Five Secrets to Resilience
Photo by Karim MANJRA on Unsplash
This past Monday, I received some professional news that put me in a state of tears, failure, shock, and disappointment. It was the lowest that I’d been for almost a year. The experience itself felt devastating, and its effects were compounded by the overall anxiety of coronavirus and week 4 of shelter-in-place. Through this week, I’ve been experiencing all the emotions— shame, anger, grief, resentment, hurt and also freedom, compassion, love, support, confidence, and curiosity.
I’m definitely still in it and will continue to experience the cycles of grief throughout the coming weeks. At the same time, I’m sharing five secrets of resilience that have been fueling me through the week.
1. Acknowledge the Grief
The one coronavirus article that I keep returning to is a Harvard Business Review article explaining That Discomfort You’re Feeling Is Grief. We are grieving the loss of freedom, liberty, and the fact that so many things have been cancelled— weddings, events, gatherings, graduations, amongst others. We have loved ones who are sick, in pain, or dying, and we cannot be physically with them. The world has changed. It has become wildly uncertain. There is a sense of anticipatory grief that the article describes:
Anticipatory grief is that feeling we get about what the future holds when we’re uncertain…. Anticipatory grief is also more broadly imagined futures. There is a storm coming. There’s something bad out there. With a virus, this kind of grief is so confusing for people. Our primitive mind knows something bad is happening, but you can’t see it. This breaks our sense of safety.
Grief proceeds through all the stages: denial, anger, bargaining, sadness, and acceptance, however, it’s not linear. We may pass through all of these in a day, or even an hour, and they will continue to cycle over weeks, months, and years.
In the immediate day 1 of my news, I went through bargaining and denial. And then, knowing that I’m someone who typically processes bad news by driving myself into action to fix & change & learn quickly from what has happened and jump into an action plan, I decided to try something different. I took the counsel of my support system and my coaching training to Slow Down to Speed Up. I stopped to process my emotions rather than escape them by being busy.
What has worked for me when processing deep disappointments in the past is to deepen and acknowledge my feelings and sit with the emotions, acknowledging the reality of the sadness. Two exercises have helped me:
A) The RAIN method, which has us go inside to
Recognize what is happening;
Allow the experience to be there, just as it is;
Investigate with interest and care;
Nurture with self-compassion.
Tara Brach has guided meditations to lead you through this introspective process which allows naming of difficult emotions and letting them be experienced.
B) The loving-kindness meditation helps me to quiet my high performer who demands that I spring into action, often by criticizing myself for not having avoided this mistake by doing more, trying harder, and just being better. I use this series of guided statements to help me focus my attention. Jack Kornfield has a wonderful guided meditation.
May I be happy
May I be protected and safe
May I be healthy and strong
May I be kind to myself
May I live my life with ease
This is how I name and recognize that I’m grieving the loss of a potential future, and acknowledge that it hurts. That I have lots of feelings, and it’s OK to spend time with these feelings.
2. Permission to be Angry
Anger is one of the stages of grief, and sometimes in the attempt to be calm, to be contemplative, to be meditative, it feels that anger is not-OK. My long-time leadership coach immediately picked up on this and in our session, he pushed me to be angry. To express all the negativity, the judgment, the hatred that I was currently feeling for myself, for them, and even for him right now as he pushed me be angry.
We ran through exercises where we both yelled out the most extreme profanities against the news and the bearer of the news. He had me scream and be ugly. He had be push against a solid wall to feel the rigidity of something that I couldn’t control or move. I might have told him that I hated him.
This reminded me that I’d used my anger before in the past to help me get through the deaths of close family and also through my divorce. With my personal trainer, we’d done a sledgehammer and tire exercise that used all my physical strength against a giant tire, helping me feel the anger in my body. And through feeling it, be left with a feeling of satisfaction and physical exhaustion that allowed me to move beyond it. Since I’m not at the gym right now, I immediately texted my trainer and he gave me a home version to do ball slams involving a weighted medicine ball and slamming it against the ground. We will see if amazon considers this an essential item.
My coach gave me permission to be angry. He gave me a gift to express the anger inside myself. By naming it and fully starting to feel it, I’m able to start moving through it rather than suppress any slow simmering resentment.
3. Perspective across Time
I am grateful for my community of support. I’ve known one of my oldest friends for 27 years. He’s seen me and seen my stories as I’ve grown over time. I called him so that he would help give me a perspective based on all the “disasters” that have happened in my life. With that perspective and longevity, we both agreed that this news was a 3 out of 10 on the devastation scale. Hmm… maybe not so bad. And I’ve also recovered from the other “disasters,” some easier than others.
Another take on perspective When making a decision, my business coach asked me to think of how it would feel to make the yes decision and the no decision given the perspective of time:
In 10 days
In 10 months
In 10 years
With those 3 timeframes, my resilience kicked in and realized that this might still sting in 10 days, but that in 10 months or 10 years I’ll likely have forgotten about it, or perhaps use it as a major turning point to learn from. Perspective is powerful. Perspective helps you see things from a meta-view where the future version of you is already resilient and has moved on.
4. Find the Humor
Part of lasting resilience for me is not taking myself so seriously. The universe has a funny way of messing with you. Laughter is a release from the tension & severity of the situation. It’s a way to let loose and not take things so seriously.
I have a selfie of my sister and I at our father’s creation. We are outside the cremation chamber with a line of people behind us waiting to pay respects. We are both hysterically laughing & crying at the same time. The more people that gave us side-eye and shushed us for being inappropriate, the louder we laughed. It felt really good. Especially with the absurdity of taking a selfie in the moment.
When I talked to my oldest friend, after all the storytelling and processing, at the end of our conversation, we laughed together. We laughed because the way I was feeling now was reminiscent of all the times he’d comfort me in college when a boy who I liked, wouldn’t like me back in the same way. I felt like the world was over, and that I would never ever have someone fall in love with me. He wryly commented that it was his first thought when we got on the phone, but he had wisely avoided that analogy until I brought it up. Which led to more laughter.
Life is ridiculous. It helps to laugh at yourself. It helps to laugh at what the universe throws your way.
5. Connection to Meaning
Finally, towards the end of the process, when all the feels have been felt, and there may be a light at the end of the tunnel, what helps me with resilience is connecting to what really matters.
I have a strong sense of my values. I have a strong sense of what showing up as myself and playing full-out means. I have a sense of who my people are.
My meaning comes from helping people become better leaders. My people are high achievers, often senior leaders within tech companies or founders & CEOs of startups. They create products with meaning and value for the people of the world. Often they are “others,” they feel under-represented in some way, whether it’s being female, or black, or gay, or an immigrant, or ex-military, or bullied as a child. Often they have big dreams and would like a little help and creativity to dream bigger north stars, and some accountability to help them get there. When I help leaders become the best versions of themselves, they show up and inhabit their unique, values-based version of their leadership. With that strength, they inspire their teams and create more humane & ethical products for everyone else in the world to use.
Knowing my meaning and that I have a personal definition of success means that any setbacks are simply a bump. It helps me to find the inner peace to pick up and keep going. It lets me ask what value or meaning can I find from the setback? What is the gift that can derived from it? Perhaps that it’s a NO, so that the Next One will appear and be even better. Perhaps it drives some insight and learning about myself. After every event, positive or negative, my frequent question is “what can be learned here?” Taking all the answers and threading & theming them together starts to connect to a greater meaning.
Bottom-Line
Many things will happen that are out of your control and make you feel judged, a failure, or stuck in a bad situation. Five secrets to lasting resilience that have worked for me are to 1. Acknowledge the Grief, 2. give yourself Permission to be Angry, 3. view Perspective Across Time, 4. Find the Humor, and finally 5. create Connection to Meaning. They’ve helped me climb out of many pits of despair, and I hope they can also help you.
Deepest thanks to David Darst, Rich Litvin, Gilad Karni, Bob Russo, Danielle Baldwin, Moe Badi, Jeralyn Mastoianni, Pam Christian, Corrine Sandler, and my Kairos family for the support through this week.