Children learn more from what you do than what you say, so your resilience - the way they watch you approach adversity - affects theirs. Explore these mindful strategies for building awareness around challenging experiences.
Resilience relies on how we perceive our lives. So maybe we get queasy watching our child on stage for the first time; anxious and concerned, we start ruminating. Within those thoughts exist layers of assumptions, perspectives, and mental filters—I didn’t prepare her enough; she’s going to embarrass herself; I must do something to save her. If we feel our role is to protect kids from everything, that moment on stage becomes miserable. If we recognize we cannot shield our children from every hurt, but we’ve done our best, the experience changes—I’m almost as stressed as she is! Hope it goes well, but I’m here if it doesn’t.
Perception itself is malleable. In fact, this idea is a focus of the military’s resilience training for soldiers. Participants explore mental traps—habitual distortions that undermine emotional well-being. These pitfalls might represent thoughts like Asking for help is an admission of failure. They include catastrophizing the worst possible outcome of every situation or, alternatively, minimizing and ignoring whatever overwhelms. An overly active inner critic may continually let us know we are not good enough to manage. All these distortions represent filters that twist perspective and pull us away from resiliency.
You can begin to separate your perspective from the experience itself. Many attitudes toward adversity seem like factual statements: Those people are like that. My child will never . . . I’m not the sort of person who ever . . . Notice those habitual thoughts, and ask of each, Is it true? Drop your assumptions and predictions for a while, and see what changes.
Try catching yourself with this simple S.T.O.P. practice:
- Stop whatever you’re doing.
- Take a few slow breaths.
- Observe what’s going on around you and in your mind, and
- Pick how to proceed.
To read more of Mark Bertin's article, please click here.
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