Find and Build Your Inner Strength

"This post offers a basic road map for how to deal with issues—for healing, well-being and effectiveness, and personal growth.

1. What's the issue?

Pick an issue. (Maybe you're the rare person with just one.) Try to be reasonably specific. "Life sucks" could feel unfortunately true, but it doesn't help you focus on resources or solutions.

If the issue is located in your world or body, be mindful of how it affects you psychologically. Sometimes we just can't do anything about a condition in the world or body, but at least we can do something about our reactions to it.

2. What psychological resource—inner strength—if it were more present in your mind, would really help with this issue?

This is the key question. It can be interestingly difficult to answer, so initial confusion or struggle with it is common. Clues toward an answer could come from exploring these questions:

• What—if you felt or thought it more—would make things better?
• What—if you had felt it more as a child or whenever the issue began—would have made a big difference?
• Does the issue ever get better for you—and, if so, what factors in your mind (e.g., perspectives, feelings, motivations) help it be better?
• Deep down, related to this issue, what does your heart long for?

There could be more than one resource, of course, but, for simplicity and focus, it does help to zero in on just one or two key resources at a time.

Sometimes we need to grow an intermediate resource (e.g., the capacity to tolerate feeling rejected so that we are willing to risk experiencing that feeling) to get at the key resource we need to develop inside (e.g., the inclination to ask for love).

3. How could you have experienced this inner strength?

In other words, how could you activate it in your mind so that you can install it in your brain? This is the first step—"have"—of the HEAL process. You can learn more about it in my book Resilient or in this video on taking in the good.

It could be that the resource is already present, and you just need to notice it (e.g., the feeling that the body is basically alright right now). But, often, you need to create it deliberately (e.g., call up a sense of determination from the emotional/somatic memory of times you were pushed through a difficulty).

4. How could you help this experience of inner strength really sink into you?

In other words, how could you enhance the installation, the neural encoding, of this experience to grow this resource inside yourself?

This involves the second and third steps of the HEAL process: "enrich" and "absorb."

If you like, you can be aware of both the resource (e.g., feeling determined) and one or more psychological aspects of the issue (e.g., feeling helpless) so that the resource starts associating with and helping with these aspects of the issue. This is the fourth optional step of the HEAL process: Keep the sense of the issue small and off to the side of awareness while your experience of the resource is “big” and rich in the foreground of awareness."

Read the complete article available at Psychology Today!

Reflection:

What are your inner strengths?

#Strength #Self-reflection #Development #Growth