Four Thinking Patterns for Resilience - Part 1

The ability to cope with whatever life brings us is a mindset, a way of thinking created by personal attitudes, the way we represent our experiences in our minds and our behaviours. When we are able to cope all the time, then we are ‘resilient’.

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So how do you go about creating resilience for yourself? Let’s take a look at how learning Neuro Linguistic Programming can offer you some powerful and practical tools that you can implement each and every day, enabling you to cope with life more of the time. There are 4 key thinking patterns that will lead you towards resilience in your daily life:

1. Personal Empowerment

2. Your Emotional State

3. The Stories You Tell Yourself

4. Your Beliefs

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In this blog, I am going to focus on Personal Empowerment.

I want you to think of your empowerment in terms of this equation:

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Cause > Effect = Empowerment

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What does this mean for you? When you are at the ‘effect’ side of the equation you have reasons and let's face it, excuses as to why your life isn't the way you want it right now. Realistically speaking, we've all been there. You probably go to the effects side of the equation more than once every day. You know that you are on the effect side of the equation when you point outside of yourself and say, ‘things are like they are for me because of…’ and you point towards someone or something. For example, you might say, ‘because of my family’, ‘because of my job’, ‘because of the company I work for’, ‘because of the economy’, ‘because of my boss’, ‘because of the government’, ‘because I had children’, ‘because I got married’ and the ‘because of’ list goes on, made up of reasons and excuses, everything outside of you. Of course, the global pandemic was a huge driver of effect thinking in many people.

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Effect thinking, like all thinking, is natural, it is an integral part of the human condition. Effect thinking can feel comfortable because hey, everything that's happening to you right now is because of something or someone else. That's a comfortable place to be, it's an easy place to be. The thing is, when you sit at effect and you point outside yourself all the time, you are giving away your personal power. If it's everything and everyone else that are controlling everything that happens in your life and all your results, then they have the power, you have given it to them. You have given all your personal power away, pushed it outside of yourself.

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To reclaim your personal power, you need to make a shift in your thinking. Have you ever said, ‘They upset me’, ‘They broke my heart’, or ‘They made me angry’? Let's think about that differently for a moment. Did they, or did you consciously or unconsciously choose to feel a certain way in response to something that somebody did or said? Here’s the important learning, nobody can make you feel anything. It's a conscious or an unconscious choice that you make. This is good news. It means that you have the power to feel what you want to feel, to respond how you want to respond and to behave the way you want to behave. You have choice when you know how to access it.

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Moving to ‘cause’. When you are at the cause side of the equation, you become completely responsible for your results. You take full responsibility for your behaviours, your emotions and for what you can achieve in your life. This is how you are going to move towards being resilience, creating coping strategies that naturally develop the correct mindset to manifest what you want. You have to step into your power to achieve your desired results, step into your responsibility. Being at ‘cause’ can feel a little more challenging. It might even feel like a big stride out of your comfort zone. Trust me, it's worth a little discomfort. Once you make that shift from effect to cause and you bring everything back inside and take responsibility, that's when you take all your power back. The power is yours again and you give nothing away, you can be with your personal power. That is real empowerment and a step closer to resilient thinking.

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Please understand that being at ‘cause’ is not about blaming yourself for your life not being the way you want it to be right now. That is not what ‘cause’ thinking is about. It's about becoming responsible and in control of how you respond to the world around you. At the end of the day, you have choice, you have choice of how you respond to the world around you. It's not until you get really conscious about that, that you realise the choices are there for you to discover. You will quickly realise, ‘I do have the choice of how I'm going to respond to how someone has just spoken to me, or how someone has just behaved towards me’. ‘I have a choice about how to respond to how my career is panning out, or what the world economy is like’, right? You have a choice. To get your personal power back and become empowered, you need to step into that choice and decide for yourself, how am I going to respond to that?

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Stepping into ‘cause’ and bringing your personal power back inside, you will be delighted how resilient that feels in terms of the power it gives you. You will be in control. So, which side are you on? Are you at the ‘effect’ side of the equation right now, or the ‘cause’ side of the equation? Of course, which side you are on may depend on your context. You might be at effect when you're at work, for example, and then at cause when you get home, or the other way round. You might flip and flop between the two during the day. It's quite natural and normal to experience that. I would like to encourage you to start really building that resilient mindset by getting conscious about how you are responding. Listen to your own language. When are you placing responsibility on other things and other people? Notice when you do that and then focus on bringing that power back inside, choosing how to respond, what emotions you want to feel and how you are going to project yourself out into the world. That's real power.

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Get conscious about how you respond to things and the language that you choose to describe your experiences. Next time you hear yourself say, ‘they upset me’, or ‘they made me angry’, pause for thoughts and think, ‘how would I prefer to respond to this, what would be better for me? Getting angry and upset, that's not good for you. It's not good for your mindset, it's not good for your mental health and it won’t make you any more resilient to your environment. Exercise that choice. Choose to feel how you want to feel. Step over to ‘cause’ today.

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