How To Claim Your Rising

Key Points

• The aim of rising is to be aware of your values and how events reinforce how you choose to live your life.
• Getting clear on what matters most to us and spending some time creating space in our lives to prioritize this, is what self-care and wellness are all about.
• Hope and Humour are key aspects of rising from adversity and reclaiming our sense of ease and joy once again, they are powerful mindsets, behaviours, and practices that fuel our rising.

Are you feeling DONE? You are not alone.??We conducted an informal survey, asking people all over Canada, coast-to-coast-to-coast, and worldwide, to describe how they were feeling today using one word.??A resounding amount of people responded with the word 'DONE.'??People have had enough. As a collective, we have all experienced varying degrees of micro and macro traumas since March 2020. We are permanently changed from living during COVID-19.

This is part one of my newest article series discussing the next phase in my resiliency trajectory model. It’s called?RISING.?I will share with you my evidence-based principles and practical tools that will empower you to move from?grasping?to?stretching. To transform yourself from a state of?coping?to the state of?growing.

HOW TO CLAIM YOUR RISING

I do not believe that time heals all wounds. I believe that time allows for us to make space so our grief, pain, hurt, and setbacks can coexist with our life as we know it today. The rise phase of my resiliency trajectory model is when we strike that balance. This is when we enact our deepest core values and choose to live them.

After an adverse event?(like a global pandemic that shuts down life as we know it),?we decline. Then we adapt, then reclaim parts of ourselves that we may have lost, and then rise with our values intact or slightly modified and strengthened. The aim of rising is to be aware of your values and how events reinforce how you choose to live your life. The rise phase is when we come to the other side of our adverse experience, transformed. We get to choose how we want to live and be while we rise from the adversity.

ENVISIONING YOUR MOST RESILIENT SELF

So how do you want to live as you rise, dear friend? What values do you want to live by? And what are you rising?towards??

Getting clear on what matters most to us and spending some time creating space in our lives to prioritize this, is what self-care and wellness are all about. Sometimes self-care is hard because it feels like just one more thing; we have to check off our never-ending to-do list. Our mindset can become too productivity-focused, and we are challenged by the limiting belief that self-care isn't?aligned with deliverables. But what if we could shift our mindset, create more spaciousness around the idea that the tapestry of wellness can and must include self-care, creativity, and expression to make it all more fun – more meaningful.?

What does it look and like and feel like when you are at your best? If you-at-your-best isn’t necessarily a recent memory (you are not alone), what?would?or?could?it look like? The power of visualization is well documented by science. High-performance athletes use it to give themselves a measurable leg up to succeed in their chosen sport. We can use this same power of visualization to create a tangible picture and feel a sense of what it means when we are handling life with a deeper sense of ease and joy.

WHAT HELPS YOU BOUNCE BACK?

Resiliency is our capacity to bounce back and recover from a setback or challenging experience. It is how we dust ourselves off and get up instead of giving up when we fall. My approach is known as Everyday Resiliency ? because it is the small decisions we make each day that set us up to do the extraordinary. With practice, everyday resiliency becomes a tool that aligns with our primal drive to feel safe and secure. Each person has the capacity for resiliency. It isn't something we have or don't have, and it isn't something we are born with. We all have the capacity to become more resilient. Resiliency is there, inside us - it just needs to be recognized and cultivated.?When developing our resilience, there are some key factors that help us to bounce back from and grow stronger through difficulty. In my research and work with thousands of individuals throughout the world, I have come to call these factors the Five Core Traits of Resilience. These five pillars are: Belonging, Perspective, Acceptance, Hope, and Humour. Each pillar contributes to the overall constellation of skills, attitudes, and behaviours that allow us to persist and thrive through adversity.?

HOPE AND HUMOUR

The fourth and fifth pillars of my resiliency model, Hope and Humour, are key aspects of rising from adversity and reclaiming our sense of ease and joy once again. They are powerful mindsets, behaviours, and practices that fuel our rising. We are transformed. We are different now. And we trust that all will be well. It will not be easy, but I will be okay.

Hope?

We each have an inner pilot light deep inside ourselves, a hope-filled flame that tells us that we can do hard things. This is about self-efficacy. Resilient people protect their morale and practice optimism.?Part of feeling good again is having the unshakable sense that good things are possible for us. It believes that we?can?feel good again. Hope gives us the drive to seek out our passion and purpose because we know better days on the horizon.

Humour

A key cornerstone of wellness is knowing how to have fun. The art of cultivating laughter, pleasure, and play and knowing how to enjoy moments of merriment is what resilient people do. A big side-splitting belly laugh feels good! Finding humour in even a dark situation brings levity and builds connection. Chuckling instead of (or even while) groaning at life's frustrations opens up the possibility for more creative solutions to our challenges.?

With hope and humour activated and our mindset dialled into growth, we hope forward towards a deeper sense of joy, ease, and spaciousness. We are able to embody our values in the choices we make and the way we live moment-to-moment, day today. This provides us with the opportunity to tap into the power of our creativity, generating even more self-exploration, expression, and fulfillment.?

I invite you to hope-forward even as we are still building new familiars. Remember, this is not the new normal. We are co-creating new familiars. And in time, they will feel like the new patterns, routines, and rhythms of our daily lives.?

Take good care my friends,

Dr. Robyne

Interested in this topic? Please join me next week as I discuss article two of resiliency rising, finding psychological safety.