Episode 27: Resilience

Well, hey, everybody, welcome to the 27th episode of Don’t lose your balance. My name is Mallory Durrick. So today, I’m going to be talking about something that we also talked about in the gratitude room, especially this morning. It’s Saturday. And we talked about resilience. And the story was about the British population during World War Two. And when Germany bombed them 454 straight days, they call it the Blitz. And they had set up psychology camps, if you will, outside of Britain, to help the people deal with all the problems that were happening from a psychological perspective during this time. And nobody went to these these facilities to get emotional help, they just somehow figured it out and learn to embrace whatever was going on and embrace doesn’t mean you’re embracing something with joy and happiness. It just means you’re embracing the reality of the situation. And that’s what they did. And when they did this, they showed an unbelievable act cohesively as a as a unit of people of humanity of resiliency. And that’s what the prompt was about. And it was talking about resilience. And I thought a lot about it since we closed the room this morning about resiliency for myself, even and I want to talk a little bit about it. But you can’t talk about resilience without understanding what the definition is. I mean, I think we all know intellectually what it is, I’m going to speak about it from a voice of clarity. So what is being resilient mean? Well, it means being adaptable, and human beings are actually more resilient than they are not the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties, or a toughness that you’re faced with having that toughness perhaps is a way of showing resilience. inanimate objects that spring back into shape are elastic and are resilient. But when you talk about what resiliency is in a person, psychologists define resilience as the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats, or significant sources of stress, such as family and relationship problems, serious health problems, or workplace and financial stressors. The question was asked how during the time of COVID, do individuals show their resiliency they adapted, they figured it out, they figured out how to go to work every day and perform their job responsibilities. They figured out how to manage their work life balance. If they have kids at home, and they’re working at home, they managed to figure out what was inevitable for them because they didn’t have a choice. And so they were resilient. But I do recognize, I think myself included, the people don’t like change, and we are creatures of habit, and yet the habit can get stale or worse, be unhealthy. So when I look back at the, you know, let’s say it’s the drug addiction, I was clearly inside of a situation that I couldn’t get out of until I made the decision to get out of it until I asked for help to get out of it until I acted with the courage of my convictions to get help. I was resilient in that I didn’t let it kill me and it could have killed me. Not something I would have liked. It never was my intent to die from any of it. But I had to develop some kind of a resilience to this addiction. It had to spring back into normalcy. And unfortunately I didn’t get all kinds of mess up overnight. So I didn’t get all kinds of recovered overnight either. I had to work at it. How do you develop a level of resiliency in your day to day? And I’ll get back to the hard part of resilience later. But how do you develop resiliency? Well, one, I would say you should learn to relax and be self aware, I think it’s really important to be mindful of everything that’s going on around you. One of the best things that I think I learned how to do was to edit my, you know, outlook in life I, I looked at my life, and I said, Well, it wasn’t always bad. I remember being quite good.

So I know that I can get back to that. But I need to have a better outlook on life and how and look at how I’m going to make a change. And what are those changes going to involve? What am I going to have to do in order to get to that next healthy mark, because I knew I had an ultimate mark of healthiness, but I wasn’t going to get from no healthy to super healthy, there, were always going to be phases of healthiness. I never anticipated it would take as long as it did. But I guess I had to really learn the hard lesson. What does that mean? I learned from my mistakes and my failures. And I think that’s probably the greatest takeaway of resilience. Because if I don’t reflect, frequently, I reflect on all of the mistakes that I made and all of the problems that I had, and not just okay, I have a problem, but how did I look at my life as problematic? And if I don’t look at that, and say, what can you learn from it, I can’t change it. The other thing I think is important to do is to choose your response, I could have stayed on a negative path for a very long time, or I could choose and I talk about choice in another episode, I could choose to respond more favorably, which would take me to my perspective of what that might look like. There is this common narrative that I do, and people do. And I remember somebody else talking about this, and I really resonated with this. Stop thinking about the all or the always, or the never the extremes of what those things mean, don’t have to come into the consciousness. It’s not always this way. And it’s not never this way. It’s sometimes this way. And I think that that helps, because it gives you a much better perspective and much greater clarity on what you’re dealing with, and how it’s all working for you. But more importantly than anything, if you want to spring back or get to a place of different than where you are now, you need to set some goals. And I think that’s fairly obvious. Yet, it’s very infrequently done, I didn’t really have any, I never had goals, I sometimes still don’t even have goals. But in my mind, I probably had goals. In my mind, I had goals that I wanted to live a certain kind of a life on my own. But I don’t think I was that matter of fact, about it. I, I think I got used to during the time of COVID, I got used to this kind of lifestyle that I really embraced and did love. Even though I said you don’t have to love anything you embrace. But I did love it. And I was surprised by how much I loved it. Because there had been times in my life where I didn’t, I didn’t like being alone. In fact, I felt very abandoned. I don’t feel that way anymore. And I guess it’s my resilient nature. From what I have overcome, that I recognize that being where I am is actually the opposite of where I was. So it has to be a lot better for me, you know, and then I guess what it what it ultimately did for me when I maybe learned to relax and practice self awareness. And I edited my outlook. And I learned from my mistakes and failures, I chose better responses, I maintained a very good perspective. And I set myself some goals, it helped build my self confidence. I think that self confidence is the root of all evil I do when you are not confident and I’m not just talking about going to work and not knowing what you’re doing. When you just command confidence you command a better audience and the audience could be the audience of one yourself. You’re just far more present. You’re more sure of yourself. And there’s always this thing that people say well, that’s easier said than done. Yeah, it is. It is easier said than done all of those things. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Meaning. It may be difficult, but it doesn’t mean it doesn’t need to be impossible. And I think That’s a very important takeaway. Nothing that you want to achieve or attain for yourself is really out of reach. It may be, I don’t know, a little unlikely, and it may be harder to get there. But there’s always a way when faced with adversity, and I have been faced with adversity, although my adversity was probably self induced. That doesn’t mean it was any less difficult to deal with. And I think that some people will say, Well, I can’t, I can’t leave my home, I can’t leave my, my job. I can’t, I can’t do some things. I think I would say, Are you sure about that? Because I did. I left scenarios that I didn’t think I would ever leave, I fought for some level of balance that I wanted in my life, because I just couldn’t take any more chaos. And I think that if you look hard enough, you might surprise yourself, just how adaptable you are. Now, clearly, if somebody said, you need to move out of where you live, in order for this, that and the other thing to have happen for you, I would my probably would question Well, is it something I actually want, I don’t want to move to another place. But I will offer the notion that I didn’t want to be sick, I didn’t want to be poor. I didn’t want to be in sales, there were all these things that I knew I didn’t want. And I knew that in order to get what I did want, I had to adapt, I had to learn, if I wanted to get out of sales and go into marketing, I had to take jobs in marketing, if I wanted to get out of marketing to get into web design and graphic design, I had to learn the tools that were needed. It just didn’t, I didn’t wake up one morning and say, Okay, I’ll be a go, I’ll go be a graphic designer, I had to teach myself many things. And especially in web design, because it’s not just design, it’s also a level of development, and I, and I’m confident with what I’m doing. But I am. So I, when I compare myself, which I know is a terrible thing to do. But when I compare myself to other people who do what I do, I think I don’t know anything. And then I think Wait a minute, you’re building sites and doing a really good job with it. And you are getting help. And you are learning things online, and you are getting better. And you are building your confidence. So you’re fairly resilient when it comes to adapting into this world, that I may think other people only know this. But I don’t only know web design, I know a lot of things. And that makes me feel way more confident than not. So if you care about change, which I clearly did, I cared about change in my relationships, I cared about change in my career, I cared about change in my lifestyle, you first have to commit to the process. So you can overcome whatever obstacles are in your way to get to whatever goal you want to achieve for yourself. There is something to be said about that process. And you may have to you know, get tough, and sometimes tough doesn’t always suit other people. And you have to think about what is the bigger priority. Somebody also use the word masking that individuals tend to mask whatever limitations they have, which is a way of showing resiliency. And there’s something really interesting about that. I don’t know if it’s a fake it till you make it or pretending that you’re something that you’re not until you just allow whatever you are to come out, and you need to likely be okay with it. And I think COVID brought out a lot of this in people I do. There are people who could who used to say I could never work at home and found themselves loving it or these doctors who had to find a way to do telehealth, how can you be a doctor when you don’t actually see your patient? Yet they did. And I can’t say they gave the best medical care but they surely kept in touch with their patients in a one in one environment. offices are no longer filled in waiting rooms that are person to person. Now they’re more adapted to just a few, which means that we get better attention at least here in this country. I think we get better attention from our doctors. They’re not spread so thin. I don’t know what the backend looks like and what the insurance companies are paying for or whether or not that’s going to work for the system ultimately, but it sure does work for me. I’ll walk into an office and I’ll check in and they’re calling my name because I already checked in online. So I think there’s something wonderful to be said about the resilient conversation. I think I’m very resilient. Despite not liking change, I don’t, I don’t like change. we’re creatures of habit, and I don’t like change. But I did welcome change when I had all this negative stuff. And it was hard because it was so familiar to just not be confident, it was so familiar to not be healthy, it was so familiar to just be stuck in these relationships. That didn’t work. For me, it was so familiar to be codependent and worry about what somebody else’s feelings were rather than my own. But in order to warrant the change that I really wanted for myself, I had to be very resilient in figuring out how to adapt into this kind of new Mallory that we that I am speaking of. And I hope that helps people figure out what’s right for them to get to a place of balance. Because yeah, I didn’t feel good with all the things that I went through. And I really wanted to feel happy. And I see what happy looks like I can feel what happy feels like, I know what happy happy is. And it’s a wonderful thing. And I hope for everybody that they get to achieve the same thing. So be your most resilient self. If you’re suffering through whatever you’re going through, find the resources that you need, just like I did, it doesn’t have to be what I found, but I did find resources and it wasn’t until I did that I could spring back to who I really ultimately was. Okay, well if you found value in this or any other episode of Don’t lose your balance. You can follow me download it, share it with somebody you know, I also have a website. It’s called Don’t lose your balance calm and I have two Instagram handles. One is Don’t lose your balance M S D That’s Mary Sam David and Mallory underscore Durrick. Okay, and I’ll see you next time and I hope today tomorrow and always you find your balance along your journey in life.  See ya

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Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Hi, I am Mallory Durrick. I am a creative. A Marketing Strategist and Web Designer with a small and modest boutique Marketing Agency living in the suburbs of Philadelphia. I am the creator and narrator of this podcast, Don’t Lose Your Balance. This is a culmination of decades of self-help books, countless doctors, numerous hospitals, including rehabs. Once a wife, now divorced, a mother, a grandmother and an addict in recovery. These are things that I am and have experienced.

I’m sharing it all. Baring it all. Hoping to help others; not lose their balance.