Resilience

In keeping with Maria Wojtczak’s work on finding our passion, I have been thinking about 6 pillars of the authentic self. The first I call “resilience.”

On Resilience—drawing upon capacities of the “real” self that pull you through setbacks and enable you to keep moving ahead toward the goals that you have set for yourself –the capacity to experience a wide range of feelings deeply with liveliness, Joy, excitement and spontaneity.

A women that I worked with recently reminded me of many of the plucky individuals I have met at SJN --she had handled many obstacles at a major turning point in her life – despite much opposition from her parents, her boyfriend’s pressuring her and threatening to leave if she didn’t move in with him and her advisor leaving the university a year before she was finished her thesis.

Abigail was able to draw upon key capacities of her self that pulled her through these setbacks and enabled her to move ahead toward the goals that she had set for herself. She knew that choosing a career that was not in line with her father’s wishes was a wise decision and best for her; the “real” self provides for the experience of emotions both good and bad, comfortable or not-so-comfortable. These are an essential part of life which the real self does not create barriers against or go into hiding. It except the wide range of feelings and is not afraid to express them. Abigail had learned early in life that self-activation would bring positive responses from her environment.