Yay. It’s over. Let’s celebrate.

1st January 2009:  I woke up this morning feeling quite odd. It wasn’t that I was in a strange house, exceptionally dehydrated, and trying to remember just what had transpired the night before.

It was the queer feeling of optimism.

You may have noticed that every second thing I’ve been writing the last few months has had to do with coping with adversity and getting back on track (and these are just the few I’ve posted, there are another 12 article stubs that you’ve been spared from enduring).

But last night I reconnected with old friends, made a few new ones and, through the six hours of conversation, somehow found myself again. I realised that I’m not just the things that people know me for (coach, psych, business manager, general dogsbody, etc) but that I have a past, a present and a future that are far richer than I’ve been acknowledging.

And now, my view of ‘what is possible’ is panoramic.

So in honour of the whole ‘out with the old, in with the new’ thing that we do at this time of the year, I thought I’d revisit some of the lows and highs of 2008 in the hope that if I write it down then maybe, just maybe, I’ll get what works for me.

What didn’t work

All or nothing. 2008 was my year of “finish the goddamn thesis”. As such, I decided that I was going to knock it over in four months. And I did. I also:

• burnt out
• hated the thing 
• stopped exercising
• stopped socialising
• did as little work as possible 

so that every waking moment could be dedicated to the thesis.

Not only did I stuff up my physical and mental health, but I produced a really poor thesis that required a re-analysis and re-write. Four months became ten. Next time I’ll be more realistic with my time frames and I will not forgo the activities that make life grand.

Tap. Tap. Tap. No heart! The whole thesis thing has made me rethink my beliefs around keeping goals that just don’t matter. This year, I also continued to be involved in another project that turned out different to what I imagined, and stuck with it because I didn’t want to let the other person down. Again, half-hearted efforts give piss-poor results. In the future I will let go of goals that aren’t meaningful and not be so attached to proving that I can complete things. Complete the things that matter and be not like the tin man.

What would Yogi Bear do? Okay, a little hibernation can be nice but when Caro returned from overseas I just didn’t want to play with anyone else anymore. Because of where we live, it’s so easy not to talk to anyone for weeks at a time. When a good friend left a message on the answering machine saying she was worried because she hadn’t heard from either of us in ages and she was starting to worry… then I knew that perhaps it was overtime to reconnect. The moral of the story: Be not like the bear.

What did work

Let her go. In keeping with the ol cliché, “if you love someone set them free…” I fully supported Carolyn in moving to Sydney to take up a job opportunity. And while I missed her incredibly, her absence certainly made me rethink what I wanted from life and how a relationship can be. Admittedly, when the job didn’t work out and she returned after three months, I was a very happy camper. But, from the whole experience I learned that I can live more fully when I don’t use our relationship as a crutch.

The Do-It-Yourself Life. At the beginning of 2007, after a few years of having a coach, I decided to see if I’d actually learned anything and do 12 months without a coach. It was bumpy, but I did it. 2008 was also quite coach-free, except for a few months during my thesis ‘all or nothing’. And I think I’ve done okay. I’ve had to find my own resilience instead of reaching for my other crutch: coaching. Oh, I also threw my third crutch asunder when I cancelled my gym membership. While I don’t besmirch the results I got when I was being coached or trained, there’s something very satisfying about doing it on my own. This year, I learned that “I can” and that’s a very powerful thing.

Hi, I’m Trish. In Carolyn’s absence I had to socialise BY MYSELF [insert collective gasp]. And it was fine. I actually met new people. (Fancy that huh!) While I may have temporarily reverted back to wanting to share every moment with Caro, I now know I can do things by myself, and I don’t have to live in her shadow socially. This was a huge insight.

There are probably dozens of other little things that spoke big to me during the year but this is enough to show that it wasn’t so much what happened but what meaning I took from it, that made a difference to my quality of life.

Knowing that there really isn’t any ‘bad’ in the ‘bad things’ is probably my biggest learning from the year. It gives me faith that no matter what 2009 brings, life will be good.

Related posts:

1. Twenty Top Tunes 2008

Getting a little bit of perspective on your situation is one of the best ways to help you bounce back in hard times. But what else can help you become more resilient?

I was speaking with a friend yesterday who was telling me how she’d recently started having mild panic attacks over really small things. She thought she was starting to lose her mind and was ready to seek out medication from her GP, but first she decided to sit down and write what might be causing the attacks.

While we were speaking, she pulled out the piece of paper that she’d written her ‘precipitating events’ on. I gasped. It was an A4 sheet of paper with about 50 items on it. When I looked closer, these weren’t the little dilemmas I have (insert whiny voice, “I can’t get a cat sitter”, “My thesis is SO hard”, “I miss my girlfriend”). No, these were the kinds of things that go at the top of those lists of Stressful Life Events. You know, death, moving house, divorce. Her list included three deaths of loved ones, a long-term relationship breakup, moving house, major surgery, and another 43 similar events in three years.

“Holy shit!” I said, “Is it any wonder you’re having panic attacks? Your body has been on high alert for the last three years, responding to crisis after crisis.” And now, with no crises, her body is seeking out any little thing to get its adrenalin fix.

Anyway, she tells me that since writing the list she’s been doing okay – finding that meditation and supportive friends are moving her through without the need for medication.

But, geez, it made me stop and think. I really don’t have much to gripe about. I am healthy, in a wonderful relationship, live in a beautiful place, and mostly, get to do what I want. Sure, I make the occasional crappy decision that makes life difficult (sorry: a challenge!) for a while, but it always passes.

I had an article published at Flying Solo yesterday about bouncing back in business, and so resilience has been on my mind a lot lately. And if there’s one thing I learned from my friend’s story, it’s that we don’t need to let external events determine our future. We have agency. We can choose how to respond.

And the research into resilience suggests the same.

Karen Reivich, author of The Resilience Factor and a psychology researcher who has studied and written widely on the topic of resilience, reckons that there are learnable skills that help us bounce back.

1.     Emotional awareness or regulation: How do you feel?

I know it’s the clichéd counsellor question but only because our feelings are our physical and mental indicators. And they change. You are not your emotions. You can choose how you respond and how you interpret an event, and the meaning you derive from a situation.  Sometimes simply being aware that you’re angry or sad or fearful can nip those exacerbating automatic responses such as catastrophising in the bud. And while I prefer to sit with the emotion and let it pass, there are times when it’s more appropriate to move it on quickly.

2.     Impulse control: Hit the pause button

Rather than react blindly, stop and collect all the information you can about the situation before making a decision. Sit with the uncertainty for a little while. My big impulse in hard times is avoidance. I love to run away and deny that anything is wrong.

3.     Optimism: It’s going to be okay.

The ability to keep a positive outlook while grounded in reality is the most important skill in staying resilient. And this makes sense, as to get anything done then you need to believe that the desired outcome is possible. I used to revel in my pessimism (you know, I’d rattle out the research that pessimists are less disappointed than optimists) but it never brought me happiness or peace.

4.     Flexible thinking: What’s really going on?

Look at the situation carefully and from different perspectives. Ask yourself what’s so important about the situation, how you got there and check in with what you were originally attempting to do before the wheels fell off.  Often we look for patterns of behaviour that aren’t working and try to “fix them” but another approach is to find the patterns that are working, and do more of them.

5.     Empathy: Who can you talk to?

This is really about having the emotional connectedness to build the relationships that will support you through hard times. If you have empathy for others then you have probably been there for a friend or colleague when they’ve been going through a rough patch. And they’ll be there for you when you need someone to listen.

6.     Self-efficacy: Belief in your ability

What are you good at? These are your strengths and these are the things that you will use to move through adversity. It’s not a time to be developing weaknesses and navigating the tricky learning cycle that includes repeated failure. Save that for when things are a bit calmer and stick with what will make you get the results you need to see yourself moving through this period.

7.     Reaching out: What’s one thing you can do?

It’s time to take action, maybe feel a little uncomfortable (but, hey, you’re feeling uncomfortable already so you’ve got nothing to lose!) in order to move through the situation. It’s about extending yourself with little steps so that you can edge closer to your desired outcome.

Also, although it is not listed as one of the skills, apparently a sense of humour factors highly in the characteristics of a resilient person. I think this is interesting because laughter and seeing the lighter side of things is often the furthest thing from what you’re experiencing.

Interestingly Reivich began researching in the area with the belief that we are born with resilience but has since found it’s not straightforward. What do they know? Only that “resilient people have the ability to stay resilient”. Ya gotta love research.

Anyway, I continue to work on my own ability to bounce back, in the hope that resilience will beget resilience in this time of uncertainty. And as I take a deep breath, Victor Frankl’s words echo in my head:

Between stimulus and response there is a space.

In that space lies your power to choose.

Related posts:

1. Beyond Chicken Little: Carrots, positive people and a flourishing future