The Joy Factor and Resilience - Part 1
There are plenty of opportunities for any one of us to be bothered, aggravated, and down-right ticked off at how things can go in life. Sometimes it feels like we can’t catch a break, we’re putting out fires, or careening from one problem to another. Be it work challenges, family-life ups and downs, or going through major transitions - like job changes, a move, chronic illness, birth of a child or death of loved one - life certainly provides us with opportunities to feel overwhelmed.
Have you ever witnessed someone going through something really difficult and noticed a quality in them that you admired? Perhaps you observed that they were real about how they felt about their circumstance and were also able to accept it and adjust to it without letting it derailing them. You may have even observed this in yourself at certain times. It is as if you (or they) are as fully present with the problem as they can be, noticing the ups and downs, but somehow find a way to anchor themselves through it.
This is what I call resilience. According to Webster’s Dictionary resilience is defined as, “an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change.” This is like bouncing back after difficulty, or rebounding after a setback. It’s not as if you ignore the problem, rather, you recognize difficulty is present and are able to adjust and make changes accordingly.
And our resilience is directly connected to our joy level. Joy is the state of delight that exudes itself from the inside out. It is not circumstance-dependent. Rather it is what we bring to any circumstance. Joy means, “the source or cause of delight.” The good news here is that since resilience is directly connected to our joy-level we can effect positive change in our resilience by finding ways to be the cause of joy in our circumstances. By increasing our joy-level we increase or tap into our here-and-now resilience, making us more graceful and stable in difficulties.
So even though we can’t control our circumstances we can control our response to them. Join me for the next three blog posts focused on the connection between joy and resilience and what we can do to increase our resilience and tap into it when trouble comes.
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