Practicing and Applying Resilience

In the last two blogs I have talked about the importance of self-awareness as a prerequisite for being able to practice and apply the skills and the attitudes of resilience. If you don’t know where you’re starting from, it’s difficult to know where you’re going. And the skills and the attitudes that we have been talking about in this blog require practice in order for you to be able to apply them when you need them. Just like using the techniques of self-regulation, such as deep breathing or visualization, you need to have these well practiced before you need to apply them. In the middle of a crisis, it’s a little late to decide that you really need to work on being able to calm yourself down. Storytelling is one of the techniques that we use in teaching the attitudes and skills of resilience. Reading and listening to the stories that others tell as well as telling your own story could increase your understanding of these skills and attitudes and your ability to apply them. Storytelling has been around since the first human beings sat down around a campfire and talked about their lives. These first training sessions on resilience occurred thousands of years ago. From campfires to fireplaces to pot-bellied stoves to water coolers, we continue to tell stories about resilience. In most recent times, we have written these down in the form of novels and biographies and even more recently recorded them on tape and even more recently on the Internet. We have used a novel that I wrote a number of years ago, Reaching Home, as one of our primary tools in teaching the skills and the attitudes of resilience. A novel, I would argue, for the following reasons is one of the best ways to teach these attitudes and skills, since the average person requires 12 to 14 hours of time to read a novel. This time is often spent over weeks or months and is done frequently in the late evening before falling asleep. The activity is usually seen as enjoyable with the reader often identifying with one or more of the characters in the story. If you’re interested in learning more about how we have used the Reaching Home novel and other novels in our trainings, go to: www.reachinghome.com. Writing about difficult things that have occurred in our lives may often be helpful. Research by a psychologist named James Pennebaker and by others has found that writing about difficult things may actually improve our health. In a series of studies, one group of individuals was asked to write down their deepest thoughts and feelings about a traumatic event they had experienced. The other group wrote about ordinary matters, such as their plans for the day or for a vacation. Both groups wrote for 15 to 20 minutes a day for 3 to 5 consecutive days. Participants were told that no one would be collecting the stories that they wrote and that they could share or not share these stories with others. The results were surprising. When compared with the people who wrote about ordinary events, the ones who wrote about their traumatic experiences reported fewer physical symptoms, fewer visits to the doctor, fewer days off from work, improved mood and a more positive outlook. Their immune function seemed to be enhanced for at least 6 weeks after the writing exercise. These studies support the concept that writing about difficult situations that we have experienced may help us to understand and deal with the traumatic event. It may give us a sense of relief and control. Confiding our feelings in others and talking about what we have written may have a similar benefit. We use the novel, Reaching Home, in our trainings. We ask participations to read through the sections of the story and then to take time to answer specific questions about how characters in the novel have been applying or not applying the skills and the attitudes of resilience. We also ask participants to look at how they might or might not deal with the situations that the characters are encountering For more information about the training that we provide and how we make use of storytelling and the novel, Reaching Home, go to www.reachinghome.com. You can buy a copy of “Duct Tape Isn’t Enough,” which is our training program, through our website (www.reachinghome.com) or through Amazon. In the next blog post, we will be talking about a “serious” game that we have developed to help people practice applying the skills and the attitudes of resilience. by Ron Breazeale