Resilience & our personal ECOSYSTEM
Navigating our inner worlds
Personal resilience is the capacity to sense, integrate, and relate to ourselves and the world around us in beneficial ways. It exists in our Personal Ecosystem, which is made up of our history, our emotional center, and our recurrent thoughts and actions. Our inner workings operate as their own system, with many parts interdependently woven together to create our complex life experience.
Building systems-based personal resilience is both a holistic and scientific process that involves sensing, evaluating, and adapting to your unique life circumstances. When we build personal resilience, we cultivate the capacity to withstand life’s challenges and we can be successful in changing circumstances. By deepening our understanding of the systems both in and outside of ourselves we are able to fully collaborate with the world around us, embrace our core selves, and thrive in uncertainty.
Over the last 25 years of my own growth and development journey, my life has changed drastically for the better. As I understood myself more deeply and saw how my behaviors affected my life and those around me, I started to see the dynamics outside of me with more clarity. As I built resilience and started to change my behavior, the world conspired to meet me. My behavior became more aligned with my core values and I felt better about myself overall. This grew my confidence. I was more open to collaborating with other people and my decisions and actions were more aligned towards complementary relationships. The more resilient I became, the more aligned opportunities showed up in my life, and the more I thrived.
Through the practice of resilience, we have the power to transform our own lives, uplift the systems around us, and facilitate positive change in the world.
What is a personal ecosystem?
Our unique personal ecosystem determines how we interact with ourselves and the external systems around us. It comprises our thoughts, feelings, processes, and conscious and unconscious beliefs and behaviors. It determines how we build relationships, how and where we work, what we choose as play, as well as which communities we join. At the core of our personal ecosystem is the nervous system, which consists of stored memories and neural pathways that define our behavior—this is where resilience resides. Regulating our nervous system is essential to building resilience.
The things we think and do regularly over time carve grooves in our neural pathways, systematically increasing the speed at which our neurons fire along those pathways and ingraining those behaviors more deeply. While these well-worn pathways are beneficial for productive behaviors, they can also entrench maladaptive patterns (i.e. overthinking, defensiveness, bypassing emotions, abandoning our needs, and so on.) Such patterns limit our neuroplasticity, creating barriers to change.
Furthermore, when we operate in maladaptive ways, our system is more vulnerable, particularly when disruption occurs. This fragility amplifies the ripple effects of any impact or stress we experience. The most vulnerable parts of us suffer the harshest consequences, and the rest of our system focuses on bringing everything else back into equilibrium to prevent those parts from being damaged or destroyed.
Is change possible? Yes, it is.
Certainly it’s true that making changes when we’re young is easier. This is because our neuropathways start forming during gestation and continue to develop through our twenties. Beyond that, forming new pathways becomes more difficult–but absolutely possible. My clients tend to range in age from 30-60, and are able to make remarkable changes in their lives through coaching techniques that build neuroplasticity.
By developing new pathways that put us in sync with our innate strengths, we can bring our personal ecosystem into alignment with our core self and change our overall behaviors.