A Stress Reduction Technique from the Wild + Brave Coaching Archive

This live coaching originally broadcast on June 11, 2020 and features Wild + Brave's Coach Morgan Hendrix, and several Wild + Brave Humans (thank you to Johnna, Willian, and Anthony for contributing to the live conversation) who added their insights to the live coaching session.

For more resources to help you be resilient, check out:

• Stress Rescue Routine: EASE
• Thriving in the Squeeze
• How to Recover from Compassion Fatigue.

Here is our transcription of this Live Coaching:

Hello, friends welcome to Wild + Brave. Today's topic really focuses in on one of the most practical easy ways to build your resilience. And it's, instead of starting in your mind, you start with your body.

Hey, Johnna, I'm so glad you could make it live today. Great to have you with us. Johnna's one of my buddies. Let me know how you are friend.

Today with the topic of resilience, I, this is a little popcorn question. You can answer it in the replay comments or if you're live. Tell me something you have done in the last week or so where you faced something unexciting, and you bounced instead of breaking. You can take your time coming up with the answer to that. I know some of us really like to take her time kind of thinking through a story before we share it, but you can share it whenever you're ready here.

With this question, you get a chance to notice where you have been resilient because it's really important that we see where we are showing up strong and whatever you notice in your life grows. So you feed your resilience by noticing your resilience. So share with me and all the rest of us here at Wild + brave. If you can think of something you did something you faced on the last week or so where you bounced you bounced back or you pivoted you were able to find a new way when things happened, in more of an unexpected way.

When we talk about building resilience using your body one of the first and easiest things in the world is to grab your breath. So if you're a meditator or if you've studied mindfulness or honestly, even if you're just someone who has had some help with anxiety reduction techniques or pain management techniques, the first tool we use with our body to help us take a moment is the breath. So everyone who's watching, if you're in the replay, I hope you participate just as if we're live.

But take a big breath for me. When you breathe, you want to feel it fill your body. And when you end up taking a deeper breath than maybe you've been taking for a little bit it's amazing how cleansing that breath can be.

When you breathe on purpose, the breath takes up some of the space that you're thinking does. And when you focus on your breath, it allows all of the things that are running around in your head a moment to pause. And so just taking a breath is one of the first things you can do to give yourself a moment when you breathe in, you've probably seen the moms, you know, or if you're a mom, you know, sometimes you take a breath before you react. That's what you're doing. You're giving your brain space to live in before your reaction comes out.

Oh, it looks like Johnna answered here. Something that you pivoted or you bounced instead of breaking, you're experiencing some hiccups with your move. Moving is naturally stressful. We're sending a little extra wild and brave love for your move because that is difficult. May you find more ease as you move forward with your move. Things that happen unexpectedly and interrupt your progress. It'd be really easy to get discouraged. Wouldn't it?

Well good for you with your pivoting, with hiccups and moving. Let us know if there's something you tried or some way you stayed creative. Or maybe a way that you helped yourself take a break and step back that helped you stay resilient, Johnna. The more you tell us about how you stayed resilient, the more kudos it gives your brain and helps it continue to repeat and even grow that behavior. So rock on, thank you for sharing with us.

I look forward to seeing what people put in the, in the comments of the replay. All right. So for today's physical technique, we know the power of the breath. The breathing is part of what keeps us going, but when you breathe on purpose, it can clear your mind and it can give you a moment in which to reconcile or deal with an emotional response.

So today if you're on our wild and brave email list, you saw something about this. There's a technique. I use it a lot. I actually used it a lot today. I'm also in the process of working on a move. And so when you're moving they're always so many details.

And even just everyday life, these days seems you hit a lot of strange dead ends now. And then, and every time I run into something that could be discouraging like. This morning's email to everybody. I actually lost all an hour and a half of work. Just gone in a second because I, I did something weird.

I clicked the wrong thing and it just, it was gone poof. And it was, I had the opportunity to be very discouraged by that. And I use this, so this is what we're, we're focusing on today. Don't worry. We'll dredge up all the other good stuff for later. Hey, Willan, so good to see you. I have missed dancing with you, my friend.

So when you do this technique it's when something has gone wrong maybe it's a mistake you made like me clicking the wrong button today and losing all of my work. Maybe it's a disappointment. Maybe if you're, you know, for Johnna, who's moving maybe the place you thought you were going to move to actually didn't work out what a disappointment that would be. Maybe it's difficult change in circumstances. Like if you have kids in school and all the upheaval of what's going to happen with their schooling situation might just be news that forces you to change your plans.

When that happens, you can react by receiving it with your whole body in an instant. And in that instant, by receiving it with your body, you bring your mind to a place where it can deal with it. So here's how it works. A mistake happens, failure or discouragement. You reach up with both hands and you say, "okay!" I want everybody to do it.

You can look weird wherever you are. You're probably at home today at this time. But do it wherever you are, which you say, okay, all right. When you reach up your arms like that, you're actually opening your chest. You are activating a lot of muscles and it helps. Fix your posture. If you started crunching on yourself. One of the first things we do physically, when we're disappointed or we fail we experience a loss. We protect.

And when you crunch in on yourself with that self protection, you actually squish your diaphragm and you, you compress your lungs and a lot of other organs that don't need to be all squished up. So when you reach open, you are expanding all that and gives you a good breath. All right.

Now, when you reach up like that, and I like to have my palms open because that stretch also activates more muscles. When you say. "Okay." Say I, I lost all my dad. I click, click, click. Okay. The, you may have heard us use the phrase, "so that happened!" where you notice that something has gone wrong and you acknowledge it and you don't freak out, you don't swear.

For those of us who kind of have a colorful reaction to things going wrong, this gives you something that's completely child appropriate you can do. This is a very family friendly response to a problem. Where you reach up and you say, okay, and you go back to what you're doing now. Usually when things go wrong, you have to make a choice.

Am I going to try again, try harder, keep my head in the game to push through or does this problem, this failure, this feedback mean I need to make a change. How do you know the difference between when something is a sign it's time to pivot or it's a call to work harder? Who kind of has some, some, some feedback on that.

Hey, Anthony, glad you could make it. When you think about moments that call for you to try harder to dig in, how do you know it's the right thing to stay in there? What's the signal to stay in there? For me sometimes what helps me stay in the game and know that it's a "try harder" situation.

If I reach up and I say, "okay," and I think about what the loss means or what the disappointment means. If what I care about is still on the other side of the disappointment. Say a relationship that matters a great deal and maybe I'm trying to repair communications with someone who we just don't communicate very well.

. It happens sometimes you start to have poor communication patterns that are really hard to break with somebody. So say we experienced a setback and it happens again. Maybe I fall off the face of the world and stop texting back or they take my texts completely out of context.

I can say. "All right. That text didn't go well." What do I do and think into the response.

We got some feedback here. Hugs to you too, Willian. Say hi to Liz for me. All right. Johnna says, Oh, this is some feedback on how she stayed in the game and stayed resilient.

She said, mindful breathing. You're using your breath. Good for you. Asking for help, asking for help is. One of the best resilience strategies, because it connects you to other people. And it's a measure of you taking action. When you can put your need into words, it helps you claim ownership of the situation, even when it isn't fixed yet.

And by asking for help you engage the people around you which is awesome, staying positive and focused staying positive and focus can be a challenge. And when you, when you do what you need to, to stay in the game, that's awesome. That's a game changer. And allowing myself to do something special for myself.

That's good. So sometimes you have to feed a little energy into yourself in order to recharge to get some fresh perspective. I think we all have different ways of getting that fresh perspective. Whether it's going for a walk outside if you have furry children and anyone who has a dogs or cats who like to go for a walk? I don't know a lot of cats like to go for a walk but going for a walk outside for me going to the beach or having a bubble bath with jazz music something that just lets me decompress playing with my plants outside that sort of saying whatever you do to put a little energy back into yourself can be really good, good technique for keeping you in the game when you're disappointed.

So I want everybody to do it with me one more time. If bad news hits. Yeah. What are you going to do? The instant? You get smacked with the bad news. I want you to reach up and say, "all right." now, when you do that, I'm kind of leaving my arms up a little longer because being on video, it's kind of weird seeing yourself do stuff.

But people who know me have seen me do this in conversations. For example, say we're working on a project where we're putting in carpet and a friend's house. Or we are throwing a party and I suddenly get news that something's not coming together right. Maybe something's not working or something is broken.

If it's a disappointment and I have an emotional reaction, I often will just reach him and go, okay. So what do we think we should do? That moment of "okay." Allows me to receive it. And instead of reacting to it, I can let my brain go to work on dealing with it.

Who resonates with that difference between having a reaction to something and actually being able to go to work, dealing with it?

Sometimes when we react, we get caught up in the thinking about whether this should have happened or not. We may get trapped in a cycle of looking for who's to blame that it happened. Who's gotten stuck there? Know all of us have at one time or another. Anytime you're trapped in your reactions and ruminating on whether things should or shouldn't be this way, you are delaying dealing with the problem.

Sometimes you need to step back and think about why is this happened? What is the source of this problem, and you need to do business with it. But simply being trapped in the reactive mode delays, being able to get through it and move to a more productive or successful place.

Anthony has got some insights on the, "is something we're fighting for, or do you push through when there's dis you know, disappointment or do you move on?" And Anthony says, "you gotta ask yourself if it's worth fighting for do the efforts you've been putting in ever take root. Or do the birds of life steal those seeds."

Sometimes when you invest in things they don't instantly pay off and work completely. But that if you put effort in, you can see it start to make progress like with sowing and reaping. When you put in and invest your time or your efforts, or you work a strategy it's like planting seeds and you have to tend them and care for them, even when they're not bearing fruit in order for them to get to that place.

But sometimes the places that you're planting seeds, other things come and steal the seeds or the seeds just never really come to fruition. And if you take a view of whether you're seeing progress, even if it's imperfect progress that can help, you know, whether to stay in the game or perhaps the approach just isn't working.

That's that's a good metaphor there too, Anthony, with the seeds, sowing and reaping. Good visual. A lot of us are visual learners, myself included. So always like having those pictures.

As you move forward with this idea of receiving the bad news it goes directly in the face of our natural reaction, which is to fight bad news.

When we hear or find something that feels like a setback or maybe is a failure. Whatever it may be. Part of us goes through the first couple of stages of grief where we start with denial. Like, "Oh, this can't be happening." and so when we fight it or we seek to blame others for it, it's a way of keeping it away from us.

But if we receive it, it puts us in a position powerful enough to choose our reaction. Now who out there has tiny Wildin Braves. Who's got kids. Or kids in your life, maybe you're a mentor or a teacher. Maybe you have grandkids that you're you're with more than you're with your adult children anymore.

Whoever has little ones, this is a good thing to teach kids. Anything where a kid can use their body to react to an emotion and have it be productive and balancing is really good. So if you have kids, this might be something to talk to your partner, talk to your spouse, ask them about, you know, Hey, could this be a new family thing where when we're disappointed or angry or feel a negative reaction that we can "okay!" and then address whatever is going on and be cool to see what happens in your culture.

It's a really good one for adults too. If you have a team a team of people who's working, whether you're in a ministry or maybe you have maybe you have a business team together, this could be a shorthand that you all agreed to adopt that gives you more resilience in your reactions. You can choose to do this in order to extend the bandwidth that you have in your relationships. Those quick reactions of blame and fear and denial can really take chips out of people, us included our own unresilient reaction depletes our resourcefulness.

So give it a try with your family. Like Anthony's got his little tribe. I love that little emoji. That's. So adorable. And you can try this with your kids or the kids around you. If you're in public and you want to embrace this, but you're still getting used to it, you actually can do the okay to the side or down.

Right now, I'm sitting cross legged on my chair and which is just how I sit all the time. And if I was having a video conference and someone gave me bad news, something I really didn't want to hear, or they're, dealing with something I didn't think we were going to be dealing with. I could physically accept it right with the breath. And what I'm doing is I'm actually opening my hands down below the seat and it opens my chest up.

Use this to lengthen your fuse. And help you have more resilience today. Let us know how it goes, and we will see you again next week. Thank you to everyone who is on live. And if you're in the replay, we love you too have a great day and stay wild and brave everybody.