The Tribune

Michelle Miller Motivationals

Despite their devastating nature, hurricanes and other such tempests can serve up some valuable life lessons. Like the importance of being proactive, making proper preparation and managing limited resources etc.

But one of the greater rewards is it provides an opportunity to understand how well you weather life’s storms. Your capacity to get through the howling winds, torrential rain and extensive power outages etc., is directly tied to your sense of resilience.

While you have no power to stop the many storms of life, you do have the power to build your resilience to weather life storms with confidence. Resilience is that spring like, elasticity that enables you to face life challenges with unbridled courage.

This quality of resilience to navigate such natural disasters requires more than your physical strength. Instead, it takes oceans of emotional stamina. You may not pay attention to your emotional intelligence; however it is a treasured resource for staying calm and thinking up solutions.

Research on the subject of resilience suggests that folks who cannot manage their emotions – often fall prey to hysteria more likely to become overwhelmed by fear. This is often due to the lack of self-understanding and lack of adaptability.

Having resilience speaks to your flexibility to stretch beyond your comfort zone. It is about trusting yourself to rise up to meet adversities fearlessly. Understand that being fearless doesn’t mean the absence of fear but the realization that what you need to do is bigger than fear. So, you feel the fear but forge ahead anyway. When you face what you may fear, you strengthen your resilience to face the next challenge with courage.

Confidently weathering life storms also speaks to the many personal hurricanes that we all face from time to time. Losing a job, grieving the loss of a loved one, facing foreclosure, dealing with divorce or handling serious health concerns etc. Each of these can amount to a personal hurricane that wreaks havoc on your mental and emotional wellbeing. I believe that the more resilience we develop to deal with our personal inner storms, gives us a better chance of dealing with the many major storms that come our way.

This is why knowing how well you weather life storms is a crucial assessment that we all need to make. When you take the time to build your resilience in advance, it becomes a gift that you give to yourself. The bottom line is, whether you are prepared to weather life storms or not, storms will come your way. The best that you can do is to get busy building your inner strength.

You can start by looking at all the challenges you have already faced. So often we go through ‘hell’ without giving ourselves any credit. Every kind of ‘hell’ that you’ve endured adds to the currency of your resilience. But you must own it.

Nothing will hit you harder than life. Resilience helps you to understand that in life it’s not how hard you get it, but more about your ability to take the hit and bounce back with courage. This resilience is not innate – it must be developed step by step. We all can benefit from more resilience. Leader to leader recognize that the stronger your resilience, the better your chance of weathering the many storms of life.

Make today the day that you begin the process of building resilience to weather life storms. In so doing, you move yourself closer to living an empowered life. Yes, you definitely can do it.

What do you think?

Please send your comments to coaching242@yahoo.com or 429-6770.

© Michelle M. Miller 2017

• Michelle M. Miller is a certified Life-Coach and Communications/Leadership Expert. Questions or comments can be sent to email – coaching242@yahoo.com or telephone 429-6770 or visit or snail mail to P.O. Box CB-13060