Welcome to today’s dose of wisdom.
Today we are talking about:
Resilience and Tenacity
Both of these qualities could be in our nature and they can also be developed through the way we live.
This morning my alarm went off – it was very early. Every part of my body didn’t want to get out of bed. I hit snooze. I hit snooze again. Then that internal dialogue started: “ok you are already awake, there is no point going back to sleep… If you go back to sleep for another hour then you will roll out of bed and into your day and probably feel pretty lethargic cause of the late night you had. If you get up now and get in the pool, the day could feel quite different.”
That voice of reason can be SO annoying at that time of day! But it did get me out of bed.
Bleary eyed I drove to the pool almost muttering under my breath at myself about how uninspired I felt to be going swimming.
Once I arrived though and jumped in and started swimming laps, that aliveness came back into each cell in my body. I didn’t have a plan about how many laps to swim, I just wanted to move my body in the water for 30 mins. Up and back down the pool. I just kept swimming.
As I was swimming I noticed the parallel for life out of the water too:
In life, just like in the water, in an effortful day or situation, we just have to push through and just moving.
There are daily opportunities to lean in rather than avoid and push away the hard stuff. In doing that, we build resilience and tenacity.
Resilience is our ability to bounce back when things are tough.
Tenacity is our ability to keep going with something that may be hard or effortful.
There are so many opportunities in life to grow these life skills in ourselves and in our children:
Whether it’s running for a ball in a soccer game even though its hard. Whether it’s finishing a puzzle or staying in a creative process. Whether it’s staying in a hard conversation when we have a yearning to avoid. When we get up when we feel like staying in bed. When we stay the path towards our goals even when the path gets tricky.
It’s good to remember to flex those resilience and tenacity muscles regularly and to model that to our kids too.
Let me know all the ways that you have leaned in and kept going when it hasn’t felt easy. I’d love to hear it.
Warmly on Wednesday,
Mel
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