“Bounce back from life’s challenges with greater wisdom and understanding. Empower yourself through mindfulness, improved emotional control, connectedness to others, and the ability to ride the waves of troubled times without making an already difficult situation worse.”
No matter what you believe about yourself, or what others have told you …you are a valuable individual, who has done the best you could do, based on your circumstances. You are a valuable individual.
Our survival instinct drives us toward a desire to be connected to others, and to feel like we have the power to live our lives effectively.
There is a myth that says the absence of trouble or challenge is the norm, and if trouble or challenge is present, then we have done something wrong and we risk becoming damaged.
Yet the opposite is true. Challenge should be expected and accepted. Challenge engages our drive to survive by causing us to stretch to find solutions that help us maintain connection to others, as well as empower us to live our lives more effectively.
The real problem is, there is no manual or set of instructions for how to deal with challenge, which in turn results in our defaulting to instinct, information gathered from role models (healthy or unhealthy), guesswork, and most dangerously, reacting to a triggered emotional mind.
You CAN NOT blame yourself for not knowing the rules. You CAN blame yourself for hiding your head in the sand and refusing to grow.
Resilience is the process of bouncing back from challenge with greater wisdom and understanding. We can’t avoid challenge but we can improve our ability to meet challenges head on, turning them into our strengths and sources of wisdom, by using a well cultivated collection of life mastery skills.
It must also be said the other side of challenge, is peace. Balance is always the answer.
Life Mastery Skills that serve as a shock absorber to challenge, and serve to restore peace include:
Mindfulness Skills
Emotion Management Skills
People Skills
Distress Tolerance Skills
Thought Management Skills
Problem Solving and Decision Making Skills
Structure and Time Management Skills
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Everyone has within themselves the answers to their own challenges. For some people the answers are easily accessible. To others… the answers are locked behind a door. All that is needed, is the right key. The key is simple yet priceless. It is a collection of “Life Mastery Skills.”
Depending on our life experience, some skills come naturally. Others may feel like walking up a downstairs escalator, or worse like being lost in a dark forest.
The good news is, there is nothing magic about life mastery skills. If a person chooses, they can be learned like any other skill, such as riding a bike or baking a cake.
When learning anything new, there are three simple steps:
1. Know it. Having a basic intellectual knowledge of the skill.
2. Feel it. Personalizing that intellectual knowledge, or in other words, “feel” how the skill could benefit you.
3. Practice it. Take the behavioral leap and practice, practice, practice.
When you address all three steps of learning you create a powerful combination of thinking, feeling, and acting, which looks and feels a lot like magic.
THE GOAL:
CREATE BALANCE THROUGH LIFE MASTERY SKILLS, ALLOWING YOU TO HAVE MEANINGFUL RELATIONSHIPS, AND POWER OVER AN EFFECTIVE LIFE.
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Barbara Scoville, LCSW 