5 Strategies To Develop Mental Resilience

How often do you complain? Really though? .. The weather, the traffic, the kids, work, the neighbours, the news?

Maybe more than you think or realise.? Imagine you stopped complaining - hard stop.? Truly accept everything that happens around you and fully live the mantra that..

Everyone around you is doing the best that they can with the tools they have available to them at that time

One of our goals at Tag Digital is to support our team be the happiest, healthiest and smartest they can be and as part of that, we had the privilege of having Emma Bell join us for a morning to discuss building mental resilience

Emma studied mental resilience, travelling 35,000 miles to meet 50 survivors of trauma who were not only surviving but thriving - she worked with them to understand what their common strategies were in mental resilience and has written a highly successful audiobook on their stories and strategies.

She shared some of these powerful stories with us, and worked with us to define firstly our foundation for building resilience and then 5 key strategies to take away.

Resilience is built through every choice, action, decision - it is a muscle that is built up every day, multiple times through everything that we choose to do.? If muscles aren't used they atrophy so keep doing those mental push ups everyday.

To get started and set the foundation for building your mental resilience .. ask yourself these questions:

• Do you accept that your response/reaction to events is something that you can control or manage? Choosing your reaction will give you power and control - you can't choose what other people do but you can choose your response.
• To what extent are you concerned about what others think of you, and when is that helpful and unhelpful?

You will be way less concerned with what others think of you when you realise

how seldom they do.”

David Foster Wallace, ‘Infinite Jest’

• How often do you complain about events at work? We all do it and things can trigger us but the more you build this muscle the easier it will become and the better you will get at spotting it.
• How good are you at accepting a difficult reality and moving on to the solution? Accept what has happened, validate your feelings and move onto a solution.

The 5 Key Strategies for Building Mental Resilience

1. Take control of the narrative - decide what you want this to be and own that truth, take back your power.? Emma shared with us the story of Kia Scherr - who tragically lost her husband and daughter in the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks

When she saw the terrorist she saw a young man, not much older than her son and she chose her narrative

“Forgive them, they know not what they do”, I said. My family thought I’d gone mad but I explained, “No, I mean it. Since love is lacking here, compassion is what we need.”

2. The 3-second pause - breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breath out, the simple tool not only calms us but moves the decision from the limbic part of the brain (impulsive memory, emotion, and habit part of our brain) and moves it toward the frontal lobe, which powers cause-and-effect thinking. This gets us out of monkey mode and into a more logical state.

3. Watch which thought bus you’re on! - If you needed to get to the airport and there was a bus going in the opposite direction, would you get on? No!

A Harvard Medical study showed 65% of thoughts are negative or redundant and 47% of your time lost in thought.? But also it takes us only 5 days to build new thought patterns or habits.

Be aware of your thoughts and all the crazy directions they go in and push them in the right direction again and again (building that resilience muscle).

4. Stop Complaining? - This is a biggie, imagine we took our foundation and instead of complaining about things we cannot change we accepted them and found solutions - game changer, right?

5. What is Possible? - One of my favourite quotes from Henry Ford:

Whether you think you can, or you think you can't – you're right,”

We are our biggest limiters - truly imagine what is possible and take steps to move yourself 1 degree in the right direction. Anything is possible if you put your mind to it .. like the story of Jaap Bressers who redefined what a possible after a diving accident severed his spinal cord and he challenged the beliefs of the medical staff and regained 50% mobility

What steps are you going to take today to change your mental resilience? Comment below