Empower yourself to accept and adapt and move forward!
When I was running several veterinary hospitals before the strokes, coping was my middle name. I’m sure that described you before your stroke. Whatever you did before the stroke, you probably had the same middle name. The question is, do we still have coping skills after the stroke?
Coping means some of you are just getting by. To others, it means you are more than coping; you are resilient. Resilience is the ability to handle difficult life events, like when you had a stroke! You can bounce back when life gives you scrap.
Resilience empowers people to accept and adapt to situations and move forward. They can use their resources, strengths, and skills to work through setbacks. Being resilient does mean that people do suffer, experience stress, or have emotional upheaval. It’s not mental toughness. Resilience means working through emotional pain and grief by tapping into your strengths. It means seeking help from your support systems, so you can prevail.
It is vital how you explain setbacks to yourself like a stroke. You describe an event or something in three ways:
- Persistence
- Finite
- Personalization
Persistence is how the effect is permanent or temporary. How you frame the event is important. Resilient people will see the event as temporary, even only a small part of it. For instance, you might say, “I can’t move my hand and I will never get it to move.” Instead, you can say, “My hand is weak, and I will attempt to move my finger today.” How you define it, makes it temporary.
The next factor is finite. How you describe the event, will determine how much of your life is affected. Resilient people say an event is finite. They put boundaries around setbacks or damaging events like a stroke. Otherwise, it will affect other unrelated areas of your life. For instance, you could say, “I cannot move around very much because I had a stroke.” Or you could say, “I can move around my neighborhood a little more than last week.” Your description will decide what it means.
Finally, personalization is how you decide that the event is specific and close to you. People who have resilience have Teflon on themselves when bad events occur, like a stroke. For instance, you might say, “my stroke has affected me in so many ways, I am in trouble.” Or you can say, “this stroke has a major effect, but I’m still going to live my life in spite of some consequences.”
If you make an event temporary, the effects are limited, and with narrow personalization, you will be more resilient and better handle the event and its consequences. Resilience will give you the emotional strength to cope with your stroke and whatever life gives you.
Please leave me your comments below! You can view my other videos. Check out my YouTube channel (drbcalhoun@gmail.com). You can share my last video titled “Are you curious?” I bet you are interested!
Thank you. To your success!
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#yourcopingskills
#acceptandadapt
#resiliencemeansyoudoit
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#finitestroke
#personalizationstroke
#emotionalstrength
#betterhandle
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