Sporting the “Been There Done That” t-shirt, you may be wondering what the next step in life is.
After all, surviving a difficult and possibly traumatic experience is no small feat. When you’ve embraced healing and are steady on your recovery path, what’s your next move?
How do you ensure that old triggers don’t knock you down? You may even feel like a different person after your experience. How do you set goals for the “new you?”
And further still, how do you stay on the path to reaching your goals?
Take heart. The answers are all within your grasp. Your resilience in life can be harvested from your past.
Here’s what I mean.
Use Your Greatest Strengths
To recover from a challenging chapter in life, you likely know how to practice a great deal of self-awareness. Getting in touch with wounds and acknowledging certain emotions, you have probably gotten to know yourself quite well.
So, use that information to be a more resilient person in the future.
With regards to surviving the negative experience, what strength(s) helped you the most?
Take these strength(s) and use them in new ways. You may be to help someone else in a similar situation. Or, you may be more equipped to launch your own business.
Whatever your endeavor may be, remember to flex your strongest muscle consistently. Doing so will help you to become more resilient to whatever life presents to you.
Harness the Power of Your Emotional Triggers
When something or someone pushes your buttons, it’s important to use the experience to help you.
Moments like these can easily sidetrack you and rob you of your self-confidence. Try to take them with a grain of salt.
How?
Look at the facts of the situation and identify how you felt. Examine how you felt at the exact moment. Then, determine whether it hurt your current endeavor or hindered it.
Wrap your mind around the things that instinctively bother you. Doing this removes a large portion of their negative influence, making you a more resilient person.
Embrace Self-Efficacy
Surviving is overcoming. It’s being a master over something that could have easily taken your life. Or, at least, derailed your life enough to render it unrecognizable.
Perhaps you don’t win every battle against anxiety or old wounds. But, being here and reading this blog post means that you’re well on your way to winning the war.
Essentially something inside of you believes you can accomplish your goals. You can do this. That’s self-efficacy.
Confidence eludes most people. Mostly because humans tend to focus on their failures.
Rather than succumb to this sinkhole of human doubt, take a proactive approach by keeping track of your wins.
Your accomplishments–times you exceeded expectations and were in control of your life–are all journal-worthy moments. It’s a good idea to remind yourself of them when you hit a roadblock.
Do Activities You Enjoy
Lastly, take care of the little kid inside of you by doing things you enjoy.
This includes activities like reading books, running a marathon, painting, playing an instrument, writing, collecting antiques, etc.
Activities don’t necessarily need to transform into a side hustle or even be important to anyone else. Although they can. Rather, your chosen activities need to hone the tools and techniques that helped you survive. Express those nuggets of information, advice, and wisdom in unique ways through something you enjoy.
Take the first step…
If you are ready to practice more resilience in your own life, I would like to help. Please contact me via phone or email so we can discuss how we might work together to achieve your therapeutic goals as quickly and effectively as possible.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Linda K. Laffey, MFT
