“Of all the virtue’s we can learn, no trait is more useful, more essential for survival, and more likely to improve the quality of life than the ability to transform adversity into an enjoyable challenge.” Mihaly Csikszentmihaly [ Mee-High Check-Sent-Me-High ].

Introduction

We currently live in a world of exponential change. Major change is occurring in almost every part of our lives and as a result we now live in what the World Health Organization has called a “stress-epidemic”. Dealing with everyday things such as pandemics, disasters, economic volatility, conflict, office politics, demanding and even abusive customers, large volumes of work with competing short deadlines can wear us down and cause a lot of unnecessary stress. 

Not only are we having to deal with constant change in our lives but the world we live in is also becoming more volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. The acronym often used is, we live in a VUCA world.

Dealing with all of this can have significant long-term impact on our health and relationships. Then add on life’s unexpected events, such as illness, injury and global pandemics, the end result becomes chronic stress and a feeling of being completely overwhelmed. The reality is nobody is immune to stress and challenges in life. What we have control over, is how to respond to these situations and come back from them. 

• Resilience is the ‘rubber ball’ factor: the ability to bounce forward in the event of adversity. Put simply, resilience is the ability to cope with and rise to the inevitable challenges, problems, and setbacks you experience in the course of your life and come back stronger from them.
• Resilience relies on different skills and draws on various sources of help, including rational thinking skills, physical and mental health, and your relationships with those around you.
• Resilience is not necessarily about overcoming huge challenges; each of us faces plenty of challenges daily for which we must draw on our reserves of resilience.
• Resilience is the key to a well-lived life. If you want to be happy, you need resilience. If you want to be successful, you need resilience. You need resilience because it is hard to have happiness, success, or anything else worth having without meeting adversity along the way. 

To master a skill, to build an enterprise, to pursue any worthy endeavor requires that we confront discomfort, adversity, and fear. 

The Benefits of Struggling

The benefits of being challenged, afraid, uncomfortable, confused are so precious that if they could be bottled, people would pay dearly for them. But they can’t be bottled, and if you want the wisdom, the strength, the clarity, the courage that can come from struggle, the price is clear: you must face the struggle first!

The butterfly must struggle to leave its cocoon. It has to get its large body through a tiny hole in the cocoon. On first appearances is does not look possible.

In fact, it is critical that the butterfly goes through this process of struggle to free itself. This is nature's way of ensuring fluid is forced from the butterfly's body and into its wings so it can fly. Without this process the butterfly would never fly.

Learning Outcomes

This program is all about you. It is a program that will both educate and empower you to make the necessary changes in your life so that you can feel more resilient, happy, successful, and fulfilled. The course covers thirteen key areas of resiliency.

1. Identify the different types of resiliency. 
2. Understand the difference between good and bad stress.
3. Understand more about how the brain works and the concept of the “amygdala hijack” (fight-flight) and how to override this.
4. Identify your personal stressors, signs, and symptoms of stress.
5. Know the characteristics of highly resilient people.
6. Know how to re-frame negative and unpleasant experiences and thoughts into more neutral experiences. 
7. Be able to be more "at choice" to the events and situations in your life.
8. Know where to best focus your attention in relation to stressors in your life.
9. Learn how to set helpful boundaries in your life.
10. Know the importance of building positive emotional reference structures and ways you can do this.
11. Use simple and powerful breathing techniques to quickly bounce you back into more resourceful emotional states.
12. Identify your own protective factors and how you can apply these more regularly in your life.
13. Build a personal resilience plan specifically, for yourself.

“Experience is not defined by what happens to you – but rather by what you do about what happens to you" - Jim Rohn