Three Tools for Resilience: Slow Down, Take Stock, & Connect
How to find resilience during challenging times.
“Stressed people are creatures of habit who lack the capacity to choose a different response. They keep doing what they’ve always done, moving deeper into lostness without any means to recognize where they are. If we are to reawaken our brains and our precious human capacities, we have to create the conditions that support thinking and reflection. We have to actively cultivate insight through practice.”
— Margaret J. Wheatley, So Far From Home
If anything, 2020 has taught us much about stress and how we handle it. There are only so many feelings pints of ice cream can numb when we’re worried about our family, our business, our health, our communities. How can we find resilience amidst a year of much unrest? How can we slow down, take stock, and connect to ourselves so that we can make it through (perhaps with a bit of grace)?
We offer three deceptively simple tools to help you find your ground and stay with yourself and your own experience when stress starts to ramp up from a turbulent world:
- Notice & Name (How are you?)
- Decide (What would you like?)
- Reflect (What are you grateful for?)
Notice and Name: How are you?
Noticing and naming is just that: noticing how you are and articulating what’s happening for you right now. To begin, start by taking a few slow, settling breaths. Now ask yourself the following questions. Feel free to journal your responses.
- How am I doing?
- How’s my body feeling?
- Where is my mind?
- What has my attention?
- On a scale of 1 to 10, where is my current stress level? How does my body let me know?
Red-Yellow-Green Check-Ins
A tool to support you in noticing and naming, with yourself or with others, is the Red-Yellow-Green check-in. Based on Steven Porges’ Polyvagal Theory, the Red-Yellow-Green tool provides a simple framework and common language for identifying our current emotional state.
In groups, it works like this:
Each person has about two minutes to do a quick check-in on how they are doing–Red, Yellow, or Green — and how they’re entering the meeting. People may choose to share a bit more about what’s behind their color choice, or perhaps a brief update about their life, work, or their learning goal for the session. But long processing of these responses is not necessary and by all means not required.
The basic rubric for these inner-state color markers is as follows:
Green means you feel safe, copasetic, or perhaps are in flow. You’re able to have eye-contact, creativity, play, humor. In a sense, all systems are “go.”
Yellow is reactionary, meaning that the fight or flight impulse is present, as is perhaps some defensiveness.
Red means your rational brain is offline, the nervous system is shutting down such that you may or may not be present at all, or there may be a loss of trust.
Being able to name your own inner state, or hear yourself say aloud where you are, in a group or individually, can have remarkable effects on how present you can be for yourself and others. Listening to where others are in their inner states not only helps our nervous systems relax, it fosters a much greater sense of connection among the humans in the room (or virtual room).
Decide: What would you like?
Making decisions (even small ones) and taking action to move toward more of what we’d like increases our enjoyment and sense of agency. The key is to focus on moving toward what you want, rather than away from what you don’t want. In other words, if you asked yourself “What would I like?” you might say, “I’d like an ice cream cone,” versus, “I don’t want a burger.”
Take a few minutes to reflect on the following prompts and jot down what comes up for you.
- What’s something specific you’d like more of in your life/work? Try to focus positively on what you would like as opposed to negatively on what you would like to avoid.
- What is one small step within your power/agency you could take within the next week to get more of what you would like?
Gratitude: What can you be grateful for?
Take the next 60 seconds to flood your mind or a piece of paper with your answers to the following question: What do you love?
Practicing gratitude increases dopamine and serotonin, reduces anxiety, improves our sleep and our physical health, and connects us with others. True gratitude, in which we feel actual appreciation for what we have (versus comparing ourselves to others), decreases envy. Here’s an exercise to boost your gratitude quotient.
Write a thank you letter. Think of someone on the team or in your life who has been especially kind or helpful to you or others. Write a letter or note to them, being specific about what they did that impacted you or others. Then, share that letter/note/email with the person.
Resilience is rooted in practices like these and a deep sense of self-care. Such practices allow us to manage our response to stress in our lives.
“Self-care is never a selfish act — it is simply good stewardship of the only gift I have, the gift I was put on earth to offer others,” writes our friend Parker Palmer in his book, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation. “Anytime we can listen to true self and give the care it requires, we do it not only for ourselves but for the many others whose lives we touch.” Self-care is not only what we need, but also what the world needs from us in challenging times.
