Abundance Mindset
Shifting into a growth or Abundance Mindset is one of the most important things you can do to increase your resilience! So many high achievers stay stuck because of self-imposed limitations on what opportunities they think are available to them. Living in a scarcity mindset is the surest way to keep yourself from taking healthy risks and being able to see opportunity around you. We help you shift out of fear and scarcity and into growth and abundance and make decisions as your highest self.
Your Vision and Aspirational Wellness
Your Vision = your values, your why, your personal development and professional goals. Aspirational wellness = your desires and dreams, your aspirations, that juicy feeling of being energized by what truly lights you up. How good can it get? How good can you allow things to get? The more specific the better, and this is where we help you with clarity, expansion, and seeing possibility you might be overlooking. We break it down into small steps and help you stay connected to it.
3. Your Relationship With Yourself aka Self Health
Your Self Health encompasses the way you think and feel about yourself and how it impacts your life. The other aspects of resilience are important, but if your relationship with yourself is lacking – for example, you don’t feel worthy or you don’t trust yourself, you run the risk of projecting these patterns onto everyone and everywhere else in your life.
Self Worth
In our opinion, this is the most crucial area that ripples out to every other one. A lack of it is often the root cause of burnout and lack of fulfillment, and makes you the exact opposite of resilient. Healing your feelings of “not enoughness” heals the insatiable drive for more that only makes you feel like you’re on a hamster wheel. It’s what allows you to finally know when enough is enough; to accept yourself, and trust yourself.
Self Compassion
Second only to self worth in importance to resilience, self compassion flies under the radar of most high achievers. It’s a common fear that being self compassionate will make you weaker, softer (as if that was a bad thing), or somehow less motivated. Research confirms the opposite of all of these is true. Self compassion enhances motivation, makes you stronger, and promotes resilience.
Self Trust
At this point we have honestly lost count of how many high achievers, especially women, have confessed to us that they don’t trust themselves. Agonizing over decisions, worrying about the outcome, people pleasing – these all consume massive amounts of energy and put you back into a scarcity mindset. We invite you to consider how much more resilient you can be when you finally trust yourself.
The Biggest Piece You’re Missing
Now that we’ve outlined our take on resilience, you can see that our perspective is holistic and likely much different than you’ve seen before. Our formula for Resilience includes Regulation, Mindset, and Relationship to Self and we know it’s unique.
We honestly haven’t heard anyone talking about resilience this way.
For us, if you’re not addressing the whole person, you’re not creating resilience. And if you’re not getting to the root of the relationship you have with yourself, you’re not going to make meaningful progress. All the tips, hacks, techniques, and discipline are not going to make you stronger if your relationship with yourself is lacking.
Take the Next Step
Do you feel like we were talking directly to you? Are you ready to become your most resilient self? If so, we strongly recommend working with a coach who gets you!
Hello, that’s us!! If you can’t tell, this is kind of our jam, and our specialty. Curious about our results? Check them out here! Wanna read an in-depth case study? Read it here!
We know this work is deep and it’s a journey. It has to be a fit on both ends. Curious if one of us could be the coach for you? We’re happy to offer you a complimentary session.
Sara and Stacy are holistic nurses and transformative mindset coaches working with clients around the world! They believe that the inner work creates your outer results and that you can truly be Well and Whole every day.
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