Do you Have a "Habit of Resilience"?
Do you have a "habit of resilience"? You might want to think differently about how you handle your high performance and empath yourself instead.
Gotcha, don’t I?
My sensitive high performing clients are often highly tuned in to others, very willing to shower them with empathy and compassion. And yet, when it comes to themselves, they tend to drive harder rather than empathize more.
If you recognize this dynamic, you need to know that your “habit of resilience” may be setting you up for a fall.
My own journey to self-empathy has led me to walk in many worlds at once. I’ve developed a multidimensional resilience that allows me to see myself and others more fully from a practical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual perspective.
Navigating life knowing everything isn’t as it seems on the surface allows you to get more comfortable with whatever’s happening, even if it feels uncomfortable or uncertain.
Callings rarely are comfortable or certain; they can’t be tied up with a bow. They remind you that something deeper and more expansive lives within you, not within a box.
Recently, when a trusted mentor asked me how I was doing following a bout of unexpected self-doubt, I said I was “tough” and that I knew how to make things work. After all, I’m nothing if not resilient.
High performers know how to “get through.” Resiliency is a common trait among us. But over the years, I’d built mine up so much that the truth is, I was whitewashing my inability to connect to myself and my source to rise above. Instead, I was just muscling through.
Ever happen to you?
Hyper performance isn’t high performance. If you have built up a habit of resilience you might need to become more empathetic and honest with yourself. You might need to stop grasping at straws and open to Source.
Otherwise, in the disconnected space you will long to create, long to practice an open relationship with the aspects of life that feed creativity and thriving, and you will also feel far far away from being able to do those things. This far away space makes you vulnerable to hyper performance.
And hyper performance kills creativity.
We’re all creative. And the nature of being human also means we get in our own way from time to time.
And when we do, we often follow the sheep to left brain-based success, thinking the only way we can succeed is to be practical and not creative. We think creativity takes time. We think artists don’t make money and therefore creativity is not valuable. That’s when efficiency, practicality, and tech can take over, stunting our humanness.
That’s also when our fears come out of the woodwork: fear of judgement, fear of not being or doing enough. These doubts can be so debilitating, we flail and search for the ground under us. We give up creativity in the name of certainty, safety, and even service. We become transactional, thinking if we sacrifice creativity in the name of selfless service we’ll finally be successful.
We over give. In the short term, this makes us feel generous and connected to others. In the long run, we could be squandering the big gifts that want to come through us.
We do the same things over and over again expecting different results because the road to creative success isn’t a linear process.
Sameness leads to brain death. So does banging our heads against the proverbial wall.
We end up working for companies and people we care about, but we stop caring for ourselves. If only we could get to the third mind as easily as we can open a Google Doc. And while our creativity is always available, it’s not necessarily an on-demand resource.
There are points in all of our journeys where we build the resilience we need to succeed. And for many of my high-performing clients it easily becomes a habit. We grow up by way of resilience and we don’t stop to imagine what we’d do without it.
We don’t realize resilience is a form of contraction, not expansion. AND it’s dynamic. You don’t just stay resilient, you adapt.
It works, until it doesn’t.
When ours becomes a habit of resilience, it can lead to brittleness, not flexibility. We’ve come to believe that unless we’re resilient, we won’t survive - but by now most of us want to truly thrive.
A truth from evolution: variance is what survives.
Insights are like magic weapons. And perhaps what’s most magical about these weapons is that they appear when there’s a need, a threat to our survival. If we allow ourselves to feel that need, and really empathize with all of the feelings that go with it, insight can lead to thriving.
Creativity and leaning into our callings go hand in hand. As sensitive high performers, if we accept the challenge of living our best lives, we must also be willing to make the exquisiteness of our existence a priority. And, if we’re to answer the call, we’ll likely be asked to risk it all consistently to achieve our heart’s desires and protect - and thrive in - our one precious life.
Connect with me on LinkedIn, or at katie@katiepeuvrelle.com. I always enjoy hearing your thoughts.