Resilient

Resilience – it was the word I picked this year to be the word that I would learn about, experience and hopefully growing as my guide. Resilience – is the ability to recoil or spring back bending to recover quickly from difficult situations. I knew this all too well given the last year that I've had and the changes that took place.  I also began to look carefully at the programs I was teaching in wellness to companies and individuals. I realized that much like my teaching and guiding reflected the "how to's" when everything goes right. What I had begun to realize is that you also need to "how to" when everything goes wrong. I'm not saying that things of been going wrong for me I'm just saying when things don't look like they should or  are a perfect case scenario you need to have a plan  and that is resilience.  The University of Southern California did a study on athletes, endurance athletes specifically and they could work, perform and succeed under tough training and race circumstances. They found that endurance athletes were in fact able to condition two parts of the brain influential in the ability to both feel stress and then adapt to stress. Interception which is the practice of training your brain to be as tough as your body was part of this study. There are two parts of the brain the insular cortex and the medial prefrontal cortex that influence resilience. The insular cortex is data collected in the brain from outside the body in within the body. The medial prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain decides how strongly we react to those outside influences. For instance when you get nervous and your heart starts to beat fast or you're embarrassed and your face turns red – each person reacts differently based on their ability to condition the response the more often you submit yourself to being in an uncomfortable situation the better you get at adapting- that is resilience. In wellness it's not how perfectly you eat and exercise but how willing you are to you continue to follow the path towards your ultimate goal. For instance resilience comes  in the ability to adapt when you forgot your shoes on a day you planned to walk at work. Resilience is the ability to adapt when life gets in the way and you need to continue on your wellness journey. This new aspect of training has become very monumental for me and for the people that I work with. I find myself no longer trying to teach the perfect time exercise plan but chiseling out what works in daily life of the people that I'm working with.

Resilience – the key to getting through just about anything. Jim Thorpe was considered the world's greatest athlete in 1912 and would also be the first Native American to compete in the Olympics. The night before Olympics his shoes were stolen he was forced to get in a dumpster where he found two different shoes. He wore an extra sock to make the shoe that was a tiny bit bigger fit better. He won two gold medals in the 1912 Olympics wearing shoes that were not his own. 

Resilience is more about problem-solving that it is planning what happens when things don't go your way? What dumpster will you find your track shoes in?
I'm going to be teaching an online class and resilience if you're interested send me an email at
jolenepuffer@charter.net
Bounce don't Break.