THE POWER OF RESILIENCE

If there is a particular power that you and I need, it is the power to bounce-back after a set-back. There’s a special term that we use when we refer to this power—resilience. And resilience power is the power to not let any defeat, failure, mistake, or misfortune keep you down or kill your vision. Resilience is the power to get back up, shake off the dust and dirt and go for it again. It is the power to not let circumstances or your environment control your thinking, feeling, speaking, or acting. It is to empower your vision, your values, and your intention. In other words, your meanings so that the meanings you create in all of these dimensions (and more) become the controlling factors in your life.

Now isn’t that an incredibly mighty power?

Do you have it? Do you have enough of it so that you can walk through the world with the sense that no one and nothing can deprive you of it? Is your sense of resilience so robust, so stable, and so intense that you feel free to go ahead and take smart risks? Do you have the resilience to embrace the day fully?

When you have resilience fully and completely integrated into yourself, into your mind, your emotions, the way you talk, and the way you act, you have a level of freedom within yourself that allows you to truly be your own person. You are not dependent on the outside world, on circumstances, or on your environment nor even your social environment to determine whether you feel good or bad, successful or not, effective or not. You are dependent on something internal—your choices, your intentions, and your vision. In fact, with resilience you are able to develop a fierce resolve about a vision and persevere in making it real and to do so in the face of setbacks or disappoints.

With resilience, you become unstoppable. When you are stopped, it’s only temporary. That’s because you get right back up, tend to your skinned-up elbows and knees, reflect on what the most important lessons that you can learn from the set-back, adjust your thinking, framing, attitude, relating, and whatever else needs adjusting, and then go for it again. Resilience makes you a ferocious learner, a life-long learner, a learner who accelerates the learning that makes for wisdom by squeezing every bit of learnings from every experience. The way I like framing this description is to say that you have bounce within you. Knock you down and you bounce right back up. That’s why in the Resilience Training that we do in Neuro-Semantics using the Meta- States Model, we talk about resources that put bounce within you.

What creates this kind of resilience power? As I’ve already indicated, you have to access and own your core powers of thinking, feeling, speaking, and acting (Empowerment Series #2 and #3). You also have to create the meta-state powers of ownership, responsibility, openness, vulnerability, choice, and the other things already mentioned in this series on personal empowerment. And that’s why resilience is not a simple state, that is, it is not a primary state. That’s why you cannot just “access the state of resilience, anchor it” and presto, you are resilient. Resilience is a more complex and layered meta-state than that.

Because resilience is a meta-state, it has layers. Within the state, it is not just a feeling experience. It is that, it does involve some strong robust feelings, yet it is so much more. To develop the meta-state of resilience and have it well integrated into yourself, you have to have many layers of frames of mind (attitudes, beliefs, understandings, decisions, identities, intentions, etc.) that support and empower this state. This is what I discovered when I did my very first modeling project (1991-1994) and in the process discovered or invented the Meta-States Model. By interviewing many, many people who “had been to hell and back” and who were resilient, I discovered that they all certain frames of mind that were now their operational framework.

Like what? They lived in a Matrix of frames that were characterized by such tremendous and empower ideas as the following: Getting knocked down is just life, no big deal; I will learn from this and get back into the game. I shall get through this. This is just one step back as I now take three steps forward. This too shall pass and as it does, I will let it go after I have mined all the learnings that I can from this so that I never make that mistake again. Onward to new mistakes! I have a vision of my life that will fulfill a set of values that I treasure as precious. I will let nothing kill my vision! Now is the time to take a step backwards to renew my vision of the big picture and the resources that I need for my next step forward. Every setback tells me to refine my coping skills so that I can cope with, even master this aspect of life. And so I will. I have plenty of resources, both internal and external, that I can turn to and access to help me cope and get back on my feet. I have an untraumatizable center— whatever happens that is disappointing or hurtful or even even is not about me, not about everything, and not forever. It is not personal, pervasive, or permanent (Martin Seligman). It is That There Then or This Here Now. I will not traumatize myself because something undesirable happen. I will not play the victims who whines and moans; I will get over it and master it. I am more than what happens to me. My happiness and destiny are in my hands. No one can take away my power to choose my attitude.

For more about the meta-state of resilience, get the Meta-States book (now in paperback as well as hardback) or track down a Neuro-Semantic Trainer who trains the Resilience Training.