How to become more resilient

Are you feeling often stressed, negative or even stuck? If yes, there is a book that could be a game changer for you: “Invisible Power” from Ken Manning, Robin Charbit and Sandra Krot (2015). The three authors offer a very powerful perspective on HOW OUR MIND WORKS and how this insight can positively influence our life.

When having feelings like anger, stress, sadness, impatience etc. we generally tend to look for the reasons outside of us. We look at people, words, events and circumstances and we blame them for our feelings. However, this way of looking at reality hinders us to stay in balance and to find answers and solutions which help us to move forward with some positive impact. Instead, we have negative feelings, we might take a victim posture and we lose productivity as well as cooperation with others.

Let’s take a simple example: You are feeling stressed at work as you have an important client meeting and your team members have not delivered all the input needed to finalize the proposal in time. You start immediately blaming them for this lack of reliability and professionalism and you let them know. You are very angry and you do not know how to solve the situation and to keep the good client relationship.

What happens here? Our mind develops permanently thoughts and feelings from the inside. However, we are convinced that they are triggered by what happens outside of us. In the example the stress and anger seem to be the consequence of the team members’ behaviour, but they are not. The stress and anger are emotions which result from the thoughts your mind creates in this situation.

This is what Manning, Charbit and Krot explain. We are not feeling in a certain way because of someone or something outside of us. We are feeling in a certain way because of our thoughts. This means that we can control our thoughts and change our reality in this way. The three authors call it the “inside-out paradigm”.

Getting back to our example: Instead of starting to blame the team members, we can ask ourselves about what made it difficult for them to deliver in time. These thoughts will trigger curiosity and push us to investigate and to find out what would be the best solution now to stay professional with regard to the client. In this way, instead of producing stress, blame, blockage, we create a positive movement to find an appropriate solution.

To be able to do this, we need to recognize the way our mind works. We can compare the mind with an operating system which always wants to bring us back into balance, but we need to acknowledge this so that our mind operates in this way. Our thoughts are ideas which we produce from the inside and we have the power to let them go and to replace them by different thoughts which will trigger more positive feelings and outcome. If we consciously apply this “inside-out paradigm” in our private and professional life, we will become more resilient and productive.

What is on YOUR mind now? 😉