A while back I was feeling ill and exhausted and I did a Facebook live from my kitchen to share my thoughts on resilience at a time when I needed to remind myself what it was!

A lot of people told me that they would love to read a transcript of the video, and who am I to say no?! So here’s what I said, and you can see the video at the bottom of this post.

I’ve been thinking of the need for softness in recovery and the word resilience.

I initially called my company “Rook Resilience”, and I still stand by that as I am a resilience coach, but people can get quite triggered by the word “resilience”, so that’s one of the reasons I stopped calling myself that. Also, because I guess I want to describe what it was that I actually did! But I still have people who come to me because they they see me as the person to support them in being more resilient. But I want to talk about what resilience means to me:

Resilience to me is not stiff upper lip, keep going, armour up, push through. That’s the opposite of resilience, actually, it’s just pushing the crash down the road.

Resilience is the ability to bounce back, but it’s the ability to bounce back healthily. It’s making rock bottom that firm foundation from which to rebuild yourself, not to just carry on in your old ways. Resilience is seeing the patterns that got you to breaking point, learning what they are, realising that they’re there to keep you safe, but that they are not serving you and more, and rewiring yourself to a self-love place. To a place where you say yes to yourself by saying no to others, to a place where you let others down so that you don’t let yourself down, not a place where you show your resilience by taking stuff on, by taking what people throw at you, by sucking it up. It’s actually resilience which says “No more, I’m not sucking that up. No. And for all the words you give me, if your actions don’t speak the truth, then then I won’t accept your words. I’m looking for actions now.”

It’s a place where you see red flags in people and and you take note of them.

It’s a place where your boundaries are stronger than your empathy. Because the thing is, a lot of us who are healing from trauma, because we know we did things that we’re not proud of, because we know we were acting out of a place of fear and shame and living in a stress response, we can be very empathetic as to why other people are acting out in ways that are not kind. And we let it go maybe too quickly because we can see where it’s coming from. But we can see where it’s coming from, we can be very empathetic and loving and kind to people while still saying “I will not accept that behaviour in my life.”

Because if we’re healing, especially from trauma, especially from childhood trauma, we have to have a safe place to land. We can’t just keep abusing ourselves. How do we heal if we do not allow ourselves to be in a healing environment? So if people’s actions are not safe to us and we want to heal, we have to remove ourselves from them. And that to me is resilience.

Building back stronger. Sorry to use that phrase for the political ones, but it is. It’s building yourself back stronger. But strength that comes from love, not fear and hatred.

And for everyone who says, “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger…” No. What doesn’t kill you really, really hurts you.

What builds you back stronger, what makes you more resilient, is healing well. Healing with love. Healing with support.

If I break a bookshelf, it’s just broken unless we fix it with glue. Now if it’s really good quality glue, that bookshelf could actually be stronger because the glue is so freaking solid. But it wasn’t the breaking of the bookshelf that made it stronger, it was the repairing with really good quality glue. So if you want to become more resilient, heal yourself with good quality people. Be really strict with the people you allowed into your energy field because, honestly, it is the the biggest form of healing.

Community and people are really important, we are social beings. But I think for me, especially for me personally, and I think for a lot of people, there is a period in healing where you will feel really alone and isolated because you have to let go of so many people who you realise were not there for your higher good. They were not there to support you. They were not there to create a safe, loving space for you. They did not have your back.

You realise there are people who are friends with you because you were a giver and a giver and a giver, and they were drains, and they would take and take and take. And the minute you set boundaries in your healing, they start to say you’re difficult or you’ve changed. As you let them go, you’re going to feel lonely. But you are making space for the right people.

So rather than trying to hold on to the wrong people, start to really think what are the right people? What are the people I need to help me heal? And make space for them. And, yes, it might feel lonely in that interim, but you have to make space for them. And in that space where you feel lonely, that’s where you find you.

Eyes in. Focus on you. What do you want? What are you focusing on? What do you want in your life?

It’s not about whether they like you. It’s whether you like them. You do you, and the right people will fall into place. And that’s where you find resilience.

You may also like…