One thing I learnt #6: 2021: Three focused ways to build personal resilience

During the last decade, most of us have fallen into the rat race of increasing personal productivity and continuous self-improvement. Do more, faster, fit more in your day, network more. What? You haven’t published a book yet? Write one, now! You don’t juggle ten projects at a time? Nope, not good enough. By the end of it, we felt paralysed with inadequacy. At least I did, making me feel worse than my mother did in my teen years (I’m hitting a nerve here). 

Then came the pandemic. The death triangle -uncertainty, fear and doubt- settled in for good. At times, I wanted to curl in a ball and eat Doritos forever. PepsiCo would be happy. I was one of the lucky ones who didn’t lose their job or got struck by covid. But then it hit me: if there is one thing we can do in 2021, is stop focusing on all the productivity and performance nonsense and instead build our resilience. Guess what, it’s almost guaranteed that performance will follow. Throughout the years, guided by experts and after spending a considerable amount of money (sigh), I honed into 3 simple practices that have helped me to continuously top up my resilience reserves. They span across a holistic view of living, covering the body (the physical being), mind (the mental being) and heart (the emotional/spiritual being). Let’s see if I can capture them in three little paragraphs. 

Body

For physical resilience, have a play with an intermittent diet, with lots of good fats. I’ve been doing it for 5 years now and I have more sustained energy, mental focus and clarity than ever before. It allowed me to exercise more and actually enjoy it. Most importantly, I can eat whatever I want (an overstatement for dramatic purposes), without the vicious side effect of gaining weight (you have to remember, I am a gay man, it’s a vicious world out there!). The linchpin of my regime is ‘good fat coffee’, aka bullet-proof coffee. Like millions around the world, I believe in the science behind it and swear by it. 

Mind   

When it comes to mental resilience, well, you know what I’m going to say: (altogether now) mindfulness and its greatest tool, meditation. In fact, I like to talk about developing the faculty of awareness and equanimity. I’m not keen on the trendiness of the word mindfulness. I’ve been practicing Vipassana since 2010, a Burmese type of meditation that involves a yearly 10-day silent retreat. I know, madness. The good news is that there are 15,000 Apps that can make your mindfulness journey easy and fitted to your needs. Mediation is not the only tool, pets, walks, nature, running, they can all play a role in strengthening your awareness. Even if you practice 3 minutes a day, you’ll see the benefits. You’ll find that awareness generates resilience’s greatest weapon: equanimous observation. Eventually, you’ll learn to observe events as they arise, good or bad, detach yourself from them, and eventually let go. Easier said than done. 

Heart

Last, and usually forgotten, is resilience for your emotional and spiritual well-being. Obviously, highly linked to mental well-being, but I like to keep it separate. Perhaps because it is more subtle, or because it’s particularly close to me and my personal journey. For me, the main resilience deficit of our times is self-acceptance, part of the overall inadequacy syndrome imposed to everyone from our society and way of living. And I don’t mean that in the shallow Instagram self-love type of way; if anything, this is actually a cry for help. I mean it in a deep psychological way. In the last decade there is a whole body of research, driven by the science of Positive Psychology, on the impact of negative thoughts and low self-esteem on personal success and happiness. In the context of resilience, the focus is using mindfulness to ‘feel your feelings’, staying with and observing the discomfort of negative feelings. This will help us be patient with ourselves and accept our flaws. Accept who we are and not who we think we’re supposed to be. 

So, to wrap this up, as I have to get ready for our New Year’s Eve lockdown celebrations: 

1. If you don’t take my word for any of these (rightly so, why should you), we can start digging online. There is plenty of research-based evidence. I will post more resources and H2s (how to do it) for each later in the year.  
2. Not all three elements are relevant to everyone, we all have our strengths and weaknesses. But all three need to be practised.
3. This is a long way to discovery. Those three areas are focused and simple, but not easy to achieve over-night.  Get your boots/high heels/platforms/loafers/trainers/flipflops on, there is a lot of walking. 

Here’s to a resilient 2021!