Episode 1: 5 Ways to Build Resilience & Create a Better Life

Have you ever wondered how some people manage to sail through very full lives with apparent ease whilst others struggle to get through a day without losing their cool?

Maybe you start your day with the best of intentions but as the stressors pile up you lose your ability to focus and function?

I 100% relate and I can tell you that the difference between surviving and thriving lies in your resilience levels.

In this episode of the podcast (the first in a new season) I share 5 ways you can build your resilience levels to create more calm and emotional flexibility in your daily life.

Episode highlights:

• A definition of resilience & why it matters
• Developing the skill of self-awareness
• Nervous system regulation to recover from stressful situations
• The power of responding vs reacting
• Why it's a disaster to let your emotional brain lead
• How to practice self-care (realistically)
• The value of daily meaningful connection
• Re-framing failure
• Simple ways to shift your perspective and reduce your stress

To learn more about resilience and access more powerful, practical tools to reduce your day-to-day stress, check out my Stress Less PDF Guide here - it's currently just £3.50!

Are you fed-up of having your life ruled by stress? If what you need is more calm, better focus and improved productivity instead of constant frazzle and overwhelm, you'll love my brand new Stress Less PDF Guide.

Inside you'll find 21 practical, actionable stress reduction strategies to help you get your groove back. Buy the PDF guide here.

If you know you want more from your life or career but you're totally stuck about where to start, I invite you to book a complimentary strategy call with me here.

We'll uncover what's holding you back from the goals you want to achieve and you'll leave the call with actionable steps to get you moving in the right direction.

For the tea on me, how I work, who I coach and the packages I offer, please visit my website - www.emmaobriencoach.com

You can also connect with me on Instagram @emmaobriencoach where I share an abundance of tools, strategies and brilliant content, you might also see the occasional dog.

Check out two of my FREE online workshops:

My 7 Step Formula for Getting Unstuck

4 Ways to Stop Procrastination in its Tracks...

Transcript

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Emma O'Brien: Hi folks, a very warm welcome to season. 3 of the lemons and pineapples podcast with me, Emma o'brien. If we've not met before welcome

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Emma O'Brien: this season is all about how to make life better for yourself. I'm going to be sharing tools and strategies to help you really

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Emma O'Brien: find more connection in life, improve your communication

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Emma O'Brien: and really be able to enjoy life more. You're going to find stress management strategies in here. That is one of my areas of expertise, and I'm really excited to be bringing this new season to you

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Emma O'Brien: before we jump in. I'm going to invite you to check out my brand new stress, less ebook. You'll find the link in the show notes for this. And if you go to my website, which is Emma O'briencoach dot com, you'll also find a link on the homepage there, too. This is a condensement, if you like, of my

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Emma O'Brien: skill set when it comes to managing stress. The tools I have learned in my coaching practice tools I have practiced in my own life, and the strategies I share with my own coaching clients to help them really get to grips with understanding and reducing their stress. So do have a look at the ebook. It is just 7 pounds.

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Emma O'Brien: So it's super affordable. And it's packed with over 21 strategies to help you reduce and manage your stress

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Emma O'Brien: without further ado. Let's jump into today's episode. I'm going to be sharing with you 5 ways to build resilience.

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Emma O'Brien: Let's talk a little bit 1st about what resilience is, and resilience is the ability to adapt to

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Emma O'Brien: and recover from

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Emma O'Brien: stressful events that happen in life and by stressful events, events

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Emma O'Brien: that might be some sort of change that's happening. It might be a job change. It might be a change in your personal life. It might be external circumstances that are out of your control. It might be change. You've instigated that you're finding it a little bit hard to navigate. The more resilient you are, the easier it is to deal with the unexpected.

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Emma O'Brien: the quicker you will recover from external events and circumstances that trigger you into a stress response.

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Emma O'Brien: Building resilience is a big part of the work I do with my clients. It's a big part of the work that happens in my stress management workshops that I do.

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Emma O'Brien: And I'm going to share with you 5 ways. You can do that.

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Emma O'Brien: So the 1st one is to develop the skill of self awareness. Self-awareness is incredible when you can get to the grips with it. It's a means of knowing yourself better, and when you know yourself better, you have the opportunity to be able to change the way you do things. So if

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Emma O'Brien: you have a particular go-to behavior when somebody does something at work.

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Emma O'Brien: when you are triggered, when you feel uncomfortable.

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Emma O'Brien: when you can start to become self-aware, you can notice these behavior patterns, and when you are aware of your own behavior patterns that you that you do, you can change them.

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Emma O'Brien: And self-awareness is really powerful because it gives you the

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Emma O'Brien: ability to catch yourself before you go into a typical behavior that's unhelpful.

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Emma O'Brien: So, for instance.

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Emma O'Brien: being able to develop self-awareness has been quite transformational in my marriage.

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Emma O'Brien: when we have disagreements, as all couples do.

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Emma O'Brien: it can sometimes be very tempting to throw in a little comment occasionally. I'm sure you can know what I'm talking about here. Self-awareness is the difference between throwing in that comment in the middle of an argument that then

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Emma O'Brien: creates a cascade and keeps the argument going for a lot longer, and catching yourself and having a moment to think what are the consequences going to be of me chucking this comment in here? Is it going to be helpful?

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Emma O'Brien: Is it going to be kind? And if the answer to both of those questions is, No.

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Emma O'Brien: I don't do it.

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Emma O'Brien: That self-awareness for you. It will help you de-escalate situations that are starting to

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Emma O'Brien: kind of get out of control if you like, when it comes to communicating and relating to other people, and it will perhaps stop situations

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Emma O'Brien: getting out of control. In the 1st place, when you're able to really observe your own behavior and think is this? What are the consequences going to be if I do this? And if you can catch yourself in the moment before you

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Emma O'Brien: allow your reactivity to lead. Self-awareness is allowing your responsiveness to lead.

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Emma O'Brien: It's really, really powerful.

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Emma O'Brien: The second one is nervous system regulation. Now, this essentially is being able to understand your stress response and your stress response is going to be very unique to you.

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Emma O'Brien: We all have different things that trigger us, something that I find incredibly stressful, and will set me off into a pattern of anxiety.

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Emma O'Brien: won't bother another person in the slightest, and vice versa.

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Emma O'Brien: So nervous system regulation is about understanding your stresses, understanding what triggers your stress response, getting to know the internal feelings of being stressed. Because when you can understand those things, and this leads beautifully from the self awareness. You can start to change them. Now, I'm a heart meth practitioner. So I teach a set of really powerful nervous system regulation techniques which allow you to

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Emma O'Brien: calm yourself when you are in a fight or flight response and bring that response down before it really really escalates, and also nervous system. Regulation tools allow you to recover quicker when you have been triggered into a fight or flight response.

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Emma O'Brien: I think one of the things

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Emma O'Brien: that is misunderstood about nervous, resistant regulation is that somehow it stops you being affected by stress. Unfortunately it doesn't. It gives you the power to be able to control your stress response far better, and it gives you the power to be able to recover from it when you have been stressed.

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Emma O'Brien: And the thing with this is, and why it's of such value is when you can

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Emma O'Brien: calm that fight or flight response at will.

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Emma O'Brien: It doesn't lead all the time. So if you are someone who has a short temper. For instance, being able to learn nervous system regulation can help you keep that temper under control.

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Emma O'Brien: If you are someone who is prone to being very anxious. When you have nervous system regulation tools, you have the means to be able to calm that anxiety down. So it doesn't completely hijack your brain and take over anyone who suffers from anxiety will know that when you end up in an episode of anxiety, when you're in an anxiety spiral. It's very difficult to come out of it, because all you tend to do is loop.

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Emma O'Brien: and when you have the tools to calm that response, you have the ability to break that cycle.

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Emma O'Brien: and when you feel like you're more in control of your nervous system, and it's not in control of you. It reduces your general stress level. I think a lot of us get very stressed about the prospect of being stressed, because when a fight or flight response is engaged. It is very overwhelming. Being filled with anxiety is very overwhelming, being filled with anger is very overwhelming, and we end up being led by those emotions rather than being able to be led by our logical brain.

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Emma O'Brien: which will be the one that allows us some self-awareness, super powerful.

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Emma O'Brien: The 3, rd resilience building skill is practicing regular self-care.

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Emma O'Brien: And again, this is a term that gets thrown around an awful lot, but

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Emma O'Brien: can't really overstate the importance of prioritizing yourself.

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Emma O'Brien: Now, this doesn't mean going for Spa days.

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Emma O'Brien: because unless you can go to the Spa for a while every day and have a bit of quiet and soothing time. A Spa day once every 3 months isn't going to actually help you. Self-care is a day to day

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Emma O'Brien: thing, being able to have a bit of time for you to really fill your own cup. A lot of us are running on empty. A lot of us are struggling through, and we're overwhelmed because we don't actually get time to take care of ourselves. So this might mean just sitting in the garden for 10 min, having your morning coffee

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Emma O'Brien: before everybody else wakes up in the house, or before you go out to work, it might mean making sure you have quiet time before you go to bed to read a book for half an hour. It might mean going for a run. It might mean going to the gym. It might mean 10 min of meditation in the morning, but it is really important that you attend to yourself

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Emma O'Brien: every day in some shape or form. When you look after yourself, and you meet your own needs yourself.

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Emma O'Brien: you naturally will cope far better because you have. You've already tended to the the inner piece of you that needs to be looked after

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Emma O'Brien: a lot of people are overwhelmed because they don't have any time to themselves. They'd really like some time to themselves, but they're so busy giving to everybody else, and then it leads to burnout. So self-care is really important. So a question for you is to think about. If I was to ask you what's 1 thing you could do to care for yourself each day. What would that be? And if you can identify it and do it even better?

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Emma O'Brien: The 4th way to build resilience is to make sure you are connecting with other people.

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Emma O'Brien: having connections with other humans is imperative for well-being.

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Emma O'Brien: and I think this is something that in in our age of being online and

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Emma O'Brien: being in a hustle culture and get up, go to work, come home and repeat. We tend to neglect the

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Emma O'Brien: friends and family and the people who we love and value in our lives, and who love and value us too.

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Emma O'Brien: So making time for regular connection with people is really important. Having a support network is really important. We talked about resilience being the ability to recover from things that happen that are stressful.

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Emma O'Brien: and it is far easier to do that if you have other people supporting you, if you have access to friends or somebody who you can pick up the phone and say, this just happened. I need to talk about it.

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Emma O'Brien: I have. I call her my work wife. I have a work wife who, when things go the wrong way up with work in some shape or form, I will give her a call and have a little rant. She does the same thing for me, and immediately after a half an hour phone call talking through what's happened. We feel much better when you don't have that.

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Emma O'Brien: You have no outlet to talk through what's happening, and you end up holding on to everything yourself.

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Emma O'Brien: which in itself is stressful. It's bad for you to do that. So make sure you're connecting with friends regularly, whether that's on the phone, whether that's scheduling a lunch once a week or once a fortnight or a couple of times a week if you can do it, and making sure you're prioritizing the people and the connections in life like I said, it can be so easy. I do it. I can have 2 or 3 weeks go by, and I think

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Emma O'Brien: haven't spoken to my child who's in the Uk. At university. And that's actually, it's important that I do that. And it's important to make time for that. It's easy for time to run away with us. But connection is really really important.

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Emma O'Brien: and the last resilience building skill I want to share with you is learning to shift your perception

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Emma O'Brien: around difficult and challenging things that happen to you

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Emma O'Brien: the things that happened to us.

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Emma O'Brien: Oh.

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Emma O'Brien: we call them circumstances right?

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Emma O'Brien: The problem with circumstances is not what happens. It's the way we respond mentally to what's happened. It's our thoughts about the circumstances that generally causes the problem rather than the circumstances themselves.

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Emma O'Brien: So there is a model with this in that we have a set of circumstances that lead to a collection of thoughts that happen.

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Emma O'Brien: The thoughts lead to feelings and emotions that we have, and the feelings and emotions that we have drive our behavior

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Emma O'Brien: I shared when I talked about self-awareness and nervous system regulation, how, when we don't have a handle on our stress response. When we don't have a handle on our big emotions, they tend to lead.

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Emma O'Brien: And all of a sudden you can find that you've made everything much worse because you've in anger. You've retaliated by being reactive with somebody as opposed to having the self-awareness to just think, hang on a minute. I know this person has made me really angry, and I'd really like to give them a piece of my mind. But what will the consequences of that be? Is it going to make things worse?

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Emma O'Brien: It probably is. Let me not do it, and that happens in a split second. But when we have that self-awareness it changes things so to come back to

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Emma O'Brien: shifting your perspective

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Emma O'Brien: when things don't go as planned, and when they don't go the way we want, and when we don't get the results that we expect or want from a certain thing.

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Emma O'Brien: It can be disappointing. It can bring up quite big feelings. What I invite you to do when things go awry is to have a look at

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Emma O'Brien: what is

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Emma O'Brien: the potential learning opportunity here

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Emma O'Brien: in this situation that's happened?

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Emma O'Brien: Is there

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Emma O'Brien: something I can glean from this.

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Emma O'Brien: Is there another way of thinking about this?

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Emma O'Brien: Is there another way of looking at this that might just shift your perspective?

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Emma O'Brien: And this is a thing we can talk about with failure as well. I think it's a wonderful thing to be able to reframe failure.

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Emma O'Brien: So when things

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Emma O'Brien: fail, when things go wrong. Often it can be very derailing. But when you can have a look at what's the learning opportunity here in this thing that's gone wrong.

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Emma O'Brien: Is there something I could have done differently that I can take into the future? If this particular set of circumstances happens again? Can I do something different to get a different result.

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Emma O'Brien: Am I missing something here?

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Emma O'Brien: Do I need to upskill? Do I need to find some help? Do I need to do something differently here in order to get a different result. It can be very easy just to get stuck in a failed, and stop there

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Emma O'Brien: and then sit in the story of that. When you're able to shift your perspective, you can start to have a look at.

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Emma O'Brien: How could I do this differently? What is the learning here. When we get curious about the circumstances that show up that we don't really want.

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Emma O'Brien: we're back in our power of being able to do something differently.

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Emma O'Brien: and when we are able to do something differently, we have the confidence that when a similar situation comes up again, we know we've got the tools to be able to cope with it. That is resilience at work.

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Emma O'Brien: I hope this was helpful. I would love to hear from you about what you do to build resilience. Which of these you're going to try out? You can wherever you. If you're watching this on Youtube, you can pop me a comment in the Comments section. If you are listening, you can hop over to Instagram. Pop me a DM. At Emma O'briencoach, and let me know your thoughts.

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Emma O'Brien: and a reminder to please check out my stress less ebook if what I've shared has resonated.

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Emma O'Brien: I've added quite a lot of strategies that pertain to what I've shared today in this podcast in the ebook. And of course, this is what

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Emma O'Brien: I coach clients around. This is the work I do. And when you are able to build resilience when you are able to be self-aware. When you're able to regulate your nervous system, your life unfolds very differently because it puts you in the driving seat, and I am here

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Emma O'Brien: to help you have a better experience of life by sharing these tools and strategies with you, so I hope you've enjoyed this. Thank you for being here with me. I will see you same time next week bye, for now.