The Resilience Expansion: Is Resilience Spiritual or Practical?

By Thomas Keydel

When starting a conversation about resilience, I ask: How do you understand resilience in your life? Is it practical or spiritual? The question I think changes people's perspectives almost immediately. The practical has such a narrow focus - with "practical" resilience we just want to get on with it. This resilience is about getting things done. When you change that perspective to the spiritual, you are asking an entirely different question. Now resilience is about relatedness; it's about siding with the beauty of our own truth and with the connections that are most important to us. Both perspectives are important and there is a time and place for both discussions. My primary area of coaching is financial coaching. So resilience often serves a very practical purpose. Resilience is about following a plan that has meaning for my clients financially. But, as you can imagine, underneath that more practical facade is a vulnerable place of desire -- one that is looking for integrity -- the sense of wholeness that comes with integrity is where my clients are most alive. Resilience is about shaping that sense of integrity. Clarifying it enough so that it can be a springboard for action. It's about raising up that part of their lives as something that they can self-managing themselves.What's the relationship between self-management and resilience? Answer: Personal Accountability and Personal Transformation. Coaching is about change. We hold up that mirror and ask: "Who do you want to be right now?" No matter what the issue, clients are always wrestling with twin-headed beast of desire and aversion; they keep asking "how can I accommodate both my desire and my aversion?" And the truth is that they can't. How can they be in two places at the same time? By looking at a client's sense of integrity and the resilience that comes from that place, you drop the aversion - you take it out of the equation. The most resilient question you can ask is "Are you becoming the person you most want to be?".... Aversion is not the primary concern. Or, if the issue happens to be around financial coaching, then the resilient question that you can ask might be, "Does this plan make the most of who you are?" People need the opportunity to be bigger than what they struggle against -- its our job as coaches to make that possible. Self-management is only possible with resilience. Without resilience, self-management turns into self-correction (that is, making yourself less than what you can be) What is the distinction between self-correction and self-management? Answer: Self-correction is a repetition of something we already learned, we don't really express ourselves when we self correct. Self-correction is about conforming and about listening to others and about choosing to be small instead of the large, wonderful and beautiful person we are meant to be. And it's not easy to drop that drive to self-correct. The overhang of self-correction carries a huge price tag. In contrast, self-management, holds us accountable to what we want to discover. Rather than continuously self-correct ... with self-management we learn to create a place of vigorous inquiry: "How do I manage myself in light of everything I hope to accomplish?" Self-management pushes the line between the practical and the spiritual by replacing that more pragmatic urge to self-correct, with a more open-ended choice to explore who we really want to become. Coaching is always dancing the line between the pragmatic and the spiritual. Why? Because whenever we stop long enough to set aside the drive to conform and self-correct -- we are left with a more genuine sense of desire; the natural will to express gratitude and joy. Simply by making the distinction between self-correction and self-management, the deeper vision becomes more approachable. We are looking at it from a place of vigorous inquiry: "How do I manage myself in light of what I hope to accomplish?"

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1482683091
• ISBN13: 9781482683097
• Release Date: April 2013
• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Length: 60 Pages
• Weight: 0.37 lbs.
• Dimensions: 10.0" x 0.1" x 7.0"