Resilience isn't only for the hard parts

There are moments in life that put a permanent dot on your timeline.

You know the ones.

There was life before the diagnosis and life after it.

Before your parent died and after. Before the divorce. Before the accident. Before the phone call you weren't expecting.

And the joyful ones, too. Getting hired, having kids, a big move or incredible opportunity.

The big ones have something in common:

You know, even while you're living through them, that something has changed.

I've been thinking about those moments a lot this past month as we've talked about what it means to stay resilient when life knocks you off course.

We've talked about empathy. About separating what you know from what you're afraid might happen. About adjusting expectations when your capacity changes. About remaining reliable when other people depend on you—even when your own life feels anything but reliable.

Those are important resilience strategies.

But here's what I don't want us to miss:

Most of our lives are lived between the dots.

Most Tuesdays don't change our lives. Most weeks - thank goodness! - don't bring a diagnosis or a crisis or a decision we'll remember ten years from now.

We get up. We exercise (or make an excuse and don’t). We go to work. We answer the email. We make dinner. We give someone a ride to something. We talk to someone we love. We have the meeting. We do the laundry. We laugh, we plan, we relax. We go to bed.And then we do something like it again the next day.

It's easy to think that resilience matters most when everything falls apart. Of course it matters then. But that’s when we use it, that's not when we build it.

Actually we build it in all those ordinary days when the stakes aren't nearly as high.

When you ask somebody for a hand with something. When you learn which relationships are really standing the test of time. When you take a second to notice how you respond to small changes in plans. When you create or strengthen routines that support your life, make decisions about what matters, and practice tolerating uncertainty when the consequences are relatively small.

So when one of those dots appears on the timeline, we're not inventing resilience from scratch.

We're reaching for strategies we've already practiced.

September we focused on resilience when life is anything but normal. As we move into October, I want to spend some time thinking with you about the other side of that:

What does resilience look like when, thankfully, nothing particularly dramatic is happening? Because maybe the ordinary stretches aren't just the space between the important moments.

Maybe they're where we prepare for them.

What are you doing this month that is an ordinary opportunity to build your resilience? Hit reply and tell me, I really want to know!

All my best,

Dr. G