“There will always be factors and people that we cannot control; how we respond can determine the quality of our lives and the effectiveness of our leadership”
At the very essence of this statement is the acknowledgement that emotional resilience is at the heart of enhancing our personal and professional lives.
Spiritual leaders have been known to claim that irritation can be an important teacher and indicator that we are making progress on the development of our emotional resilience. Think about it – if you can exercise “self-control” when people and situations are irritating you then they believe this is a sign of success!
Being able to remain centred, present and energised (exhibiting self-control) even when we feel uncomfortable is much more impressive than doing so in an environment where everything is to our liking and within our control.
No matter how good we are at controlling our circumstances, there will always be situations, limiting factors and people we cannot control. How we consciously choose to respond to these experiences determines the quality of our personal and professional lives. This is our emotional resilience!
To develop our emotional resilience then, is not about learning to control our environment. It is all about noticing our feelings and our immediate reactions, taking a moment to pause (and quickly reflect) before choosing to consciously respond, when we are confronted with a person or situation that irritates us. When you do this you can know you’ve made progress. It is when you have mastered this internal reality that you can claim to have well developed emotional resilience.
Do this and you stop trying to eliminate annoyances and instead learn to handle them gracefully – this brings us to the higher order of emotional intelligence.
Consequently, we propose you will find this personal re-frame so very powerful – choose to be thankful when you find yourself in the presence of people and experiences you find annoying – because they are presenting you with an opportunity to develop the effective and impactful qualities of patience, tolerance, empathy, self-belief, self care and resilience. Fortunately for most of us, within the realities of our lives, we receive an abundance of opportunities to practice and cultivate these qualities.
