Project Reassure: For-Self-Advocates-Understanding Resilience

 

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Resilience Skills: Self-Advocates

Introduction to Resilience

Resilience Skills: Self-Advocates

 

Staying in your Resilient Zone or “OK” Zone helps you to keep working on your goals. But how do you know where you are in your Resilient or “OK” zone? And what can you do if you are moved out of your zone?

Resilience skills are things you can do to help you:

Cartoon of a worried woman who is thinking about flowers.

  1. Know where you are in your zone
  2. Stay in your zone
  3. Get back into your zone if you are moved out of it

It will take time and practice to learn how to use these skills to become more resilient. The more you practice using these skills, the wider your resilient zone will become and the more you will be able to manage stress and challenges.

These skills can be used alone or together to help you stay in or get back into your resilient zone. These are the different resilience skills:

    • Tracking: This skill helps you figure out where you are in the resilient zone by paying attention to your thoughts and senses.
    • Resourcing: This skill can help when you are near the edge of your resilient zone or if you’ve been bumped out of it, by paying attention to memories, people, places, things, and ideas that help you feel better.
    • Grounding: This is a good skill to use when you are having trouble staying in your resilient zone by paying attention to things that are around you in the moment.
    • Gesturing: This is another skill you can use to help move you away from the edges of your resilient zone by paying attention to your movements and using them to help you relax.
    • Shift and Stay: This skill is a powerful way to stay in your resilient zone by learning to shift your thoughts away from things that are bothering you to stay on neutral or happier thoughts.
    • Help Now!: This is a skill that can be used if you are stuck outside your resilient zone. These strategies focus on calming your body, and bringing you closer to your resilient zone.

 

Resilience Skills Examples:

Tracking uses your senses to pay attention to thoughts, feelings, and sensations in your body. Use your sight, hearing, taste, smell, and sense of touch to notice what is going on in your body. You can use tracking to find out where you are in the resilient or “OK” zone.

Example: Noticing the lights in the room and other things you can see.

Resourcing is when you use a person, place, or thing that is calming or relaxing. It can be something you can feel or touch in person, or something that you think about or imagine.

Example: Thinking about your favorite place to go on vacation.

Gesturing is when you move your body in ways that changes the way you are thinking. You can use gestures to remind your brain of times when you felt calm and relaxed.

Example: Slowly rubbing your hands together.

Grounding is when you pay attention to where your body is touching solid surfaces and the support it gives. You pay attention to your body in the present moment.

Example: Sitting in a chair and paying attention to where your legs and back are touching the chair.

Shift and Stay is when you change what you are paying attention to, and keep it on something more pleasant or comfortable. You use the other skills to shift your attention to something “okay” or pleasant, and then stay with those thoughts.

Example: You are in a noisy place and having a hard time paying attention so you use
grounding to shift your attention from the loud noises to how your feet and legs feel while
you stand tall.

Help Now! is when you use different strategies to relax your body when it is too hard to think. There are many different strategies you can use as part of this skill.

Example: Going for a walk, doing pushups against a wall or getting a cold drink

The Resilient Zone

The Resilient Zone is when we are in a place to be able manage our feelings
and thoughts. The Resilient Zone can also be called the “OK” Zone.
Below is a picture to help explain the Resilient or “OK” Zone. The curved red line
is our thoughts and emotions. The straight blue line is the edge of the Resilient or “OK” zone.
If we are able to keep our thoughts and emotions inside the blue lines, we say we are “in the
Resilient or “OK” Zone”.

We are able to have many different thoughts and emotions. When we are in the Resilient
zone or “OK” Zone we can be sad, mad, happy, calm, worried, or distressed. We are able to
manage the thoughts and feelings that we have when we are in the Resilient or “OK” Zone.

Two parallel blue lines with the space between labeled as the resilient zone or okay zone. There is a black wavy line in the space between the blue lines with different emoji faces representing calm, excited, worried, tired, relaxed, sad, happy, angry, and scared.

Emotions Inside & Out of the Resilient Zone: Learning to Widen It

Resilient Zone

The Resilient Zone is also known as our “OK Zone.” This zone is where we feel “OK” and can manage our thoughts and feelings. It is a state of well-being.

Parts of the Resilient Zone

  1. High Zone: When we’re in the high zone, we may feel edgy, irritable, mania, anxiety, angry, or pain.
  2. Low Zone: Our low zone usually leaves us feeling depressed, sad, isolated, exhausted, or numb.

It is easy to get stuck inside one of these zones which can make it hard to concentrate.

Emotions:

Inside the Resilient Zone

We can be sad, mad, happy, calm, worried, and/or distressed in this zone all at once while still being able to manage it all. Our emotions simply exist in the Resilient Zone, there is no right or wrong way
to feel.
We may experience many different emotions whether they’re positive or negative without overacting. These emotions are present but they are easy to deal with, even easy to ignore.

Outside the Resilience Zone

Our emotions may become unpredictable. They are overwhelming and hard to manage no matter what we’re feeling. We are not able to react well.

  • Practice the “shift and stay” method if you feel outside of your “OK Zone.”
  • Shift (change) your attention from the bad thoughts to neutral or pleasant thoughts. Once you focus on something new, stay there.

The Goal: To widen our Resilient Zone

There are certain things like traumatic and stressful events or reminders that can bump us out of our “Ok Zone.”

Being bumped out of the Resilient Zone can make it harder to deal with things and to express ourselves. Outside of this zone, we may act without thinking or even harm ourselves or others. Managing our feelings becomes difficult.

Widening your Resilient Zone is extremely important because it allows us to feel and experience more while still being okay. The wider our zone, the more space there is for our thoughts, feelings, and reactions.

We become more resilient when we widen our
zone. It gets harder to move outside of the zone
and overact, and easier to stay OK longer.

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Other downloads

Name Description Type File
Introduction to Resilience. Resilience can be explained in many different ways. It can also mean different things. Everyone has resilience! pdf Download file: Introduction to Resilience.
Resilience Skills Overview This resource provides an overview of what Resilience Skills are and provides some examples. pdf Download file: Resilience Skills Overview
The Resilient Zone The Resilient Zone is when we are in a place to be able manage our feelings and thoughts. The Resilient Zone can also be called the "OK" Zone. pdf Download file: The Resilient Zone
Emotions Inside and Out of Resilience Zone The Resilient Zone is also known as our “OK Zone.” This zone is where we feel “OK” and can manage our thoughts and feelings. It is a state of well-being. pdf Download file: Emotions Inside and Out of Resilience Zone