As a resilience pie-baker, you’ve heightened your awareness of your body, feelings, and thoughts. Each moment you’ve noticed yourself is a piece of data. You now have a lot of data, so what do you do with it? How can you use your observations to actually become more resilient?
How can self-awareness help you build resilience? By giving you the data to notice, understand, and optimize your habits.
This month in our Easy-As-Pie Resilience Recipe blog series, we’ll help you learn how to develop habits that increase your resilience. Habits are the patterns of what you do, usually without thinking about it. In order to optimize your ways, you need to be aware of and make sense of what you’re doing now. You do that by filling your awareness with specific observations of yourself. When you reflect on self-observations, you’ll start to recognize your patterns. These patterns are your existing habits.
Resilience Pie Recipe, Step 2: Notice patterns from your observations (make filling).
Paying attention to what you’re currently doing is like taking baseline data before conducting an experiment. In order to assess the effects of the experiment, you first need to have a thorough grasp of your starting point. To improve your resilience, you first look at your moment-to-moment experiences to answer, “How do I currently experience resilience?”
Here’s how to notice your patterns/prepare your pie filling:
- Notice patterns of sensation. What recurring sensations do you observe within and on the outside of your body? Which are most and least common? The most common are your strongest habits. For example, “I grind my teeth when I do work, which means I’m grinding my teeth almost all day.”
- Notice patterns of emotion. What recurring emotions do you experience? For example, “I am anxious when I think about the future, which I do at least once an hour on average.”
- Notice patterns of cognition. What recurring thoughts go through your head? What specific words go with each thought? For example, “I’m not strong enough to do this is what I tell myself when I’m anxious about completing a task.”
- Look for connections. How might your patterns be related? How might they impact your ability to be resilient? For example, “When I say to myself, ‘I’m not strong enough to do this,’ I feel panicked, which I experience in my body as tightness in my throat and neck. It makes it much more difficult for me to accept new challenges, handle bad news gracefully, or notice good things.”
- Notice positive patterns, too! Resilience is first and foremost about building off of the things that are already working well. What patterns help you to be resilient? For example, “When I’m in the middle of something and someone comes up to talk to me, I always try to stop what I’m doing, look at that person, and give them my full, open attention. This helps me to learn from other people, which often leads to opportunities.”
By interpreting your self-observations, you perceive patterns – the pie filling – of how you currently experience resilience. Understanding your relationship with resilience now will help you to take it to the next level in the future steps of your resilience pie-baking!