Putting Emotional Resilience Into Action

One minute I was teaching a class on Emotional Resilience the next I was challenging my own.

Monday was an odd day. I wasn't really in the mood to teach a class on Emotional Resilience, particularly as I was donating my time, but when I looked down the list of the 18 attendees, I saw that these were people with "proper" jobs, the real heroes of our community.

Social care; supporting abuse victims; end of life care, the really tough roles to face in to.

I realised giving my time was the least I could do, and on the whole the class was very well received. There was just one person, on camera and OFF mute, who tapped all the way through the guided practice. It was very distracting.

Even when I named them, they were so engrossed in their work, that they didn't realise.

It did irritate me, and if I'm honest, I spent far too much time thinking about it.  At the time, I thought this was the challenge of the day until an hour later I had a call about a contract I was working on. It had been cancelled! The core stream of my income, gone.

How ironic given my morning class! Now I really had to walk my talk.

I often teach that emotional resilience gives us that ability to adapt, but there is a subtlety in our response because it's not simply pushing through adversity, like many of us have been taught.  We can't simply ride rough shod over the emotions that arise.

This is where having a strong sense of emotional resilience really comes into it's own.  It provides us with the capacity to experience all of our emotions, good and bad.  We can sit with them in awareness without them becoming over bearing and consuming.  It this acknowledgement we can move forwards even whilst acknowledging the adversity of our experience. 

If you want to understand how mindfulness underpins emotional resilience, message me for a discovery call or subscribe to Just Breathe for more insight.