Elena Aguilar - The Onward Workbook Daily Activities to Cultivate Your Emotional Resilience and Thrive

Copyright 2018 by Elena Aguilar. All rights reserved.

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ISBN 9781119367383 (Paperback)

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Preface

Welcome to your workbook.

This is a place for you to explore the ideas I've described in Onward and to engage in practices that might shift your thinking, feeling, and behaviors. Resilience is cultivated with intentional action, and I hope that action might start in the pages of this book. I hope you'll allow me to guide you along some of the paths that can boost your resilience.

This book is me as a coach. It contains the questions I'd ask you if I were coaching you or facilitating your team's weekly meetings; it contains the activities I'd suggest that you try. You always have choice, and you don't have to do any activity that you don't want to do. But if we met in person, you'd hear the encouragement in my tone of voice and the gentle nudge in my words, Just try it! I'd encourage you to try every activity in this book, even the ones you'd like to turn away from.

Here are some of the ways I envision you using this workbook: I see you waking early on Monday, having slept a full eight hours, but up in time to crack this book open before heading off to school. I see you drinking a cup of coffee or tea, flipping through the chapter of the month, and spending 15 minutes on an exercise before going to school. In another scene, you're using this book with a group of colleagues, reflecting on one of the activities and talking to each other about your insights and connections. Sometimes I see you in the evening, jotting down a short reflection on one of the activities you'd tried that day. Finally, I envision you on a weekend afternoon, sitting under a tree or somewhere comfortable and digging into one of the activities that'll take a little longer, or going through a series of activities.

I hope you will integrate this workbook and its activities into your daily life. Toss it into your school bag on occasion, even only so that it serves as a reminder of what you're learning and practicing. You will cultivate your resilience if you engage in these activities regularly. You're about to build some mighty resilience muscles'and those need daily strengthening.

Each chapter contains enough activities for you to do one each day for a month'that's how I've envisioned that this workbook (and Onward, the book) will be consumed. However, there are many activities that you'll want to try more than once. You'll need to transform these activities into mental and physical habits in order to truly cultivate your resilience. It's the equivalent of wanting to have big biceps; you know that you'll need to do more than one set of biceps curls on one day if you're going to change your body shape. Of course, I don't assume that you'll be able to do every one of these exercises every day. That's why you need to try them all'so that you can figure out which ones work best for you and which ones most benefit your mind.

The order of activities in each chapter is somewhat random. The first activities introduce the habit, and the final activities guide you to reflect on your learnings from the chapter. I've organized the activities in between to offer variety in the kinds of activities and the topics they explore. You might go through them in order, but you are also welcome to jump around to the ones that most interest you.

Each chapter offers a few recurring exercises in which the structure is the same, but the topic is different. For example, I invite you in every chapter to explore an emotion (such as love, envy, or anger) through visual art. Each month, I also invite you to write a letter to an emotion as a way to understand that emotional experience for yourself. I close each chapter with an activity to help you reflect on the learnings in the chapter and also concretize a vision for yourself of a more resilient you. One of those activities is called Destination Postcard (a term adopted from the Heath brothers' brilliant book Switch). That's an activity for which I hope you'll consider sketching, collaging, or doing anything that makes that vision more vivid and meaningful to you.

Some of these activities will be best engaged in before or after school, or when you have more time. The following icons clarify which activities will be best during what time of day.