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ISBN: Print 978-1-64739-501-8 | eBook 978-1-64739-305-2
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To my son, a beacon of light, love, and goodness. And to LG, whose resilience allowed me to heal and move forward from tragedy to wholeness.
Contents
Imagine for a moment that you have the resilience of a master. You go through your day able to weather whatever challenges come along. You go through your week, your month, your year confident in your ability to handle all the punches life throws at you. Imagine the circumstances of your life as they are now; whats changed is that you have exactly the resources you need to remain whole, steady, and solid. Reflect on how good this would feel. Take in the sense of mastery and empowerment youd experience.
I want you to know that this level of mastery is completely within your reach.
Whatever your age or life experience, its likely that youve experienced your share of challenge and difficulty along the way. Job instability, illness, accidents, loss of an important relationship, even a global pandemicthese events are part of the fabric of what we encounter in this journey we call life. And doesnt it often seem that just when you move through one set of challenges and find stability, another one arises? That, too, is simply the nature of life.
At times you may wonder how youll cope with the difficulties you face, and whether youll have the resilience you need when the going gets tough. Its true that resilience gives us the inner resourcescourage, strength, wisdomwe require to deal with difficult circumstances. But resilience also provides the realization that how we fare in life has less to do with the particular challenges we experience and more to do with how we respond to those challenges.
It turns out that you already have resilience deep within you. Though we often consider resilience to be an exceptional quality, in fact it resides within every one of us. But most of us dont know how to access our resilience, as we never learned that we each have a deep, unshakeable inner core of strength and capability. For many of us, rediscovering that buried core of resilience takes some thoughtful and determined excavation. That is just the journey on which this book is going to take you.
The tools to manage lifes travails and the inner core of strength you need are deep within you right now, waiting to be deployed. Modern neuroscience has revealed much about how we can tap into this core and sharpen those tools. In this book, well explore some of these evolving discoveries to deepen your understanding of the capacity for resilience that we all possess.
In my professional life, Ive worked with thousands of individuals going through all types of difficult life events. As a hospice physician, I was dedicated to helping those facing the end of their lives. I saw many of these individuals succumb to psychological pain and anguish. And I also saw many people mobilize their inner resources, enabling them to get their affairs in order, say goodbye to those who were most important to them, and spend their remaining time on what they valued.
Fifteen years into my work caring for the terminally ill, the practice of medicine entered a particularly challenging time. The advent of the electronic medical record, increased focus on productivity, and the emphasis on the bottom line left physicians feeling estranged from their calling, depleted and overwhelmed by administrative burdens that kept them from the important task of tending to their patients. I wanted to help and decided to become an executive physician coach. Over the ensuing 10 years, Ive had the privilege of coaching over 500 physician colleagues from around North America. In that capacity Ive also witnessed the tremendous ability individuals have to work with their own inner core to overcome the difficulties life has put in their path. Along the way I deepened my individual mindfulness practice and became a certified mindfulness meditation instructor.
I also have personal experience with building resilience. I grew up in a middle-class family, with well-educated parents. There was no alcohol or drug use, and to all appearances this was a happy and healthy home. But what went on inside the house was very different from the facade. Both of my parents had been severely wounded in their own lives, were not resilient from their own bruises, and as a result subjected me to significant abuse. I coped by focusing on schoolwork, by relying on friendships, and by escaping into books where good things happened, there was healing in the human condition, and happy endings were possible. I found the resilience to get through a difficult childhood, though it would take much more workand tapping into my inner coreto fully process, recover, and move on from the experience. Much excavation was necessary for me to rediscover my strengths and goodness.
