Back to: How to Build your Resilience and Mental Fitness
Resilience and Mental Fitness
This lesson gives a high level overview of resilience and mental fitness. As you read through it give yourself the objective of letting the content sink in and ask yourself the question:
Who am I meant to be?
How will strengthening my resilience and mental fitness serve me now and in the future?
What is resilience
Resilience is the ability to deal with the stress and adversities of life and perform at your best regardless of the circumstances. It is the ability to focus our minds by bringing attention back to the present moment. This skill is an indispensable skill that enables you to take control of your life, your work, your career, your performance and your relationships. Gift yourself the gift of training your brain to help you journey through the natural challenges, curve balls and traumas (big and small) that you will experience by developing your resilience and mental fitness.
Resilience is the ability to effectively address challenge in a manner that allows us to be enhanced by the experience, not diminished by it. Dr. Taryn Marie
Resilience is the capacity to maintain or recover high levels of well-being in the face of adversity. Carmelina Lawton Smith
Resilience is the capacity for stress-related growth. Davis-Laack 2020, The Stress Resilience Institute US
Resilience is about our capacity for change. It’s synergistic with well-being, you can’t have one without the other. Jenny Campbell – Coaching at Work, Vol 14, Issue 2
Resilience leads to
- Better judgement
- Better character
- Better willpower
to be the master of yourself.
Negative emotions/feelings e.g. stress, frustrated, irritated, anxious, fearful and many more are caused by being in the past or future rather than the present.
Research reveals that our minds are wandering approximately 47% of the time and we are unhappiest when our minds are wandering.
The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.” William James, Psychologist
Mental Fitness
Shirzad Chamine who developed Positive Intelligence® says that “Your mind is your best friend and your worst enemy.” Your mental fitness, or positive intelligence quotient (PQ), measures the amount of time your mind is working for you versus against you.
High PQ means your mind works for you far more than against you and gives you more control over your mind and how well it acts in your best interest.
If your internal Judge along with Saboteur thought patterns are stronger and more active than your Sage thought patterns then your mind will drag you down.
If your Sage thought patterns are stronger and more active than your internal Judge and Saboteur thought patterns then your mind will lift you up.
Your mind will either lift you up or drag you down.
If you are not physically fit, you would feel the physical strain as you climb a steep hill. If you are not mentally fit, you would feel the mental stress, such as anxiety, frustration or unhappiness as you handle work and relationship challenges. Shirzad Chamine, Positive Intelligence
Find out how often your mind is working for you versus against you here http://www.positiveintelligence.com/PQ-score
People who have strong mental fitness still encounter their life’s fair share of challenges. However, they approach the challenges from a different angle or perspective. They don’t blame, throw shots or complain about the other person or the situation or criticise and judge themselves; they approach the situation, the other person and themselves with blameless discernment, staying focused, in control of their emotions and behaviours in the midst of the situation.
Blameless discernment: Acknowledge the situation you are in and pro-actively explore how you can move forward from it.
Focus
As you work through the various elements of this program keep your mind open and curious; ask and challenge yourself to recognise the unhelpful thinking and behaviour patterns and how you can replace them with helpful thinking and behaviour patterns and practice the steps to increase your positive intelligence quotient (PQ).
Carl Osborne says that “Mastering the art of resilience does much much than restore who you once thought you were. Rather, you emerge from the experience transformed into a truer expression of who you were really meant to be.”
Who are you meant to be?