Q&A: Community and Resilience
Share your stories and ask creative development coach Lorraine Blackley for advice about getting through adversity, as part of the Generator topic 'I've lost confidence and had a few knockbacks - I'm beginning to doubt my talent. What can I do?'
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When the knockbacks come hard and fast and are of the magnitude that people in Christchurch and Japan are experiencing we can sometimes wonder how to keep going and what is the point? When the world we live in is changing we need to evolve our consciousness and our functioning.
Two words come to mind, community and resilience.
Community - a pulling together and making sure of everyone’s wellbeing and not just your own. We have seen this as a natural human response to the current adversity in the local, national and international responses to Christchurch and Japan. Is humanity being called into a greater sense of community to increase our resilience in these times? Even as an individual facing your own private adversity, the message is don’t go it alone. Let someone know. Find someone to talk to and if friends and colleagues aren’t helpful, find professional or voluntary organisations to listen and assist.
Resilience is the positive capacity of people to cope with stress and adversity. This coping may result in the individual or community “bouncing back” to a previous state of normal functioning, or using the experience of exposure to adversity to produce a greater ability to cope with future adversity.
Use this Q&A forum as your community and share stories of adversity you have faced personally or professionally and how community, resilience or anything else has helped you. We can find courage and camaraderie in others stories.
Please feel free to ask me any questions you need about getting through adversity.
- Lorraine Blackley
Comments
23 March 2011 - 14:47 PM
Lorraine Blackley is available until April 1 to answer your questions. Use the comment box below.
One of the ways I find useful in getting through adversity is not to make the events that happen mean anything but rather just observe them. For example I recently sold my house and I needed to sell it for financial reasons but I also needed to sell it because it was time to move on. So I don't get caught in the drama of the economic times and go poor me financially I'm not making it. I stay neutral and go okay I need to sell my house and I look for what it is I am moving onto. Staying neutral and staying out of the drama. So far it has been a great adventure. I live in a country location, living with 6 others, close to the beach and have a swimming pool. I got a great price for my house, my life has improved 10 fold and I have hardly given my old house a thought, even though I loved it. I'm sure if I had got into the drama and felt sorry for myself things almost certainly would have gone differently. Staying neutral and staying in action certainly helps me face the hard times although it has taken a lot of practise to be able to do that.