Sunday, September 16, 2007

Building a Quieter Mind and Strengthening My Resilience


I think I commented on someone else's blog a while back and said something about my goal to build a quieter mind. Last week my thoughts were terribly noisy and I didn't take advantage of strategies I had in place to 'quiet my mind'. Subsequently, my week felt chaotic and I felt physically sick.

I will begin with some information ERin brought back from a Child Neglect and Abuse Conference. The presenter for one the sessions was Dr. Eidell Wasserman. Dr. Wasserman presented on Resilience in Professionals. Resilience defined as the ability to cope with adversity and adapt to challenges or change. Dr. Wasserman identified the strengths of resilient people and the first is "Optimism". This is defined as the ability to see situations improve along with envisioning solutions along with maintaining a sense of humor and ability to have fun.

So here is to reflections on my optimism.

Tomorrow, more on Resilience with Self-Knowledge and Insight.

2 comments:

Patrick said...

I have always thought that my biggest challenge is to see that situations will improve. I am willing to accept the status quo up to a point. I have seen situations (at work)improve after dealing with some difficult issues that I would have preferred not to have dealt with.

Matt said...

Martin Seligman has done a great deal of research on optimism. If you haven't checked out his work, I recommend Learned Optimism as a good starting point.

I'm trying to model these ways of describing the world to my son. It's never to early to start building an optimistic framework for the world.