“Inner strengths are the supplies you‘ve got in your pack as you make your way down the twisting and often hard road of life.… On average, about a third of a person’s strengths are innate, built into his or her genetically based temperament, talents, mood, and personality. The other two-thirds are developed over time. You get them by growing them.” Rick Hansen
To face your challenges and your vulnerabilities, you need inner strength. To grow our inner strength, we need to cultivate calm and stability, practice kindness, self-compassion and generosity, and allow ourselves to be vulnerable. We will be exploring these practices over the next three sessions.
To face your challenges and your vulnerabilities, you need inner strength. We talked about neuroplasticity, how your brain is shaped by where you focus and rest your mind. If you give into your brain’s negativity bias, you allow your brain to focus on self-criticism, worrying, slights and stress. If you train your brain to rest on the good, you will shape your brain for a positive mood and sense of self-worth.
Reflection
“Are my choices comforting and nourishing my spirit, or are they temporary reprieves from vulnerability and difficult emotions ultimately diminishing my spirit?
Are my choices leading to my Wholeheartedness, or do they leave me feeling empty and searching?” Brene Brown
If you answered like I did, you may want to cultivate your inner strengths, so you make better choices and nourish your spirit to feel more wholehearted. The questions are: Where do you start? What strengths do you nurture? Based on my experience, I recommend that you start by training your brain to be calm and stable. Then you choose the easiest inner strength to work on. I found that working on one strength, strengthened the others. And you want some wins to build your confidence and motivations.
Cultivate Calm and Stability
It is very difficult to see clearly if your body and mind are not calm and stable. A still lake reflects perfectly. But you can’t see the reflection in a lake churned up by the wind. We need to quiet our mental chatter to calm our minds and bodies. The best way for me to do that is to meditate. When I meditate, I train my brain to change the focus of my attention to my breath. That focus on my breath makes me feel calm and stable. I have been meditating for years, it is easier to calm my mind when I get triggered than it used to be. But I need to continue building those neural networks to make it more automatic.
“Remember, difficult feelings and thoughts are like quicksand. The more you struggle against them, the more they suck you in.” Matt Licata, Jeff Foster
It is easier to calm ourselves if we think about calming ourselves just for this breath, and then this one. If we think the difficulties will go on forever, we get overwhelmed and reactive. That is the beauty of the Mindful pause, where we just take three breaths. And maybe we then see we need another three breaths, or some walking mediation to calm ourselves.
Take Persistent Baby Steps
We often go for the big bold steps, thinking that we will speed up the change. But when we bite off more than we can chew, we give up. Rather than saying you will meditate for an hour a day, it is better to start with 2-5 minutes a day. Rather than saying I am going to find 10 things a day to be grateful for, find one. The baby steps may not feel like you are doing much, but if you do them persistently over time, you will see results.
Why baby steps? They prevent brain freeze and overwhelm. Baby steps are so much easier and have a greater chance of success, thus reducing your fear of failure. Taking a baby step triggers your innate reward system and motivates you to keep going by feeding your enthusiasm to move forward.
Savor the Good
Our brains have a built-in negativity bias. We must train them to focus on what is working, what is joyful, what is good. My favorite practice is called Taking in the Good. Everyday you find something good, a beautiful tree, a sunset, someone’s smile and you savor it for 20-30 seconds. When I did this daily for 6 months, I noticed that I was seeing the good much more often in life.
Savor when you get what you want, instead of just moving on to the next thing. Take time to appreciate your successes and your joys. Allow yourself to experience awe. Pay attention to the people and things you are grateful for. Grateful eyes look as if they had never seen it before and caress it as if they would never see it again.
Reflection
Take a moment to look at what’s satisfied you in the past week. What really makes you feel nourished?
When you are reflecting on what has satisfied you, don’t just look for the big things linke wining the lottery. You can focus on the little things, you will be so grateful for your non-toothache after you have had a toothache. If you think the things have to be extraordinary, you will miss out on all the little things that can bring joy to your life.
Nurture the Courage to Face Your Vulnerabilities
With gratitude helping us to see that there are good things in life, even when we face difficulties, we have more courage to face our vulnerabilities. We see that life is not all good or all bad.
Reflection
“What do I do when I feel emotionally exposed?” Do I shut down? Do I lash out? Do I just jump into fix-it mode? Do I take a couple of long, slow, deep breaths? Do I hold those emotions like I would hold a crying baby?
“How do I behave when I’m feeling very uncomfortable and uncertain?” Do I make up stories in my mind to be certain? Or stories to justify what I am thinking or what I did? Do I see out more information? Do I have a trusted friend I can talk to? Can I just sit with that feeling of being uncomfortable and uncertain, just letting it be there? or am I pushing it away?
“How willing am I to take emotional risks?” How wise am I about evaluating the emotional risk? We don’t want to go to the point where we are oversharing, thinking that is taking emotional risks. That is not discerning, not wisdom. How do I evaluate emotional risks to see which are worth it and which are not? Or do I just shut them all down because I think I will be safer that way?
Bolded questions are from Brene Brown
The edges of the experiences we fear form a kind of invisible fence that limits the life we allow ourselves to have. We dread how we think an experience may turn out, so we close ourselves off from that experience. But what we dread is usually rooted in childhood, and today it is much less likely, less painful, and less overwhelming than we fear.
Start with facing small vulnerabilities. Play a game you are not good at. Call a friend you haven’t been in touch with for a long time. Give someone a compliment. As you build your confidence in your ability to handle your vulnerability, you can move on to bigger things..
Curate Your Mind Made World
We all live in a world that is developed by our minds. Your mind made world was developed as you were growing up. It contains lots of “shoulds” that are not really yours. It includes perceptions that are not true. And it limits your thinking, your actions, and your life.
To curate your mind made world, start by seeing clearly. Notice that the stronger our wants and fears, the narrower the perspective we can take it in. We are otherwise occupied or fixated.
By listening deeply to yourself, you learn to recognize your own beliefs and opinions, needs and fears. If your mind is filled with the perceptions of others, you won’t have enough inner space to really hear yourself. Our culture has taught us to jump to fixing problems, whether they can be fixed or not, instead of listening to how the problem makes us feel. We don’t listen to our bodies to learn what makes us suffer, and what brings happiness.
In the upcoming sessions we will further explore ways to cultivate our inner strengths.