28 Days Of Resilience

Day 1 is a welcome to the course and laying the groundwork for what's to come. We take a moment to set a context and reset our understanding of what resilience is and where it comes from. From the very beginning, we're talking about resilience as the nature of human beings; the nature of you.

We're often told that change is a process, and that it takes time. What if that's not true? What if change is a moment, and transformation can occur in an instant? That's the direction we're exploring in today's lesson.

Resilience is often 'sold' to us as something to build, something lacking that we have to go and find and install. In today's lesson, we're looking in a different direction; starting from a different premise - that resilience is built into the design of us.

We take for granted that our bodies start the healing process as soon as an injury occurs, or will spring into action to eliminate unhelpful foreign bodies. It's always working to find balance. In this lesson, we explore the metaphor of the immune system in relation to the mind.

We sometimes think that life is happening to us - that we're at its mercy. In this lesson we're exploring the idea that in fact, it's happening through us; we're life in motion and we are built to navigate all the challenges of a life fully lived.

A common question when I'm teaching about resilience is "how do I build it?" That assumes it's something to build, something we're lacking. In this lesson, we'll look at why that question is a red herring and what's more helpful to understand in terms of resilience.

In the world of mental health, we're often given tips and techniques to manage stress, in order to build our resilience. In today's lesson, we'll take an in-depth look at the misunderstanding that's keeping us stuck feeling stressed, and explore the relationship between stress and resilience from a fresh angle.

When it looks like a situation is causing us to feel a certain way, it's a sign we're not seeing life straight. In this lesson, we explore how this is our signal to take another look, and align ourselves with reality.

If you've ever tried to get rid of unwelcome feelings, today's lesson could help you become more at ease with those uncomfortable feelings and relieve you of the need to 'evict' any you'd rather not experience.

There's no doubt that life is more fun when our thoughts turn towards the more so-called 'positive'. But what if labelling our thoughts and trying to manage them is part of what's keeping us in a cycle of negativity? In this lesson we raise our gaze to what's powering our experience.

There's a lot of work in trying to manage or control all the factors and circumstances of our life that we think are stressing us. In this lesson, we're going upstream, to understand what's really going on and take all that managing off your to-do list.

When we feel stressed, we tend to focus on that feeling, and on finding ways to fix it. What if that's not necessary, and in fact we're innocently keeping ourselves stuck by fighting the feelings that are trying to tell us we're out of alignment with what is?

We tend to generalise and project feelings onto situations and accept them as true. In that way, we perpetuate the myth that situations have inherent emotional properties. When we start to question our fixed ways of viewing situations, we open up new possibilities.

The idea of "bouncing back" is based on a faulty assumption - that an event or circumstance could ever render us less resilient than we were prior to it happening. In this lesson we take on that assumption and show how we can correctly reinterpret the signals our feelings are sending us.

In recent times, we have been encouraged to spend an enormous amount of time considering and examining our feelings in detail. In this lesson, we're going to question the wisdom of that, and how understanding what they're telling you is much simpler than you may have thought.

In this lesson, we're going to explore why you don't need 'self-confidence' and what's more helpful than that temporary, hard-to-capture feeling. We'll look at what's really holding you back from doing the things you want to do.

In today's lesson, we look at why burnout isn't a universal experience, and why some people thrive in jobs that are generally seen as stressful. We'll start to separate fact from fiction when it comes to our experience of stress, and appreciate the infinite menu of possibilities available to us.

Techniques and strategies for coping with stress can be found in all corners of the internet. In this lesson, we're going to take a different approach, and explore why they're not necessary, and why they aren't what creates change or relieves your feelings of stress.

We often take our feelings of overwhelm very seriously (because of course they feel serious). In this lesson, we're going to explore what happens when we don't take them so seriously, and question our assumptions about what they're really telling us.

Today's lesson centres around a metaphor, and points us towards what we sometimes forget: that we have everything we need to navigate this life with grace and ease. The only thing that gets in the way is the mistaken idea that we don't have what it takes, or that we aren't enough.

When we misunderstand how life works, things feel hard. When we're in alignment with how it works, life feels less like a washing machine and more like a roller coaster - there are still ups and downs, twists and turns, but we're much more likely to enjoy the ride.

Just as there are implications to misunderstanding how life works, understanding brings different results and a different feeling to your life. In this lesson we explore what can shift when we understand our thoughts as imagination, not instructions.

We're conditioned to believe that some people are more resilient than others; that some are just better at life and others need to work harder to get through life and all its challenges. In this lesson, we'll bust that myth, and point in a more helpful direction: of wholeness, completeness, and unconditional resilience.

Today's lesson circles back to insight as the catalyst for change, and explores a personal experience of transformation as an example of what's true for all of us. We shine a light on what's often invisible: the habits of thought that keep us stuck and that we don't see as thought, until we do.

Today we're looking at the power of nature, and a fundamental shift in how we view ourselves. It's a zoom out for a wider perspective on why it's logical and obvious that we are resilient by nature, not because we work at it.

There's something very powerful about knowing that you're ok, and that the person in front of you is ok too. Today we explore that powerful space, where you can be the anchor someone needs when they're feeling untethered.

As we start to bring the course to a close, this lesson is a recap and a summary of what it means to understand your unconditional resilience. It's a reminder of what's true, and what you're really made of.

On this final day of our course, I'll ask a few reflective questions you can sit with throughout your day, to help you realise your own resilience, and what it means to know you've always been resilient and always will be.