{"id":5572,"date":"2018-08-17T12:08:12","date_gmt":"2018-08-17T06:38:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mindfulnessindiasummit.com\/?p=5572"},"modified":"2018-08-17T12:08:12","modified_gmt":"2018-08-17T06:38:12","slug":"resilience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/c4efilms.com\/msc\/resilience\/","title":{"rendered":"Resilience is a skill : Learn How to Build it"},"content":{"rendered":"

Learn How to Build it !<\/strong><\/h1>\n

“Resilience is a skill, not a trait. We can build it as our brain can make new neural pathways anytime”<\/em> <\/strong>– Manish Behl – Founder Beyondmind\u00a0\u00a0<\/em><\/h4>\n

There are two ways to become more resilient: one by talking to yourself, the other by retraining your brain.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019ve suffered a major failure, take the sage advice given by psychologist Martin Seligman in the HBR article \u201cBuilding Resilience.\u201d Talk to yourself. Give yourself a cognitive intervention and counter defeatist thinking with an optimistic attitude. Challenge your downbeat thinking and replace it with a positive outlook.<\/p>\n

But, fortunately, major failures come along rarely in life.<\/p>\n

What about bouncing back from the more frequent annoying screwups, minor setbacks and irritating upsets that are routine in any leader\u2019s life? Resilience is, again, the answer \u2014 but with a different flavor. You need to retrain your brain.<\/p>\n

The brain has a very different mechanism for bouncing back from the cumulative toll of daily hassles. And with a little effort, you can upgrade its ability to snap back from life\u2019s downers.<\/p>\n

Whenever we get so upset we say or do something we later regret (and who doesn\u2019t now and then?), that\u2019s a sure sign that our amygdala \u2014 the brain\u2019s radar for danger, and the trigger for the fight-or-flight response \u2014 has hijacked the brain\u2019s executive centers in the prefrontal cortex. The neural key to resilience lies in how quickly we recover from that hijacked state.<\/p>\n

The circuitry that brings us back to full energy and focus after an amygdala hijack concentrates in the left side of our prefrontal area, finds Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin. He\u2019s also found that when we\u2019re distressed, there\u2019s heightened activity on the right side of the prefrontal area. Each of us has a characteristic level of left\/right activity that predicts our daily mood range \u2014 if we\u2019re tilted to the right, more upsets; if to the left, quicker recovery from distress of all kinds.<\/p>\n

\n

With a little effort, you can upgrade your brain\u2019s ability to snap back from life\u2019s downers.<\/span><\/h2>\n<\/blockquote>\n

To tackle this in the workplace, Davidson teamed with the CEO of a high-pressure, 24\/7, biotech startup and Jon Kabat-Zinn of the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Kabat-Zinn offered the employees at the biotech outfit instruction in mindfulness, an attention-training method that teaches the brain to register anything happening in the present moment with full focus \u2014 but without reacting.<\/p>\n

The instructions are simple:<\/strong><\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Find a quiet, private place where you can be undistracted for a few minutes \u2014 for instance, close your office door and mute your phone.<\/li>\n
  2. Sit comfortably, with your back straight but relaxed.<\/li>\n
  3. Focus your awareness on your breath, staying attentive to the sensations of the inhalation and exhalation, and start again on the next breath.<\/li>\n
  4. Do not judge your breathing or try to change it in any way.<\/li>\n
  5. See anything else that comes to mind as a distraction \u2014 thoughts, sounds, whatever \u2014 let them go and return your attention to your breath.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    After eight weeks, and an average 30 minutes a day of\u00a0practicing mindfulness, the employees had shifted their ratio from tilted toward the stressed-out right side to the resilient left side. What\u2019s more, they said they remembered what they loved about their work \u2014 they got in touch with what had brought them energy in the first place.<\/p>\n

    To get the full benefit, a daily practice of 20 to 30 minutes works best; think of it like a mental exercise routine. It can be very helpful to have guided instructions, but the key is to find a slot for it in your daily routine. (There are even instructions for using a long drive as your practice session.)<\/p>\n

    Mindfulness\u00a0has been steadily gaining credence among hard-nosed executives. There are several centers where mindfulness instruction has been tailored for businesspeople, from tony resorts like\u00a0Miraval\u00a0to programs in mindful leadership at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester. Google University has been offering a course on mindfulness to employees for years.<\/p>\n

    Might you benefit from tuning up your brain\u2019s resilience circuitry by learning mindfulness? Among high-performing executives, the impacts of stress can be subtle. My colleagues Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee suggest as a rough diagnostic of leadership stress asking yourself, \u201cDo I have a vague sense of unease, restlessness, or the feeling that life is not great (a higher standard than \u201cgood enough\u201d)?\u201d A bit of mindfulness might put your mind at ease.<\/p>\n

    Original Article can be read at:\u00a0 https:\/\/hbrascend.org\/topics\/resilience-rest-us\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Learn How to Build it ! “Resilience is a skill, not a trait. We can build it as our brain can make new neural pathways anytime” – Manish Behl – Founder Beyondmind\u00a0\u00a0 There are two ways to become more resilient: one by talking to yourself, the other by retraining your brain. If you\u2019ve suffered a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5876,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_angie_page":false,"page_builder":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[76,291],"class_list":["post-5572","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","tag-mindfulness","tag-resilence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/c4efilms.com\/msc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5572","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/c4efilms.com\/msc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/c4efilms.com\/msc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c4efilms.com\/msc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c4efilms.com\/msc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5572"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/c4efilms.com\/msc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5572\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c4efilms.com\/msc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5876"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/c4efilms.com\/msc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5572"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c4efilms.com\/msc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5572"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c4efilms.com\/msc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5572"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}