Self-Improvement ~ Resilience

When you come upon setbacks and frustrations in life, are you the type of person that makes lemonade out of those lemons?  Or do you stand there look and that pile of lemons and lament about how sour they are?

If you're like most people, it's real easy and very tempting to just kick that pile of lemons and let them roll all across the ground and just say, "To heck with it!".  But really what good does that do? You may get a temporary spurt of satisfaction, but in the end you are actually worse off, because now not only do you have the sour lemons, but a mess to clean up!

According to Dictionary.com, Resilience is defined as:

1.	the power or ability to return to the original form, position, etc., after being bent, compressed, or stretched; elasticity.

2.	ability to recover readily from illness, depression, adversity, or the like; buoyancy.

With all the things that life often throws our way, it can be pretty easy to feel bent, compressed, and stretched!  So how do you get beyond that?

One simple way is just to change your verbiage.  It takes a little bit of conscious effort at first, but just by catching yourself as your negative thoughts and words start to form, stop and try to re-frame how you're speaking. Just like adding some sugar to those sour lemons....

Now some things are just unavoidable and out of your control. But just to be sure ask yourself, "Have I done all that I can to render the situation?" If you feel you have, or the situation is of no fault of your own, another great question to ask is,"Could there be some underlying circumstances that I am unaware of?" Often times this can be the case and when you become aware of it, that can bring a totally new perspective to the situation. Sometimes solving it altogether.  :)

~Brenda

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Comments

[Kathy Myers]

That is so true! Kicking the pile of lemons (so to speak) only makes a bad situation worse. We can learn from every experience, good and bad, but sometimes we need to look at it from different perspectives to find the lesson.