Resilience Tips: Why Your Vitality is Critical
By Sandy Davis, a.k.a. "The Resilience Guy"
From Self-Care to Bountiful Vitality to Resilience
Great self-care is the source of bountiful vitality. And vitality is the wellspring of personal resilience.
The sequence goes like this: Great self-care generates vitality, and vitality generates greater resilience. Vitality, therefore, is the causal link between self-care and increased resilience. You can’t get from the first to the last without going through the middle.
What this implies is that exceptional resilience is a by-product of having an abundance of vitality. If you want to increase your resilience, what you need to focus on is finding daily ways to increase and sustain your own vitality.
If you want to increase your vitality, you cannot sit still and simply think your way to having more energy and stamina. You have to take action. You have to start to actually take great care of yourself in a committed and ongoing manner.
When you intentionally start to take great care of your body, your mind, and your spirit, you will start to increase your vitality in delightful and rewarding ways. The predictable by-product of this positive shift is that you will also become more resilient. You will become more adept at meeting challenges, handling disruptions, and minimizing stress. And you will learn to handle whatever comes your way with more power, creativity, and grace.
The Secret Ingredient of Great Self-Care
Great self-care doesn’t mean taking good care of yourself occasionally, or just when it’s convenient, or only when you’re about to break down for lack of self-care. Nor does it mean making a New Year resolution to take better care of yourself, only to abandon that resolution before the end of January.
Great self-care requires that you make a commitment to take on a few specific daily self-care habits and practices and then pursue them deliberately, faithfully, enthusiastically, and continuously. Thus, the secret ingredient of great self-care is ongoing daily practice.
What Do You Need to Practice?
In order to optimize your self-care, you need to stay focused on a few foundational habits and a few simple daily practices.
Self-Care Foundational Habits
Simple foundational habits include basic behaviors such keeping all your agreements, eating well, and sleeping well. You need to develop ongoing mindfulness about each of these core self-care activities. You also need to comport yourself in accordance with the commitments you make to yourself to sustain these critical foundational habits.
For example, if you make a commitment to sustain a particular self-care habit every day, then you want to hold yourself accountable for executing that habit 365 days a year. Even if you succeed on only 360 days in a year, you want to establish for yourself the highest high standard of follow-through that you can imagine, and then you want to repeatedly meet or exceed that standard.
When it comes to your own self-care, that’s the depth of commitment you want to develop for yourself. You are fully worthy of this investment in your own well-being. And when you follow through successfully on your daily foundational habits, amazing results start to unfold.
Self-Care Daily Practices
Simple self-care practices include activities such as a daily centering practice, a daily (or every other day) practice of exercising vigorously, and a daily creative practice. Each of these daily practices can be done effectively in as little as 15 minutes each day. Thus, doing all three of the above daily self-care practices can consume as little as a total of 45 minutes a day. (At that level of engagement, your daily time commitment would amount to a total of less than five percent of your hours awake.)
As with your self-care habits, doing your daily self-care practices only occasionally will not produce sustainable personal change. It takes at least 90 consecutive days of continuous daily practice to lay the foundation for such change. More often than not, 365 consecutive days is a more realistic target.
When you first take on a combination of self-care daily habits and daily practices, and when you then make it a top priority to sustain those nourishing activities continuously, you will discover that your vitality will soar. Everything about life can become more engaging, more exciting, and more fulfilling.
From Vitality to Resilience
As you attain a bountiful measure of personal vitality, you will discover that, simultaneously, you will become more resilient. This valuable by-product is a predictable, albeit secondary, positive result. You can count on it.
You will start to have what it takes to maintain your balance through thick and thin, to hold your ground when you need to do so, and to bounce back quickly and cheerfully whenever challenges knock you off balance.
You don’t need to think consciously about this secondary result, nor do you need to practice being more resilient. As your vitality increases, so, too, will your personal resilience increase. On your part, no additional deliberations are required, nor are any positive affirmations, nor any additional effort.
You will simply be the beneficiary of this irrepressible dividend that always accompanies bountiful personal vitality.
Call to Action
If you would like to become more resilient and more able to thrive no matter what your circumstances are, what you need to do is to start making small, proven daily investments in your own self-care. As you take action both continuously and persistently, you will start to acquire the experiential wisdom required to enhance your natural resilience.
For starters, all you have to do is make some small commitments to your own self-care, and then follow through each day as though your life depends on keeping those commitments. From this place of successfully “walking your talk,” sustainable positive changes will flow, and they will have the power to delight and inspire you.
Summary
The more you take great care of yourself and invest in daily ways in your own vitality, the more resilient you become, and the easier it is to thrive.
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 manuals 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.”