BOUNCING BACK BETTER

THE POWER OF BOUNCING BACK BETTER

This is a life learning script from the Life Tutelage series. Today we are not talking about Spiritual Awakening but will talk about another important Smart Life Learning process called Resilience Building. This is the power of bouncing back better. 

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The Power of Bouncing Back Better.

Every one of us has had a time when we felt exceedingly bad, and worse still the overwhelming whispering voices telling us that life has no value might have started making noise in us. Sometimes we were only able to get back to the normal self because a friend or some other caring individual came our way and sobered us by giving some wise counsel to help us come out of the emotional debacle. On the other hand, we might have stayed in the negative spiritual world for long and became stressfully unhealthy because no one came to our rescue on time and we could have even failed to recover fully.

A rare personal attribute that most people do not possess at optimum levels is RESILIENCE. This is the power or ability to bounce back. Those people we see or hear about committing suicide, failing to eat well, engaging in negative self-talk or suffering from emotional stress, seriously lack a good level of emotional resilience.

The common cause of many marriage breaks and failures in life is simply lack of resilience. Some of such resilience factors may include the effective marriage awareness where there is realization of the good of maintaining the marriage in good shape. Ability to remember the good about your partner and the marriage and not concentrate on the negative picture.

We are all subject to various emotional and non-emotional behaviors at varying moments in our lives. An emotional behavior is an act that is influenced by a strong feeling such as crying, speaking angrily, negative self-talk, fighting and many other actions done because of forceful feelings or thoughts. There are also behaviors or characters that are positive in nature but are not life supporting, eg laziness and lack of self-esteem. Laziness can lead to procrastination or no action at all. A super star of resilience has a high level of self-awareness which allows adjusting on bad areas such as laziness whenever it starts popping in. Resilience is about self-assertiveness and self-efficacy. It is not to look at yourself down as one in misery or a defeated lot. The power of bouncing back voices in you that you are not a failure and you will never be miserable but can rise to greater heights.

 So, everything starts here in the self. What thoughts do you entertain in your mind most often? Here is wisdom and take note of this. What you think in yourself and allow to dwell in your mind becomes real food for your spiritual stamina. We will talk more about this later.

In poorly managed organizations or families, failures occur to a greater extend because people tend to be rigid and stiff in their old beliefs and systems. They are not easily adaptable to change whether within the self or to the environment so they break or fail easily. Friction and collapsing of relationships are usually caused by lack of tolerance especially on both, one or all parties involved. Tolerance is a big factor of resilience.

Do you know a “why me” mentality? It is a negative state of mind in self-talk. It is a self-talk questioning vanity and enjoying the buildup of vile emotions, but guess what, this state of being is too dangerous and self-destructive.

Resilience allows a person to go through tough times; being swept back and forth, folding like a reed in a flooded river but not breaking. Instead at first you see the reed sometimes partly over-flown by the flood water but you will never see it rooted up and taken away by the ravening floods. Infect if you come the next season to check on that place you will be surprised to see that it is no longer only one. Instead they may be several and each one of them budding to produce shrubs. That’s what resilience points to. There is some power of bouncing back better in effective resilience. It is all about winning your objective, and believe me if you check the following season again on the reeds you might see they have formed a small bush. Infect it looks as if the aim is to increase the area of influence and become a larger territory, a developing island.

That is a broader meaning of resilience and how it turns negative situations into usefulness. That is bouncing back with a purpose and growing bigger. Do not allow yourself to be extinguished by the odds of the environment. YOUR TAKE HOME!

More importantly we must be aware of our emotional resilience, which is the ability to be aware of own emotions and the ability to tap them down before they affect us or the other person.

This skill should be a major to us all as without it many of us are easily carried away by emotions only to regret later when we find ourselves in sorry situations causing us to hate life. It is important to note that emotional resilience does not mean that people don’t disagree or even point fingers at each other. Disagreeing and pointing fingers at each other should always be taken as ways of expressions of differing opinions. And that should be where learning and growth for better decision making begins instead of taking that as sources of grudge.

What resilience means is that of course having been taken that far and that long by your emotions because of a particular terrible life event, your wits should be quick to remind you that you are staying in a bad state and need to bounce back to your normal state. This is what I was referring to as the effective power of bouncing back better.

Actually, having experienced a terrible life challenge that extremely draws most energy, resilience fanatics are quick to bounce back in new style and more highly spirited and motivated to explore new life avenues.

You do not need to allow your mind to take you to a state where you feel defeated. Being in a continuous state of misery and hopelessness is a major sign of emotional defeat and the end of such a state may be miserable.

By the way it is the nature of life to toss people back and forth at varying life times. But it is the duty of the individual to be appropriately resilient enough when she or he faces challenges.

Bouncing back is not easy if one does not have the stamina to do that. There should be some motivational energy to put you back to the former state or else one will remain demonized in the negative state of the situation and suffer from depression, stress or die.

We will talk about the motivational energies of building resilience in another module that we will publish in some series to come.

Meanwhile you must know that you always need to shake up and bounce back when you are sinking into the perils of negativity and depression. People need to have some kind of projects that you are doing for life. This helps to employ their minds to work on something productive. It’s not advisable to have an idol mind that does not have any plan of action for the day. Your life goals and plans are sources of energy for resilience building.

Usually people are taken and led into negativity unaware and sometimes they actually feel as if it is their right to be in a state of self-pity. These people need to be reminded, and I am reminding them that they will be terribly toasted by emotions forever if they do not realize that negativity is not a good state to keep the mind.

No one normal person can live in isolation for long. For that reason, we are usually found to be at our homes with families or at various organizations including at work or social groups like churches among others. Of importance is to note that every single person bears own personalities and as such we display different interactive behaviors and emotions. For example, some people are by nature bullish while others are decent and quiet, others are talkative and yet others are emotionally aggressive. All this builds a society in which we live and we form part of that society.

However, because of these differences in personalities or knowledge and understanding, often times you walk around only to find people fighting, shouting at each other, or a family breaking relationship, or worse still wife and husband divorcing.

Speaking about divorce, I remember seeing this young woman one day in a small bush a few meters away from her home sitting on a rock and her face looking into the distance as if she was looking at something nasty taking place. I did not talk to her because I did not worry about her since I did not know her and proceeded with my journey to a relative’s home in Marimba Park where I slept that night.

In the following morning on my return I used the same way and to my surprise the same young woman I saw the previous day gazing into the distance was there again this time holding her face and looking down and it was around 1000hrs. I changed my way and walked towards her. I developed feelings in myself that something might be wrong with her. When I was closer I saw that there was a 2-quire counter book and a blue ball point pen on her left side. I sought a wise and professional way to talk to her so I greeted her first and then asked her if everything was fine with her.

Without showing surprise she slowly lifted up her face that was washed in tears and looked at me and without answering she got back into her usual position; face down and a small towel on her mouth and nose. Then I realized that in order to help her I was really supposed to search deep into my coaching bag of skills and find something suitable for her. The woman had a really big life problem.

I sat down quietly and looked at her directly with a long-worried look. For about two minutes I sat quietly purposefully looking disturbed and concern. When the woman rose her face, she saw me seated somewhere on a rock about five meters away and my left hand on my cheek as if I had fallen in the same problem like hers. She straightened her head up as she looked at me and said softly “Who are you sir and why do you look so concerned about me yet you do not know me?” “No madam I saw that something was not right here when I was passing and decided to come close to find out if I could be of help. I know that there are a lot of things that affect people in life which may endanger their lives if they are not handled correctly”. I said as I appeared to be looking more concerned. She then opened up and started sharing her problem.

For the sack of interest, the discussion I held with the woman revealed something shocking. It come out that her husband had planned with his relatives and to divorce her because she had no children for the five years that she had been in marriage. Her husband had taken some of the property from the house the previous day and went to stay with another wife. Now this woman here felt pained and ragged emotionally. She said that she felt there was no need to live because she felt miserably useless and unworthy.

After about two hours of skillful life care and awareness talk she opened up and said she had decided to take her life away and the 2quire counter book she was having was used to deceive people who would see her getting into the bush to suspect that she was going for studying especially those who stayed near her home.

I managed to restore hope and new life with a purpose in her through proper life coaching and counseling and today three years later that woman is well alive and got married to another man and they have a daughter. Thanks to the working spirit of resilience in her that led to a quick bounce back to normal life.

Here is a list of resilience building traits that I used to help her during my coaching sessions.

Vision- There is good life ahead that is made out of your plans today

Determination- In order to pull out to that vision there must be motivation.

Clear goal- Setting clear simple and friendly goals help to create motivation

Mission-This is the practical process of purpose to achieve the goals.

Strategic objectives- These are simple answers to the how, when, and what of the process. They are methods in the process that will be used to achieve the goals for example one strategy may answer how to do it. The other strategy may answer when to do it and the other strategy may answer the what actually will be done.

Positive mindset. Getting the mind away from captivity -a captured mindset is self-destructive. Make your mind free form any form of accusations, self-condemnation or any pop-up thought of failure.

High spirit level-A positive mindset is easy to bounce back into high spirit level even after recent life and spiritual challenges.

Let go- A mindset that can not let go easily is in danger of falling into a captured mindset zone and staying in negativity and the end is a dying self and spirit.

Motivation-Assertiveness is a good source of motivation. If someone is sure of oneself and fully satisfied by who you are you will love yourself and act with prudence because you do not want to robe yourself of your dignity and value.

Of course, this would need a whole teaching session for more detailed coverage. So if you have a comment or need something get in touch.

Question

Do you have a case of your own in which you remember your life was affected negatively because you did not exercise resilience? It could be breaking of relationship through divorce or even failing to complete school. What do you think was the cause of failing to bounce back? Please share with us