Developing resilience intentionally

(The following is Copyright © 2009 Alexander M. (Sandy) Davis. To find out more about Sandy Davis and the resilience-related manuals, programs, services, and newsletter he offers, visit http://www.resilienceworks.com.)

Developing Resilience-Readiness via Ongoing “Micro-Preparation”
The process of continually meeting small daily challenges that you intentionally set for yourself [i.e., handling well-chosen micro-disruptions] amounts to “micro-preparation.” It is akin to lifting weights.

If you want to strengthen your muscles, all you need to do is to start working with weights in such a way as to stress your muscles repeatedly, in small daily ways. At first, you won’t see much change. But as you methodically develop an ability to lift heavier weights and increase your repetitions, you can both strengthen your muscles and increase your overall physical power. The results of stressing your muscles in this slow, steady, and deliberate manner are predictable, and, indeed, they are all but inexorable.

In a similar way, you can strengthen your figurative resilience-readiness “muscles.” Instead of lifting physical weights that stress your body’s actual muscles, you can use intentional micro-disruptions to gently stress your whole self in whatever worthy ways you choose.

Once you make the process of enhancing your resilience-readiness through micro-preparation a longstanding daily habit, when “the big one” (i.e., a full-scale catastrophe) finally comes along, you will find yourself to be well-practiced and fully prepared to handle just about any disruption with surprising ease. Your resilience-readiness “muscles” will be strong.

Why Choose Self-Care Challenges?

If you decide you would like to use this process of micro-preparation to strengthen your resilience-readiness, the most effective and rewarding small challenges to practice on are those that pertain directly to your own daily self-care.

When it comes to taking good care of ourselves, most of us tend to cut corners. Because we tend to assume that we are virtually invulnerable, we imagine we can afford to neglect the very things that are most central to leading a long, healthy, and fulfilling life. We are prone to overlook the importance of making ongoing investments in our health, our well-being, and our natural creativity. This oversight can land us in big trouble.

When you fail to take good care of your own “power plant,” you can expect to live a life in which you will likely face major setbacks such as significant health challenges, a chronic lack of energy and stamina, a discouraging lack of engagement with your work, debilitating boredom, depression, and/or a near-total lack of personal fulfillment. In other words, you will most likely be neither healthy nor happy.

The good news is that all of the above personal setbacks are largely avoidable. By making small daily investments in your own self-care, you can safeguard yourself from being set back by these and other personal misfortunes. Moreover, you can do so relatively quickly, painlessly, and in a manner that is easy to sustain. (If you are already experiencing any of the above misfortunes, sustained improvements in your self-care can greatly accelerate your recuperation.)

The bad news (or at least it may appear to you at first to be bad news) is that you first have to choose worthwhile self-care “practice” challenges, and then you have to actually do the work required to meet those micro-challenges successfully. When you do, how you experience your own life will start to shift in positive ways—more often than not both quickly and dramatically. And you will be pleased.

"Disruptions are inherently stressful. They seed change.
Intentional disruptions seed intentional change."

– Sandy Davis