Through the last few weeks I have blogged about happiness, age, being injured, perspective, NLP communications techniques, goals, feelings and many other direct and indirect subjects, applying NLP to everyday life. NLP is a model of human behaviour and communication so it is everywhere, all the time, and as such it is not difficult to find examples to make into live metaphors and stories. Hopefully you will find some that are relevant and useful to you.
For a couple of weeks the word resilience has been jumping out at me. More specifically, the importance of resilience and how we can enhance it, not only as a Coach but also as partners, parents, family, friends, managers or executives. If we look at resilience in the Oxford English dictionary it is defined as the ability for people to feel better quickly after something unpleasant, such as shock and injury, almost as if it was life’s immune system. So how do we learn that? How is it that some people seem to bounce back quicker than others?
As NLP is also a modelling technology finding someone that we can model can be an answer, whether you are a company, a sportsperson or you are bouncing back from something in your personal life. By looking at how this someone reacts, ask yourself, how do I avoid staying in a place that is destructive for me? What can I do instead?
Modelling means understanding the successful behaviours the modelled person has, and how we can use them as example of our own behaviour. A Coach is also an option when you want to learn new ways of doing things, but not the only one, maybe you have a model available to you that you can ask and model.
Also I have been thinking about how can we teach resilience to our children? Can it be taught at school? Is there a way we as parents or guardians can be models for our children in resilience. Life has all sorts of things and experiences in store for us and no matter how hard we try to protect our children they have experiences where resilience can be useful. How do we actively let them know that it is not what happens to us that defines us, it is how we choose to react. This is related to my blogs “it is okay not to be okay all the time and “happiness as a way of life and not a destination” and maybe the answer lies within these three and other perspectives on life.
Some time ago I read that students that knew more about scientists’ lives and not just their successful results were more successful in science subjects at school. It seems to be important not only to study the success but also how they got there. It is important to learn about the failed experiments, theories that were not proven and the fact that they kept finding new ways to examine something, the drive not to give in. If we only teach the successful part of the stories how are the students supposed to learn not to give up if they are not successful the first time around?
This is not about not showing your weaknesses, quite the contrary, it is about showing and sharing them, and then show and share that you can bounce back from that. Making that conscious choice of looking for and go towards what makes you happy and what drives you and inspires you. Just as Henry David Thoreau said “go confidently in the direction of your dream! Live the life you have imagined. And if the choices you made or your environment is not getting you there, find a different way and a different environment and dream new dreams. After all only your own creativity can decided which dreams to dream”.
I hope you have as fantastic a week as you dream of and remember be nice, it doesn’t cost anything.
Best wishes
Ivalo