Okay friends. Can we just be honest for a second? Life is full of. Full-stop for all of us. I know sometimes it can be tempting to compare our lives to others and to feel like it looks like someone else has an easy life or their life feels way better than ours does. But the truth is part of being human is facing challenges and difficulties.

[00:00:32] And the question that truly matters is how we will respond in the face of those challenges. Will we grow through it? Will we learn from it? Will we develop resilience, or will we let the challenges we face get the best of us? Today on the show, we’re digging into this concept of resilience.

[00:01:05] We hear this term thrown around a lot, but I wanted to really unpack what is resilience? Why does resilience matter? And what are some specific strategies that we can use in our lives to cultivate resilience for ourselves? And for those around. So you ready? Let’s dive into the show.

[00:02:12] Okay. Before we dive into talking about resilience, I want to let you know that I am going live in our Facebook group tonight with a brand new training for you, it’s called more than a milspouse: How to find yourself again and figure out what you really want in life. Now, I plan to give you more warning that I was going live in the group that this training was coming.

[00:02:39] But if you go back and listen to my March real life recap, you know, that life has been a little crazy for me, right? We are in the middle of an overseas PCS. We are moving from one island to another, all of our household goods have been packed up and shipped. And I have been searching for a free spot on the calendar, around all of our moving dates and appointments and everything going on in my life.

[00:03:06] I wanted to carve out this time and I was searching for space in our calendar. I really wanted this training to happen around military spouse appreciation day, which is this Friday, may six. We get to celebrate you as a military spouse. And that’s when I started thinking about, okay, what do military spouses need right now?

[00:03:27] And the one thing that I kept coming back to was this concept of identity and how so many military spouses struggle with identity, who they are outside of being a military spouse. And so this training is specifically designed to address the concept of identity, how we get stuck here, how it holds us back.

[00:03:52] And we’re going to talk about five specific strategies that you can do to get clear on who you are and what you really want. I’m going to give you specific exercises you can do to get clarity on who you are to get in touch with yourself, or maybe discover yourself for the very first time. So if you are feeling stuck in life, if you have a friend who is struggling with identity, um, I would love for you to share this training with them.

[00:04:21] I wanted to go live in the group so we could have like some face-to-face interaction and share some slides with you. And that’s really difficult to do sometimes when we’re on the podcast. So that’s why I’m going live specifically in our group. If you are not already a part of our group, all you have to do is go to milspousemastermind.com forward slash community. That will take you right there. I hope that you can join us tonight at 8:00 PM Eastern standard time, 7:00 PM central and whatever that calculation is for wherever you are in the world. It’s 11:00 AM tomorrow Chamorro standard time in case you were curious, but I hope to see you there.

[00:05:09] All right, let’s talk about resilience. I want to start today with this quote, because I feel like this so well describes what we’re talking about today. It is a quote from Eric Creighton and it says no one escapes, pain, fear, and suffering yet from pain can come. Wisdom from fear can come courage from suffering can come strength if we have the virtue of resilience.

April was month of the military child. And I heard someone pose this question are military kids really resilient? And I had to stop and think about that question for a moment, because I know we talk about resilience in the military a lot. It’s a term that gets thrown around that gets used a lot.

[00:06:04] And we talk about it when we refer to our children and how much they move and they start new schools and they build new friendships and they join new clubs and organizations. And we talk about how we’re raising resilient kids. But are they really resilient? And the more that I thought about this question, the more that I thought, you know, this is something that we need to talk about together on the show, because resilience, isn’t a default response.

[00:06:35] We don’t automatically develop resilience just because we go through a difficult situation. It’s something that we cultivate. It takes intentionality.

So what exactly is resilience? Well, there are a lot of different definitions, depending on where you look dictionary.com defines resilience as the power or ability of a material to return to its original form position, et cetera. after being compressed or stretched. It’s this idea of a person, the ability of a person to adjust to or recover readily from illness, adversity, major life changes, et cetera. The idea of buoyancy. Ultimately resiliency boils down to our ability to adapt and overcome adverse traumatic or stressful situations.

[00:07:41] Resilience is a series of thoughts, behaviors, and actions that led us bounce back after difficult, challenging circumstances. And as I said, at the beginning of this. We all face difficult and challenging circumstances.

So why does developing resilience matter? Well, we want to bounce back. We want to let these events, these situations, these unwanted things that happen in our lives that can either really mess with us, with our ability to function as human beings. We can become stressed out, overwhelmed and exhausted, or we can learn strategies that will help us bounce back that will help reduce our stress levels that will reduce our anxiety. That will help us overcome challenges that will ultimately empower us to move forward in life.

[00:08:44] To ultimately become better versions of ourselves and in turn, allow us to empower others to make a difference in the lives of others. That’s what resilience can do for us. We become better overall versions of ourselves and more equipped to help others and to make a difference in the world, to live lives of meaning and purpose, to find fulfillment and ultimately to discover who we are meant to be.

[00:09:14] So resilience is definitely something that we want to cultivate in our lives. And fortunately, the military sees that resiliency is important, that we all face these difficult events. And just by being a military spouse, being in a military family, we’re going to go through a lot of difficult seasons, a lot of difficult events.

[00:09:42] In my own life we are in the middle of an overseas PCS. We’ve shipped our stuff. We’ve had a lot of days with,  just not knowing what’s happening when our orders were going to come through. Um, just in this waiting process that has the ability to stress us out, to have so many circumstances that are outside of my control.

[00:10:05] That aren’t necessarily what I would love for life to look like right now. But this is what is, and what matters is my ability to bounce back. To be able to navigate this without letting the circumstances, the situation overwhelm me, to knock me off my game, to keep me from becoming who I’m meant to be. That’s why we want to develop resilience.

[00:10:33] Now, how do we do that? There are all sorts of strategies and tactics that we can use to cultivate resilience in our lives. And this podcast is an excellent resource for how to do that. I am constantly looking at different ways to help you become more resilient, to help you with your mindset, with how you show up, with how you pursue your goals, with how you live a life of purpose in the midst of challenging circumstances.

[00:11:04] And if you’ve listened to this podcast for a while, you know that I’m a big fan of Viktor Frankl and logotherapy, which says our ultimate goal in life is not happiness. It’s living a life of meaning and purpose, and that’s how we find fulfillment. That’s how we truly live a fulfilling and a life where we are content with the way that life looks, regardless of our circumstance.

[00:11:33] If you haven’t listened to past episodes, you may not know that Victor Frankl was a therapist who actually survived the concentration camps in world war II. And he looked at all of the people in the concentration camps, the people that gave up and quit and, failed to keep living and the people that survived.

[00:11:53] And what was the difference between those that kept going from those that gave up? It really came down to having the sense of meaning and purpose in our lives. And he said, you know, we can discover meaning and one of three ways, and the first one is finding meaning in our work, what we do, or what we create. There is meaning in work.

[00:12:18] There is meaning the second thing is in love in experiencing truth or beauty or nature, or. Finding love in another human being when we experienced that love and that beauty, we can find meaning in that. And the third thing that he said provides us, meaning is our attitude that we take towards suffering.

[00:12:42] So we are going to experience difficult times. We’re going to experience suffering, but he said suffering ceases to be suffering the moment it finds a meaning. So we have the choice. We’re all going to experience difficult situations. We’re all going to experience circumstances beyond our control. But what really matters is if we can find meaning in the midst of suffering, and this is what the foundation of us developing resilience.

[00:13:16] So I want to just give you seven high-level strategies to help you develop resilience today. Like I said, if you go through all of these episodes in the podcast, you’re going to find a whole ton of episodes about practical strategies and tactics that we can employ to help us become more resilient people, but I just want to talk about seven strategies at a very high level today.

[00:13:42] So if this is your first introduction to resilience, this is a great place to start. I want to share this episode with a friend, give them an introduction to this is what it looks like to choose to take control of our lives, to choose to actively reduce our stress level, to become able to bounce back after these difficult situations.

[00:14:07] So the number one thing that we can do to develop resilience in our lives is to view difficulties as opportunities. It’s this idea of ceasing to view ourselves as the victim. Hey, all of these things in life happened to me and I’m just not happy with what happened. I’m the victim. And when we instead choose to empower ourselves and say, yes, this happened, but this is an opportunity.

[00:14:37] It’s an opportunity for me to learn from this experience to grow through this experience. And that there’s something that I can learn in this challenging situation. And really it’s that choice that we make to view difficulties as opportunities. That’s the starting point.

The second thing I would say to build resilience in your life is to take ownership of your life, to show up and get curious about your life and to not just let life happen, but to accept the life that you have, not the life that you thought you would be living. Not the life that you wanted, not all of the situations that you wanted to happen or the career that you wanted to happen. Accept what is. Get curious about the way life looks today, and then choose to step into your story to choose to say, this is what my life is, and this is how I’m going to make the most of it.

[00:15:39] I’m going to make today matter. I’m going to set goals and pursue goals and to choose, to make a difference in my own life and in the lives of others. To choose to pursue a life of meaning and purpose. You are choosing to step into your story. I have said many times on this show and I will say it again until I know that every military spouse believes that, that you have something valuable to offer.

[00:16:07] You were placed on this planet for a reason, for a purpose. And it’s up to us to live into our story and to bless others with the skills, with the experiences that we’ve gone through with the gifts that we’ve been given, we can make a difference in the lives of others. If we will choose to take ownership of our lives, embrace what is and step into living a better.

[00:16:37] The third thing we can do to cultivate resilience, to build resilience in our lives is to focus on managing our mindset. Now, what do I mean by managing our mindset? Our mindset is kind of another one of these big overarching terms that many people use. There’s a lot of definitions about what mindset is.

[00:16:59] What your mindset entails and what cultivating a healthy mindset looks like. I don’t want to go into too much detail here because I want you to go back and listen to episode 73, which talks about breaking the cycle of the negative thought loop and what we instead fill our mind with.

[00:17:26] So at a very high level view, it’s unhooking ourselves from unhelpful thoughts and taking and learning how to take action in accordance with our values, and choosing instead what we are going to actively fill our minds. So there’s this part of getting ourself unstuck, unhooking ourselves from the unhelpful, unhelpful thoughts and feelings in our head, and then choosing to actively fill our minds with what we are doing to grow, to cultivate a healthy growth-oriented mindset.

[00:18:06] There’s a lot that developing a healthy mindset entails, but like I said, the best place to start is go back and listen to episode 73, where we talk about getting out of that negative thought loop. That’s a great place to start.

The fourth thing I want to touch on at a very high level is taking care of yourself. And the next three parts really encompass the growth wheel that we talk about here on this show, which takes all of our lives and boils it down into these three key areas. These buckets that we need to have present in our life. If we want to live a fulfilling life, if we want to develop resilience. The first bucket is caring for ourself, and it’s how we take care of care of ourselves in terms of practicing rest, about caring for our physical health, our mental and emotional health, our spiritual health, and how we take care of our home. These are the things that we do, the practices that we engage in that allow us to show up as the person that we are meant to be, to do the things that we are meant to do. And a key part of that is learning to care for ourselves.

[00:19:24] Taking care of yourself is more than bubble baths and trips to the spa. It’s really engaging in regular rhythms that restore our soul, that fuel us and fill us so that we can show up in the world as the people we are meant to be. These are the things that we do that help us develop resilience and it’s practicing mindfulness.

[00:19:49] It’s practicing meditation. It’s making sure you get enough sleep. It’s making sure that you are fueling your body with the right foods. It’s practicing moving our bodies and getting enough exercise. It’s these things that really help us show up as the people we are meant to be and help us learn to thrive and be able to deal with all of this stress that gets added to our lives. So taking care of yourself is a hugely important piece of the puzzle when it comes to building resilience in our lives. The, uh, so we’ve talked about number one. Seeing difficulties as opportunities. Number two, taking ownership of our life. Number three, managing our mindset. Number four, taking care of ourselves.

Number five is the second piece of the growth wheel. And that’s really building connections, how we connect with others, how we connect with our spouse, how we connect with our kids and our family, how we connect with others in our lives. Cultivating relationships that help us, that fuel us, that give us life that are mutually beneficial and that are helping us become the people that we are meant to be. If we don’t have connections, we will suffer because we, as human beings are hardwired for connection and we need to have those healthy connections in our life to help us show up, to help us build resilience.

[00:21:29] The next thing is doing what matters. And this can also be considered pursuing your purpose, or if you take it in terms of the terminology we use in the growth wheel, this is the contribution piece, how we’re choosing to live our lives in service of others. So the film it comes from. Contributing to something outside of ourselves.

[00:21:51] And so this is really the doing what matters piece. And that comes from getting clarity on what really matters to us. What are our values? What do we care about? What is our why? What is our purpose? How are we going to live it out in our everyday life, in our current season of life? What are we called to do?

[00:22:13] And how are we called to show up on a daily basis? If you are currently at home with littles, and you feel like you’re not making a huge difference in the world, that’s okay. But there are still things that you can do to make today matter to show up and live your why, regardless of what season of life you’re in, it’s really getting clear and doing what matters. And when we do that, we’re going to build more resilience and thrive.

[00:22:39] The seventh way that we can build resilience. And I really want to touch on this because I feel like this is one that does not get touched on quite as much as a lot of other strategies. And that is setting value-based goals. Now, what do I mean by value-based goals?

[00:23:04] It has been scientifically proven that when we set goals, we are more likely to achieve those goals. And when life feels out of control, the easiest thing that we can do is to give up on our goals and to let life happen. But too many people live life perpetually in a state of letting life happen, a feeling like they are not in control of our life.

[00:23:31] And one way that we can take ownership of our life and craft a life with purpose is to figure out what direction we want to go in, how do we do what matters and then set goals based on our values. What’s important to us, how we want to show up how we want to serve and set goals based on that. It’s so easy.

[00:23:56] Even when it comes down to goal setting is to look at the lives of those around us and say, well, this is what they’re doing. These are the types of goals they’re setting. So I will set the same goals or similar goals, but those goals are not goals based on you, based on your unit. Your values, your purpose.

[00:24:18] And so if we can really get clear on who we are as people, what matters to us and set goals based on that, then that’s, what’s really going to help us grow into who we’re meant to be. And these goals that we set that are based on our values cannot be based on what other people are doing, what they’re accomplishing on, what they are accomplished.

[00:24:46] The goals need to be realistic, flexible, and achievable for us. And if you go back to January, you will see that I had a whole training on my flexible goal setting method. This is what I do every year. Um, every quarter I look at every month, these goals that are flooding. They are based on my values and how I want to show up in the world.

[00:25:15] And when we can set these types of goals and make progress towards those goals, even if we don’t hit the exact goal, the most important thing is that we are making progress in the right direction and setting those value-based goals is going to be a key part of developing resilience in our lives. So we’ve talked about seven things that are going to help us build resilience as military spouses.

[00:25:45] Number one, viewing difficulties as opportunities. Number two. Taking ownership of our life, not just letting life happen, not playing the victim, but choosing to take ownership to be the victor instead of the victim, if you will, um, to really take ownership of our life, um, number three, managing our mindset, unhooking ourselves from those unhelpful thoughts, learning how to, um, manage our thoughts to.

[00:26:19] Choose actions that are not based on feelings, but are in alignment with our values and are helping us make progress towards what truly matters. Uh, number four, taking care of ourselves. Number five, building connections, healthy connections that will move us towards who we’re meant to be. Number six, doing what matters, pursuing our purpose and number seven setting value-based goals.

Now, before I wrap this up today, I want to say that the very first step, if you are in this place of, well, I don’t know if I’m doing these things. I don’t know if I’m building resilience. Um, where do I actually start? Because all of this feels overwhelming. The very first thing that you can do is to become self-aware, start to notice where you’re at.

[00:27:15] What you’re currently feeling and experiencing, get curious about what’s going on in your, in your life, in your world, in your head. Um, it’s really starts with this self awareness piece. Now there are different tools, different assessments that you can take online that will kind of help you understand where you are in terms of.

[00:27:41] Um, and I will link in the show notes. There is an air force spouse resilience skills toolkit that is free for you to go through. I have been trained on all of the pieces of this resilience toolkit, but that’s a great place to start in. And it also gives you a link if you want to go take a resilience self-assessment so you can start to figure out, where am I struggling and how to start incorporating these ideas to build resilience.

[00:28:12] I will also say, just go look back on different episodes of this podcast, because these are all skills. Um, my goal every week is to give you practical tools and strategies to help you cultivate resilience, to help you find fulfillment, to thrive as a military spouse, and to live a life with meaning and purpose. So that is there for you as well.

[00:28:38] Please let me know if you have any questions. You can DM me on Instagram @milspousemastermind or better yet just pop into our facebook group milspousemastermind.com slash community will take you right there. We have a free Facebook group of military spouses seeking to build resilience and live a life of meaning and purpose.

[00:29:06] Pose your question in there, because if this is something that is on your heart on your mind, you’re probably not the only one that has that same question, that is struggling in that same way. And we want to be able to support and encourage each other. This is part of building connections and helping us become who we’re meant to be, to make a difference in the world, to use what we’ve been given to give back to others.

[00:29:31] And to really learn to thrive in the midst of challenging situations, because like I said, life is full of challenges and we’re all going to go through seasons of struggle. And we don’t have to let ourselves be filled with anxiety and stress. There are ways, there are strategies, there are tools that we can develop to navigate these, to bounce back, to be able to thrive in the midst of seasons of challenge and struggle.

[00:30:02] So I hope this episode blessed you. I am so excited for our training. To go live to give you more practical tools and strategies, and to celebrate military spouse appreciation day with you. This is going to be an exciting time to just celebrate you, to try to, bless you and to give you additional tools and resources to help you live and craft a life with purpose.

So until next time, may you have a wonderful week living filled, fueled and full of joy.