Resilience Tips: Are You a Member of the "Silent Dispirited"?
By Sandy Davis, a.k.a. "The Resilience Guy"
Life Is an “Inside Job”
All of us have within ourselves a deeply programmed instinct to do whatever we have to do to survive. Thousands of years ago, this meant that we had to know how to hunt, gather, make shelters, change our circumstances seasonally, avoid known and present dangers, and adjust constantly to ever-changing challenges. Our lives depended on these basic life skills.
Nowadays, our circumstances are much more assured, comfortable, and stationary than those of our distant ancestors. Most of us are now blessed with relatively permanent shelter, enough food, steady work, and good health. Our overall standard of living has reached a very high mark. Along the way, our life expectancy is now more than double what it was thousands of years ago.
Within our never-ending quest for higher standards of living, however, lurks a monkey wrench. In the process of maximizing our own creature comforts, we have become addicted to them. We have succumbed to the temptation of paying more attention to things outside of ourselves than to what’s going on inside.
At its core, however, life is an “inside job.”
If you don’t continually pay attention to the wellness of your mind, your body, and your spirit, all the external comforts in the whole world won’t bring you meaningfulness, happiness, and joy.
Our Adversity to Personal Change
Once we establish simple daily habits that successfully support our desires for creature comforts and our needs for security, we rarely change those habits. Instead, we become invested in maintaining whatever comfortable “status quo” we managed to create for ourselves at some point in time, usually in the distant past.
For many of us, this means that we remain unconsciously committed to daily habits that we established for ourselves as far back as our childhood, or perhaps in our teens, our twenties, or our thirties.
Old habits die hard.
We don’t seem to become aware of the creeping stultification of our daily habits until we are at least in our late forties or early fifties. Until then, we rarely reach a point of feeling compelled to adjust or improve our long-established daily routines.
In particular, we don’t pay much attention to our daily self-care habits and practices—or our lack of them.
Only when disruptions compel us to change, do we move outside of our comfort zone and experiment with new behaviors. More often than not, we do this reluctantly. We do it because our experience tells us we have to. When we finally start to recognize that our old habits are actually creating discomforts, we begin to understand that unless we change our course, we will most likely end up precisely where we are headed.
Only when the wisdom we derive from our own experience starts to kick in, do we begin to give ourselves permission to change our ways. Only then do we intentionally start to explore new ways of taking care of ourselves, new ways to revitalize ourselves, and new ways to rekindle an abiding joy in being alive.
Our Deep Fear of Change
Our various addictions to creature comforts have engendered within us a deep fear of change. We fear that if we take action to change our present circumstances, we could lose everything, including whatever comforts we are presently enjoying. As irrational as this fear is, it tends to hold many of us in its grips. It immobilizes us and makes us resist taking risks.
Most of us have become so completely caught up with what is going on around us that we have slowly lost touch with what is going on inside of ourselves. It’s as though we have let our imaginations become so dulled by all of the instant information bombarding us from the outside that we have forgotten how to attend to the wisdom that resides within ourselves. We slowly forget how to imagine the entrancing power of positive change.
When we frame up our circumstances in this fearful way, we corner ourselves. We end up feeling trapped. Only then, do we start to wonder how and why we became uncomfortable, unhappy, unfulfilled, and/or dispirited.
The “Silent Dispirited”
When you go long distances without taking good care of yourself, you may appear on the surface of things to be well adjusted, productive, wealthy, in control of your fate, and even happy. In fact, our social system actually encourages you to believe this is so—even as it discourages us from questioning the superficiality of our lives.
Questioning this superficiality is generally deemed to be counter-cultural. In fact, some folks deem such questioning to be an outright subversive act.
When you never stop to question how things are actually going, however, you pay a price. You slowly lose touch with your own essence and your highest purpose.
The more you refrain from taking stock of your current situation, the more difficult it becomes to frame up more desirable alternatives. And the more you fail to take persistent action to create whatever new results you want, the more you will gradually become dispirited.
So many of us have lost touch with our own vitality, our own creativity, and our own inner passions that a majority of us now belong to what I am going to call the “Silent Dispirited.” (Yes, that’s an intentional play on the “Silent Majority.”)
Call to Action
If you recognize that you are (or are becoming) a card-carrying member of the “Silent Dispirited,” all you have to do to terminate your membership is to start shifting your outward focus inward.
Start paying attention to your internal reality. Start taking great care of your own body, your own mind, and your own spirit. Start to listen to what they are telling you. Start to trust your own inner wisdom.
As you do so, you will start to make wise daily investments in your own vitality, and you will gradually become more resilient. At the same time, everything around you will become more colorful, more meaningful, and more enticing.
The easiest and most simple way to make this positive shift is to take on a few new daily self-care habits or practices. One small but persistent change in your self-care behaviors can be the tiny first step in what may well prove to be a long, enjoyable, and sustainable new journey.
All you have to do is take on one small new revitalizing behavior. Choose one that nourishes your spirit. Then do it repeatedly, consistently, and for long enough to establish a rewarding new personal habit.
Do you dare?
Relevant Quotations:
“You’ll never plow a field by turning it over in your mind.” – Chinese Proverb
“One simple change in your daily practices has the power to change everything—even your destiny. Without deliberate ongoing practice, however, nothing changes.” – Sandy Davis
“Imperfect action beats perfect inaction every time.” – Jeffrey Gitomer
For More Information:
If you would like more information on how to take on and sustain a proven combination of self-care habits and simple daily practices that can keep you young, vital, and resilient, check out http://www.resiliencemanual.com.
You are welcome to re-publish the above article in its entirety either on a web site or in a blog, providing you do not change the article and you include the following attribution in its entirety:
Copyright © 2010 Alexander M. (Sandy) Davis. To find out more about Sandy Davis and the resilience-related guides and services he offers, visit www.ResilienceWorks.com. To subscribe to his free monthly e-newsletter, send an e-mail to Subscribe@ResilienceWorks.com. FYI, he’s “The Resilience Guy.”
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