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Five secrets to resilience
This past Monday, I received some professional news that put me in a state of tears, failure, shock, and disappointment. It was the lowest that I’d been for almost a year. The experience itself felt devastating, and its effects were compounded by the overall anxiety of coronavirus and week 4 of shelter-in-place. Through this week, I’ve been experiencing all the emotions— shame, anger, grief, resentment, hurt and also freedom, compassion, love, support, confidence, and curiosity.
I’m definitely still in it and will continue to experience the cycles of grief throughout the coming weeks. At the same time, I’m sharing five secrets of resilience that have been fueling me through the week.
1. Acknowledge the Grief
The one coronavirus article that I keep returning to is a Harvard Business Review article explaining That Discomfort You’re Feeling Is Grief. We are grieving the loss of freedom, liberty, and the fact that so many things have been cancelled— weddings, events, gatherings, graduations, amongst others. We have loved ones who are sick, in pain, or dying, and we cannot be physically with them. The world has changed. It has become wildly uncertain. There is a sense of anticipatory grief that the article describes:
Anticipatory grief is that feeling we get about what the future holds when we’re uncertain…. Anticipatory grief is also more broadly imagined futures. There is a storm coming. There’s something bad out there. With a virus, this kind of grief is so confusing for people. Our primitive mind knows something bad is happening, but you can’t see it. This breaks our sense of safety.
Grief proceeds through all the stages: denial, anger, bargaining, sadness, and acceptance, however, it’s not linear. We may pass through all of these in a day, or even an hour, and they will continue to cycle over weeks, months, and years.
In the immediate day 1 of my news, I went through bargaining and denial. And then, knowing that I’m someone who typically processes bad news by driving myself into action to fix & change & learn quickly from what has happened and jump into an action plan, I decided to try something different. I took the counsel of my support system and my coaching training to Slow Down to Speed Up. I stopped to process my emotions rather…
