Roll with the punches: 3 steps to a resilient mindset
This article is part of Dare Be's Leadership Handbook, a guide to help people lead with impact and heart
Life will never go exactly as you planned. Unexpected issues will pop up, and no matter how hard you try, you can't control everything. Sounds stressful, doesn’t it?
Thankfully, there are practices you can put in place to build up mental resilience to that stress. This will allow you to reduce your stressability and roll with the punches - instead of getting knocked around.
Today, you’ll learn three techniques that help rewire your brain to manage stress. Each of these practices focuses on compassion, mindfulness, and acceptance, creating a long-lasting positive impact on your mental resilience.
Of course, not every practice described below will work for you. You are coming in with a unique set of stress triggers and personal experiences, which will make some techniques more effective than others. So give them a try and see what works for you!
1. Extend compassion to others and to yourself
In this context, compassion is a form of meditation where you direct wishes to people, such as, “May you be happy, healthy, safe, and peaceful.”
Sending and receiving these wishes shifts our mental state from anger and fear to feelings of love and connection.
Impressively, a compassion practice even has the power to slow down ageing. Scientists can measure this by studying the difference in length of people’s telomeres (the end strip in our DNA). Essentially, the shorter the telomeres, the older the body is.
In a comparative study, scientists separated people in 3 groups and compared the length of their telomeres for six months, with one group practising mindfulness (more on that next), one group practising compassion meditation, and one control group. The control group aged normally, the mindfulness group reduced their rate of ageing, and the compassion group showed no ageing at all!
Here’s how to begin a compassion practice:
Start sending well wishes to the people you love. What matters is that you connect emotionally to the words, rather than sending empty wishes.
Once you get the hang of it, you can then extend your wishes to strangers (like the barista at your coffee shop). Eventually you’ll be able to extend compassion even to people who have hurt you, which isn’t easy, and finally to the whole of humanity.
Once you can offer compassion to others, offer it to yourself. Many people cringe at this idea, typically out of an inherent sense of unworthiness. If that’s your case, you’re not alone.
You can imagine people you love giving you hugs and sending you their best wishes, to start. Then when you feel more comfortable accepting love, you can send it to yourself.
2. Practice mindfulness meditation
Mindfulness is about being present with your body, your 5 senses, your emotions, and your thoughts.
Newcomers to the practice often assume that the goal is to have no thoughts at all. Although this may be the result for meditation masters, this is not the goal. Instead, the goal is to learn to direct your attention at will.
Here’s an example: at the end of this very sentence, close your eyes and try to count your in-breaths up to 10, without getting distracted. Go.
How was it? Were you able to count your breaths without thinking about your to-do list, that thing at work, the latest email from a client, or anything else from the back of your mind?
Our monkey mind creates a barrage of thoughts, mostly alerting us to potential threats. The more stressable we are, the more such thoughts we’ll have, and the more receptive to them we are.
Together, they create a negative thought vortex. Mindfulness meditation helps with that.
This has been a game changer in my life. For instance, it is now much easier for me to pay attention to my 8-year-old son when he is telling me about the latest book he is reading or about an amazing dinosaur fact. Before I meditated, I would come home from work and really struggle to be present with my family at home. Now, I can notice when my attention errs and direct it where desired.
At work this means that you can truly pay attention to what is happening in different situations. You can notice the flicker in the eyes of the person when she tells you that she is “not too bad,” or your boss crossing her arms when you make a proposal. You’re far more conscious of the reality around you and can act more intelligently.
Like many of these other practices, reaping the fruits of meditation takes some dedication. So start short and simple. If you practise gratitude in the shower, finish with a few minutes of mindfulness, focusing your thoughts on the experience of the warm water running down your skin.
Tip: I recommend that you use Insight Timer as the best introduction to it - it is free with lots of guided mindfulness meditations of different lengths and with different voices.
3. Practise in-the-moment acceptance
This is a very powerful approach, and it only takes about one minute once you’ve mastered it, but you’ll have to work up to it. You pause and observe with your mind’s eye each time you feel stress.
This helps you recognize your emotions, which are probably the richest signals in our lives. They can guide us towards what we want and away from what we don’t want. Paying attention to your emotions, accepting them for what they are is a simple way to feel alive and to “know thyself.”
Here’s how to do it (this can apply to any type of emotion, including anger, sadness and even the positive ones if you want to feel them more strongly!):
Awareness: notice that the unpleasant sensation of stress is here.
Pause and breathe: Follow three cycles of the 1-minute breathing exercise mentioned in these practices to find peace.
Give yourself some compassion: You have full permission to be sorry for experiencing this sensation. You can imagine a loved one giving you a hug, for a sense of presence and comfort—not pity.
Observe your sensations with your mind’s eye: Is your heart racing? Are your palms sweaty? Is your stomach tense? Whatever it is, pay attention to it, and be curious about the sensations: what does it really feel like?
Name the emotion: Is it Fear? Anxiety? Frustration? Help identify the emotion with this wheel of emotions.
Don’t run away: At this stage your urge is probably to make this sensation disappear. Instead, give yourself more compassion and comfort, then imagine that you can expand this sensation. Double it in size, and again, and again, until it occupies your entire body.
Identify your needs: What need(s) is this sensation expressing? It could be a yearning for safety, comfort, recognition, etc. Whatever it is, name it.
By doing this you have accepted and processed your emotion, then identified your deep needs. Well done!
The key to this practice is to be curious about your experience. Having an established mindfulness practice helps greatly in this process. The inherent risk is that you end up judging your stress and sensations and then beat yourself up for them. This won’t help and may in fact increase your stress. Ideally, you should first do this accompanied by a coach or a therapist.
On your first try, this may take you 10 minutes. The more you practise this, the easier and faster this will get. It now takes me less than 1 minute for most emotions.
Put everything into practice
Once you’ve tried each of the activities above, you’ll start to get an idea of which ones work for you. When that becomes clear, build a habit around that practice and make it a part of your daily routine.
It will take a while for these practices to integrate with your other daily habits, but the positive results will be well worth it. You’ll be taking important steps toward reducing stress in your life.
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