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How to Develop Your Resilience by Dealing with Your Negative Head Chatter (Part 3) - Guest Article by Jill Maidment

One of the key stumbling blocks to improving your Resilience skills is a nagging negative voice.  Resilience Coaching and Training help to retrain negative thoughts into a more positive direction, enabling individuals to cope better, whilst also improving self-awareness, self-management, and emotional intelligence. Outcomes include becoming more motivated, boosting confidence, and developing more effective problem-solving and decision-making techniques.

Effective ways to deal with your Inner Critic

Since the Stone Age, our Inner Critic has been there for a reason – to stop us trying to ‘fight the woolly Mammoth’ or run away from it.  Our negative voice is often driven by what you were told when you were a child.  However, what it’s telling you now may not be true, so keep challenging your inner thoughts and ask yourself: ‘Is that true?’ Chances are it isn’t, so concentrate on thinking about what are real facts.  Then make a list of all your qualities, interests, and activities you enjoy which make you unique and refer back to this list in difficult times.

Neural Pathways

Your neural pathways involve every thought you have and everything you feel; these then create habitual thoughts and feelings.  In turn, these can create limiting beliefs which can hold you back in every area of life.  The good news is that it’s possible to create new neural pathways, but you need to keep working at it, as some negative beliefs can be deeply ingrained.  So, ask yourself lots of open questions, which begin with How? What? Where? Who? When? Why? These are far more effective than asking yourself closed questions which can only result in a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer, for example, ‘Am I good enough to do this?  Shall I back out of this presentation?’  Open Questions lead to more rational thoughts, such as: ‘What’s really important and what really matters to me?’  And: ‘What would my best friend or Coach say to me in this situation?’

Find the positives

Remember that you wouldn’t criticise yourself as much as your ‘inner judge’ points out your faults, so stop beating yourself up and practice self-compassion.  It’s also important to embrace your imperfections and try to stop being perfect.  Attempt to replace your inner negative messages with positive statements such as: ‘I used to be bad at doing presentations, but after the course, I’ve become good at them.’  Keep building up a list of positive statements, experiences, feedback, and affirmations to repeat often, for example, ‘I have a right to be here and present to these people because I have excellent knowledge to share.’

Resilience is a learning curve

Once you have improved your negative head chatter, you should feel more resilient and able to ‘see the wood for the trees’ regarding any challenges.  Then you should feel more confident in your ability to solve problems and make decisions.  Instead of criticising yourself and asking yourself ‘yes’ or ‘no’ questions, which lead to a black or white response, if you have a problem you need to resolve, define the objective at the beginning.  Then start identifying possible causes of the problem, then gather information and check facts.  Look at all the options to solve the problem and list all the pros and cons.  Once you can see a good option, run it past someone reliable.  Afterwards, if you feel that you’ve made the wrong decision, don’t beat yourself up – it seemed like the best move to make at the time.

Becoming more resilient will also enable you to realise that you are not failing, but rather learning from your mistakes.

Jill Maidment is the Founder of Natural Talent, Bristol. She works with clients in some of the largest global companies, as well as public sector organisations, delivering Executive Coaching, Career and Transition Coaching, and Resilience Coaching. Jill has extensive experience, in the past, having worked for one of the world’s largest Counselling Consultancies, introducing Employee Assistance Programmes. She has also worked closely with Counsellors, managers and staff dealing with the aftermath of a range of major disasters, including an air crash, rail crash, and terrorist attack.

Jill believes that in the new normal, we shouldn’t be focusing on bouncing back to how things were pre-pandemic; we need to bounce forwards with renewed resilience and energy to deal with whatever challenges and ongoing change come our way.  Jill regularly speaks to large global audiences, and she has published many expert audio talks on key leadership and management topics.

Want to find out more about resilience?

You can read the first and second articles in this series from Jill. If you want to download Jill’s short eBook on Resilience  ‘The Ultimate Resilience Manual – Bounce Forwards with Resilience to Cope with key Challenges’, visit the link.

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