043: Stronger Than You Think

Lisa Funk @ 2021-05-03 20:58:22 -0700
The challenges that you are facing today… They won’t last forever. The truth is, when you’re going through a difficult season it can be hard to feel resilient.
In this episode, I am sharing why you’re stronger than you think. I talk about how problems come and go in life and the things that we can learn from what we go through.
You’ll hear about how coping with stress and anxiety looks different for different people and a story about my own resilience after facing my loss and challenges.
What you’ll find in this episode:
A segment on what’s going on over in the shop
What resilience means to me
A story about my experiences with grief, loss and a health scare
The 7 C’s of resilience from Dr. Ginsburg
How tools for coping with stress will look different for everyone
Mantras that can help you through challenging times
Read the transcript of the episode below:
 Ep 43 Stronger Than You Think

If you have listened to the podcast before you know that I am not afraid to talk about the hard stuff. What it's like to face challenges, struggles, and failure. Today, we're talking about resilience. This is episode 43: Stronger Than You Think.

Welcome to the Committed to Create Podcast. I'm Lisa Funk, and I am so excited to hang out with you here as we talk about the power of creating with our hands and our minds. I like to keep it real, remind you that you are not alone and share specific ways that creativity and mindfulness can help us live even more meaningful and joyful lives.

I am so glad that you're here.

Welcome back to the podcast. This is episode 43. We missed last week because of what I'm going to talk about in our segment for today, which is called Over In The Shop.

So in today's segment, I wanted to talk about why I missed releasing an episode last week. It was a really good reason. And most of you probably already know that it is because we launched the latest volume of Daily Mindful Lettering, Volume 2: 30 days of lettering, affirmations for peace and calm. It is out in the world.

You can find it at handlettereddesign.com. You can also link to it from the show notes. I am so thrilled. I think I've already said this, but I'm pretty sure this is my favorite thing I've created. I love it so much. I did a poll on Instagram a few months ago, asking about anxiety and who struggles with anxiety.

And I think in the poll, it was like 92% of people that answered said that yes, they do struggle with anxiety. Holy smokes. That is a lot of us who struggle with this. And I think everyone can relate to feeling at least stressed from time to time, overwhelmed. And this new book is exactly for that. Is something to help us focus, and all of the affirmations are phrases that you helped me come up with. The things that we tell ourselves or that we tell those that we love when we're struggling and just need a little bit of encouragement.

This is not just toxic positivity. This is not just a book of things that encourage you to ignore how you're feeling and to just be Pollyanna.

No, there are lots of affirmations in this book that say things like it's okay to not be okay, and I can allow myself to feel, things like that. Because I believe it's so important to feel the feelings. To let ourselves be human, but we can also encourage ourselves by saying things like, this won't last forever, just breathe, I can totally handle this.

And today we're going to be going over some of those things when we talk about resilience, but I just had to tell you how excited I am to have this book out in the world.

It would be a perfect gift for Mother's Day, for anyone that you know, or yourself, you can always buy it for yourself as a gift too, you know, I'm all about that! But I highly recommend it.

You're going to get two brush pens when you purchase as well as a video tutorial, and the workbook, which is printed on super high quality paper that's thick and smooth. And you're going to get everything you need. It's just such a great mindful activity that you can do a little bit each day. And that as our segment today.

So today we are going to talk about resilience. And how we can, you know, respond in the face of setbacks and failures and challenges. And sometimes even use them as lessons to help us recover and get back to where we want to be.

I just want to take a moment to say that we all get bummed out. Sometimes we all need time to process. This episode is not about how to bounce back right away and how to not ever feel sad. How to not care when things are hard. No.

This is about how to build resiliency in us and in our kids so that we can cope when hard things do happen. So that we can be aware and have skills that are going to serve us.

I really think that so much of this is about building self-awareness. And just being aware of how we're thinking and feeling. So much of the time we're not aware. We're just in a really dark cave where we feel stuck. We cannot see the other side, and it's so painful. And I'm not saying that by learning some of these skills, that we won't experience pain anymore, but it will be different when we have an ability to have that self-awareness. To know what we're feeling, to know how we're thinking and what our perspective is like, and to catch ourselves when we find ourselves spiraling or going down a path that we know isn't going to serve us.

There is no right or wrong way to deal with challenges. There's no, like, passing a test. Oh, she did really great, or he didn't. This is just personal for you. This is for you to have some tools that can help you get back to feeling like yourself and to feeling like you're not drowning.

I have had so many experiences where I felt so overwhelmed, that I just couldn't handle it. I just felt like it was the end and I couldn't do it anymore. So I know that for me, it has helped a ton to learn some more tools and to have things that help me to be more resilient.

It's so helpful to identify if we feel stuck in a perspective that isn't serving us. Resilience for me is just like coming from a rough place and coming back and tapping into hope again, so that we can have peace and move forward.

Now, a big part of this is having realistic expectations of what life holds, but not fixating on negative things that could happen. So I think it's really important to be realistic about the fact that life isn't always perfect, that things don't always work out the way that we hope they will. And it's good to have that realistic perspective, but also focusing too much on the fear of what could happen and being afraid to try things or do things because of that fear, doesn't help us to build as much resilience.

People are actually able to bounce back more quickly from challenges when they have a positive outlook on their future. It doesn't help to believe that something terrible is going to probably happen every day. Of course, we know that we live in a flawed world. Bad things do happen. Hard things do happen. But we believe that, for the most part, things work out and we believe in ourselves and our ability to cope with those things.

So I wanted to share an experience that I had. I've referenced both of these things on the podcast before. In 2013, my younger brother passed away and it was so heartbreaking and devastating. And a year later I gave birth to my third baby and had that crazy life-threatening blood clot and had an intense and severe DVT as well as clots all the way through my iliac, up to my iliac vein.

And I have a couple of stents holding that open. I had blood clots in both lungs. I couldn't walk. I had to have home health care and people coming into my house and I couldn't even carry my baby around or anything. I was struggling even to get to the bathroom and back. I remember thinking at the time, man, I was not grateful enough before that I could walk. I wish I had not taken it for granted when I could just walk to the bathroom.

I had a wheelchair, I had a walker. I had everything you could imagine, and everything you could imagine to help me during that time, I felt so helpless and it was challenging for sure. I am not going to pretend like I was cheerful and happy throughout that whole experience.

But I remember having a friend come over and she was helping to clean my kitchen and bring some food over, do some of the things that I could not physically do for myself and my family at the time. And I remember her saying to me, I am just so impressed with your resilience and how you are braving all of these challenges that kind of seemed to be coming back to back. There were some other parenting challenges I was having at the time as well.

And I remember thinking, what are you talking about? I do not feel like I am very resilient or that I am really that positive or anything. I felt like I was struggling, and I definitely was, but she felt that she saw something in me where I was able to be aware of how I was feeling. And I had a perspective that helped me to hold onto the things that I valued, to believe and have hope in a better future, and to use some coping skills to get through that tough time.

And it just made me think about resilience. And in this book that has just come out this new volume of Daily Mindful Lettering, there are several affirmations that really are meant to help us have that mindset and perspective to be resilient when we are going through challenges and hard times. And I'm going to share what some of those affirmations are later.

But first I wanted to go through the seven Cs of resilience from Dr. Ginsburg, who is a child pediatrician and a human development expert. And they are, of course all begin with C.

So number one is competence, and this is just having skills. And this is something that's so important to me because it's something that you can build up and work on ahead of time before something difficult happens, you can work to have the skills to cope with it.

I think about, you know, when we're teaching our kids how to do something new, we can teach them the skills for how to do it, and also the skills for how to help ourselves when things don't go right. Those are definitely part of being competent as well.

Number two is confidence, and this is believing in our abilities and being noticed for our strengths and looking for our talents and believing that not only do we have those skills and talents, but that we also have the ability to come back and stand up to our challenges and learn from them. And this is where a lot of those beliefs come from. Believing that we can handle hard things.

You know, that is one of the affirmations from this book, is that I can do hard things. This was my parents' favorite phrase growing up. They wanted to instill this in our family and it kind of became a go-to phrase for us. And anytime something hard came up, my parents would totally validate how hard it was.

They would, did not say, oh, that isn't hard. They would say, that is so challenging, and we can do hard things. We believe that about ourselves. And instilling this belief in ourselves and in our kids gives us the confidence that even when things do go wrong and when things are hard, that we are the type of people who can do hard things.

Number three is connection. Oh, my goodness. I loved this one because, man, when I was going through that really tough time, I was so connected to my family, to my friends, to my community. I remember when my brother passed away, I had gone to California to be with my family and have the funeral and everything.

And while I was gone, a bunch of my friends and neighbors had gotten together and come over and cleaned my entire house top to bottom. I'm going to start crying. They wrote cards and letters and left them on my kitchen counter. And I just remember coming home to this clean house. To all of these beautiful words of encouragement. And it meant so much to me.

And they were there for me and they brought me dinner and they let me cry. And it was so incredibly helpful to have those connections, to have all the people that helped me when I had my health crisis and couldn't walk and couldn't care for my kids. And people just stepped in and I had those connections.

And that is something else that we can always be building, no matter what we're going through at the time, because we are meant to be there for each other. We're not meant to go through these things alone. And I want to be there for my friends and loved ones when they're struggling and they want to be there for me too. A part of it is accepting that help.

But they also talk about how powerful this is for children. When they have a sense of belonging, they are so much more likely to be able to face challenges and stay true to their values and bounce back from hard times.

I know that my greatest goal in parenting is to feel connected to my kids, to have them know that I'm a safe place, that they can come to me, that I am there for them. And I just always want to be as connected as it can be.

Number four is character. And so this is being in touch with your values and what matters to you. And I do think that this is so helpful. It helps to give you perspective. It gives you things to rely on.

For me, having some values that I was taught growing up that I had learned and other beliefs that I hold was so incredibly powerful for me when I have gone through many different hard times.

Number five is contribution. Being able to look outside of yourself. And again, when you're really struggling in like the dark thick, hard, hard, hard times, this is not when I'm going to tell someone, you know, you should really go volunteer at the soup kitchen. I am all about taking care of yourself and processing and dealing with the hard feelings and not stretching yourself too thin, not burning yourself out.

But I do think that having that overall belief in being a part of a bigger picture has really helped me. And again, I'm not saying that I'm perfect at this. Okay. The point of this episode, the point of this episode is to talk about things that help us and share them with each other. And I know that it has helped me to have even the people close to me to be able to look at them and see how I can love and serve them. And it creates a beautiful perspective when we realize that we are a part of a bigger picture and that we have a role that's important that we're valuable.

And that we matter. I know that whenever I go and serve other people, I feel so much better. There are really great endorphins that come from serving and loving on other people. And it just is the best. It really is.

And again, we're not always in a place where we can do that. That's never something I want people to feel bad about. It's never something that is helpful for me to feel guilty or bad about. When I'm in a place where I feel like, you know what, I am in a place where I can look outward and do some service, even if it's within my own relationships in my home, and it doesn't have to be something big. But I do think that when we can get to that point where we can look outside of ourselves and serve and contribute that it does bring us joy and helps us to build resilience.

Number six is coping skills. This is something that I feel like is getting better. My kids are learning social coping skills in school now, where they'll learn some breathing techniques and how to deal with big emotions, which is incredible.

I love that they are becoming more aware of how important our social and emotional intelligence is. But this is something that I think has been lacking for a long time and that we can always be learning and getting better at is: how do we cope with stress? What tools do we have in our tool belt that help us to deal when things are really tough?

I am going to go out there and say that I don't think that these tools are the same for everyone. I don't think I can just come here and tell you that if you learn this specific breathing technique, that it will work really well for you. Or that all you need to do is take a nap or go for a run or paint a watercolor. I don't know exactly what helps you to reduce stress.

There are lots of tools out there that, in general, help most people or a lot of people. So if you don't feel like you have a lot of tools in your tool belt for this, I think it is worth looking into and finding out things that are going to be helpful for you and knowing what those things are.

Another thing that I want to put out there in relation to coping skills, sort of relates back to number three, which was connection, and that is having a team.

I remember when I started going to therapy and I had a therapist and a psychiatrist that was helping with the medication and I had family and friends. I had friends who had been through similar mental health struggles that were there for me. I had different tools, journaling and other things. And I remember my therapist telling me, because I would worry about having another episode of depression and what was I going to do?

And she, my therapist would always say to me, you have a team. Like, you have a team, you know exactly where to go when something hard happens. You've got me, you've got, you know, the psychiatrist, you've got your friends, you've got your mom, you have these different tools as well. And so I think that building up these resources so that you have a team is so, so helpful.

So May is Mental Health Awareness month. And during this month, I love to encourage people to find the resources in their community or online that they will turn to if they ever find themselves struggling with their mental health. So I want to encourage you to do this as part of your coping skills as part of your community, as part of your tools.

I want you to find where would you turn if you started to feel depressed or if you felt like your anxiety was too much. Maybe you already have something that you do, someone that you can turn to, but this is also really helpful if you happen to have a friend who's struggling and you already have a list.

Oh my gosh, that is such a gift. For someone who's struggling, it is near to impossible to spend the time and energy researching a good therapist. And the best way, in my opinion, to go about finding one is to ask around in a local Facebook group, or just privately among some close friends. Having a name of a good therapist, a good psychiatrist, is incredibly valuable and this could be for your own age group, it could be for pediatrics in case one of your children's struggles at some point. Having these resources already figured out can be a huge life saver when some struggles come your way or to someone that you love.

If you know someone, and they're close to you, this is not a stranger, but if you have someone in your life, that's a close family member or friend, and they've confided in you that they're struggling and you want to help them, a really great service that you could do for them is offer to look up therapists in their area or doctors in their area that might be able to help them if they're open to it. Of course you never want to, you know, push someone or suggest some thing and keep going down a road that they're resisting. No, I'm not saying to do that, but I have a friend who has done this multiple times for friends that are struggling. And it's something that really truly, I already said this, but when you're in a dark place, you do not have the wherewithal to spend the time and energy to find a good therapist.

Number seven is control. A lot of times the challenges and struggles that we face are those things that we do not have control over.

And, oh my gosh, how hard it is to realize that and to let go of that. But we can focus on the small things that we do have control over.

So I think that this one, number seven, is about both letting go of things we can't control and also focusing on those little things that we can control and that can make a big difference for us. The decisions that we make, the actions that we take, the mindset that we work on having, that can really help us, because I know that I have felt very overwhelmed when all I do is keep focusing on these things that I have no control over.

And of course, one of the ways to work on our mindset is to have some go-to thoughts. We're going to have our negative brain, our brains are wired for negativity, it's so normal to struggle with that. You know, that I have had a very negative inner voice that I have struggled with for so much of my life. And so to counteract that it really helps to have some mantras or affirmations or sayings that we can just turn to, that are things that we go to.

Just like in my family, growing up, how my parents would say, we can do hard things. And that was just a go-to phrase for us that we could cling to and that gave us confidence and that helped to change our outlook.

So I really recommend choosing some of these and I'm going to read off some of them that are included in the Daily Mindful Lettering book, because I know that they are sayings that not only have helped me, but a lot of other people in our community as well.

One is, this won't last forever. I am stronger than I think. This too shall pass. I can totally handle this.

And let me tell you a little note on that one. Sometimes I have to pay attention to the negative things I'm telling myself. And I found that I was telling myself over and over, oh my gosh, I can't handle this. I can't handle this. I can't handle this. And just by changing that around and saying, I can handle this, I actually can. I can handle this. Telling myself and reminding myself of that might seem like such a simple little twist and switch, but it changes everything in my mindset and my confidence about my abilities.

Some other affirmations from the book are, just keep swimming. I've got this, tomorrow is a new day, and, of course, I can do hard things.

Now when we are in that moment of struggle, it is okay if we are not having these thoughts. Again, I think it's so important to allow yourself to be there, to feel the feelings, to be human and to process all of it. These are here as tools to help you if you find that you're going down a path you don't want to go.

I know that for me, I can find myself spiraling when I allow my mindset to go into a negative spiral and it doesn't help and it's not the road that I want to go down.

So I want to encourage you and tell you that you really are stronger than you think. And that the challenges that you're facing will not last forever, that pit in your stomach, that racing heart, the anxiety that you're feeling, will pass, and you can totally handle this.

If you are interested in getting the newest volume of Daily Mindful Lettering that has all of these affirmations where you can trace them and write them, it helps so much to ingrain these beliefs in yourself.

If you know someone else who is struggling and you aren't quite sure how you might be able to reach out and help them, can I recommend sending them this book and giving them an opportunity to have a creative outlet that will also help to bring them some peace and calm.

Thank you so much for joining me here on the podcast. Thank you for all of your reviews. And when you share it with other people, it means so much to me.

I hope that you are including mindful creativity in your daily life. I hope that you know that you are not alone in your stress. That we are all human. We are all in this together, and you can always find me over on Instagram at hand lettered design, and I look forward to talking to you again next week.
Links:
Daily Mindful Lettering Volume 2
Ready for a fun activity to feel less stress? Come get our FREE Guide - 5 Creative Steps to Less Stress & More Joy while it's still available: http://CommittedtoCreate.com/lessstress
I hope that my podcast has left you feeling inspired and excited to create the life that you want. If you’ve enjoyed listening to this podcast, I’d love for you to subscribe so you can continue to hear more. Want to get to know me better? Connect with me on my website or on Instagram to keep up with everything that is going on with me and my business.
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