Resilience Tips: A Life-Changing Little Experiment
By Sandy Davis, a.k.a. "The Resilience Guy"
Doing versus Being
Our lives tend to be focused on doing. Most of us are constantly on the move, tackling various challenges, accomplishing countless tasks, and working ceaselessly to keep up with the ever-increasing pace of life. In the process, we tend to forget that part of life is also taking time to just be. We are, after all, human beings, not human doings.
If you want to be healthy and resilient, you need to make sure you spend at least a small amount of time every day doing a few simple activities that promote your being fully alive, centered, energized, and creative. I consider this approach to taking good care of yourself a matter of “doing the right stuff.”
What's the Right Stuff?
The right stuff consists of a few simple activities that are tightly focused on enhancing and sustaining your own well-being. When you put aside a small amount of time to pursue one or more of these reinvigorating activities every single day, you can set yourself up to thrive, no matter what comes your way.
When you don’t invest every day in your own well-being, you can easily do too much (i.e., over-do) and end up feeling exhausted, depleted, and/or dispirited. Your resilience then plummets, at which point life has a way of sneaking up on you and knocking you down. Whoops...
When you make a wise choice to take on a new self-care activity and faithfully practice it every day, you can derive a wide variety of valuable benefits. Your vitality will increase, and so will your personal resilience. On the other hand, if you make a poor choice or none at all, you will gain little, if any, positive return.
Proven Self-Care Activities
By way of doing the right stuff, here are some time-tested activities (or self-care structures) that enhance your well-being and amplify your personal resilience. The first three are what I call foundational habits:
· Keep all of your agreements
· Eat well
· Sleep well
The second three are simple daily practices that you can pursue productively, each for as little as 15 minutes a day:
· Center yourself by coming to a place of outer and inner stillness
· Exercise aerobically (i.e., vigorously)
· Engage passionately in an enjoyable “extracurricular” creative pursuit
Note that every one of these simple activities can serve to reinvigorate you, both while you pursue them, and for some time afterwards, as well. In varying ways, each is a great tonic for your mind, your body, and/or your spirit.
A Life-Changing Little Experiment
I invite you to do a simple experiment that is most rewarding when you continue it for at least three months (i.e., 90 consecutive days). (If you run this experiment for less than 90 consecutive days, your results will most likely not have time to become sustainable and, therefore, life-changing.)
The experiment has two parts:
Part 1: Choose one simple self-care activity that’s comprised of an element of the right stuff, and then commit to deliberately practicing that particular activity for at least 15 minutes a day, and for at least 90 consecutive days without missing a single day. (Note that you can break up your 15 minutes of intentional practice into smaller chunks of time. Five minutes of highly-focused practice three times a day can work as well—or even better.)
Part 2: Agree to hold yourself fully responsible for tracking your commitment to this personal experiment for its entire duration. Discipline yourself to make short entries in a daily evidence log that you consistently keep up to date. (See below for a link to download just such a daily log.)
Call to Action
Take time right now to choose just one new daily self-care activity that strongly appeals to you. Then find at least 15 minutes to practice that activity before you end this day. Remember to take note of how long you actually practice, and to enter that piece of data into your daily evidence log.
Tomorrow, repeat this process. Practice the exact same activity again for at least 15 minutes, and log your actual practice time(s). Then keep on practicing and logging this same self-care activity every single day until you complete 90 consecutive days.
Staying on this self-disciplined path for 90 days will most likely challenge you more than you can imagine at the start. The trick is to just keep going, one day at a time. Practice as though your life depends on it, and log your results as though there is no tomorrow.
At the end of 90 consecutive days, your own compelling evidence that you have succeeded in making a desired personal change will likely astonish you. You will have discovered many new things about yourself, and you may also find yourself enjoying life more fully.
At that point, you can decide whether you want to continue your experiment. You might want to start some other life-changing little experiment, or you might want to keep the first one going and add a second one to your daily self-care activities.
All you have to do today is take action and just get started.
As you do so, remember that you are entering a NO EXCUSES! zone. The only way to make this little experiment a huge success is to forego any and all excuses that your creative mind is likely to concoct in order to justify skipping your daily practice, or stopping the experiment completely, or breaking your own agreements.
Just persist ferociously, and remember to have some fun along the way.
Specialized Daily Evidence Log
You can download a free one-page “New Beginnings Daily Evidence Log” from this page: http://www.resilienceworks.com/download.asp
This log is designed to track just the one self-care activity that you choose for your own life-changing little experiment. It’s a one-page Excel spreadsheet (1) into which you can enter and track your daily practice times, and (2) through which you can aggregate persuasive evidence of your own personal growth and development.
Relevant Quotations
“We must not, in trying to think about how we can make a big difference, ignore small daily differences we can make which, over time, add up to big differences we cannot foresee.” – Marion Wright Edelman
“The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one. – Mark Twain
“The smallest deed is better than the grandest intention.” – Unknown
For More Information
If you would like to know more about how you can profit further from this experiential approach to improving your self-care and increasing both your vitality and resilience, check out the instructional manuals available at: http://www.resilienceworks.com/instructional_manuals. They offer you additional concise information and precise instructions on how to methodically increase your own personal resilience.
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.”