Islamic Life Coach School Podcast
Islamic Life Coach School Podcast
Resilience without Suffering: Balance of Grit and Self-Care
What is the true essence of resilience and what is a modern construct?
I attempt to answer that and clarify what resilience is SUPPOSED to mean
I tackle the modern day misuse of resilience, particularly its association with incessant productivity and disregard for your well-being. I challenge the norm that women should exhibit constant resilience.
To me, recognizing and tending to your own needs before a meltdown is fundamental for your health.
Let's embark on a journey to redefine resilience through understanding and respecting our bodies, embracing our roles, and nourishing our faith and humility.
I also talk about the concept of grit, its alignment with actual resilience, and the power of prayer in seeking guidance and solace. I invite you to redefine resilience on your own terms and create a personal resiliency plan to manage life's challenges better, improve your mental fitness, and strengthen your bond with Allah SWT.
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Welcome to Islamic Life Coach School Podcast. Apply tools that you learn in this podcast and your life will be unrecognisably successful. Now your host, dr Kamal Uptar. Hello, hello, hello everyone. Peace and blessings be upon all of you.
Speaker 1:I wanted today's podcast to be about some common messages that I've seen around social media today that have to do with a coach teaching other people how to be more resilient. And I love change work and I love the idea that coaches are trying to help clients create a better life. But it seems to me that we're drifting away from the meaning of resilience, which is defined by the capacity to withstand or recover quickly from difficulties. So all of that is good, but now it's becoming replaceable with universal toughness. It's starting to mean more like get over it, handle it, get up and move on, start performing, continue to meet the quote of your productivity, regardless of the price. That is not resilience, that is abuse. When I see people offering advice on how to be more resilient, it is more in terms of get over yourself. Already they usually pitch it as a masterclass on resiliency how to be more resilient. Resilience marketed at the cost of your health is downright abuse, whether it's your workplace that's sending you this message your family, your friends, social media or society at large. Resilience is not supposed to be you working and bearing all the weight 24-7. And especially for women, this messaging results in a higher expectation of resilience from women. Men also have that expectation in regards to being resilient against their softer emotions, like connection, sadness or grief.
Speaker 1:Resilience only relates to your bounce back ability. It does not mean you don't feel tired. It doesn't mean you don't fall down. It doesn't mean you shouldn't get sick, or if you do get sick, you pretend nothing is wrong and you give yourself an excuse to push harder. Grit is what resilience is about. It is an excellent word that is closely related to resilience, but grit in itself is a word that's still being used in its original sense, which stands true to its meaning, meaning your ability to bounce back from hardships. Resilience in modern day term is being used to describe more and more how much you can push yourself without having a mental breakdown. And then, if you do have one which eventually you will because you're pushing yourself all the time you're going to hate yourself for having that mental breakdown If you're not taking rest when your body demands it or when you don't slow down pushing your body to the breaking point, resisting all of its signals of self-care, a breakdown is inevitable.
Speaker 1:And exactly at that point you get yet another lecture about how you need to be more resilient. No organic system on the planet can function forever. There will be less of a human body. A human body has a lot of demands and a breakdown might look different. It might look like reactivity and anger, burnout and shutdown, or a possum state of playing that and just totally checking out, where you have no energy left to interact with your environment.
Speaker 1:My invitation to you is that resilience is when you recognize your needs before you get to an extreme state of breakdown and you tend to those needs and then you get back to your working state. Heartbreak, loss, divorce, victim of infidelity, victim of abuse, natural disaster, mental or physical adversity does not discriminate. Resilience isn't in pushing through. It's in recognizing your human design and giving yourself room to breathe, recover, rest or whatever it looks like, and that makes it more likely that you will bounce back, which is the definition of resilience. What makes it less likely that you will bounce back is if you push through all of your challenges and get angry and frustrated at yourself when you are unable to do so indefinitely. That's a formula for less resiliency, not more. If you want to be more resilient, slow down and see what you need. Your natural ability to heal will kick in if you just become aware of your needs as a human rather than continuing to judge yourself for having human needs. Resiliency is about mental fitness, just like working out is about physical fitness. You work hard and then you take breaks and recover.
Speaker 1:Suffering is not an essential part of life. Pain yes, but suffering because of that pain on top of it is not Suffering. How I define is what comes from judgment of being in pain. Let's look at one of the most natural examples where women have different needs depending on the hormonal monthly cycle. Resilience isn't pushing more because certain days you have more pain. You require more rest, different diet and have more demands from your body than any other time of the month. Resilience is knowing your body, allowing it to function at the level it is capable of during the phases of the monthly cycle, and not holding these demands against yourself, not judging yourself that you can't perform as well as the rest of the month or as well as the rest of the world. That is you creating suffering on the original pain. If looking after body's demands means medical attention or medications or adjustment at the level of physical activity that you can perform, all of that becomes a part of your resiliency plan.
Speaker 1:Resiliency looks like what is it that you need to do in order to bounce back, not to push through? Women commonly ask me in coaching I need more sleep during my cycles, what's wrong with me? And I ask them what is wrong with needing more sleep? And the universal answer is I don't like when I can't do enough because of my cycle. My dear sister, my dear dear friend, women in the common journey of womanhood, please allow yourself to redefine resilience Because of equal productivity around the clock the whole month might be a male-centric view. Maybe how you produce is that you outperform everyone else the rest of the month but needs extra sleep on certain days of the month, or you need a massage or medical attention.
Speaker 1:There is pain that is related to the monthly cycle and then there is suffering on top of that pain that comes from you judging yourself for being in that position, for being in pain, for needing extra care. Suffering is not optional. Suffering is Suffering is the extra layer that you create when you don't allow yourself to meet your needs, when you judge yourself for having different needs than anyone else. Suffering is inevitable, and suffering is the new and wrong definition of resilience. Resilience has become about always only accepting the good at the cost of your negative experience, and it is such a fancy word that's being commercialized, and now it's being actually served as a substitute for hustle Work.
Speaker 1:Hard work around the clock and you're considered resilient. Don't grieve over a loss and you're considered resilient. Hurry up and get over your sadness already. That's resilient, and it actually isn't. Resilience is your bounce back ability, and you will not be able to bounce back if you're trying to rush and hurry up through your grief and sadness and tiredness.
Speaker 1:Pain is a part of every human experience. It is just how this world is designed. We feel entitled to a hundred percent pain, free life, a hundred percent happiness. That is not going to happen in this world. You have to become an active participant in your adversity journey. Instead of being told what to do, you need to find out what it is that you need and create your own resiliency plan. Don't compete with yourself. Work with yourself, alongside with yourself. Goal isn't to outdo yourself. It's to go after the long term. It's not about the short term game. It's about the long term. It's not about the finite, it's about the infinite, especially as it relates to your goals in your Akhira or your afterlife.
Speaker 1:Humans are able to evolve beyond your ancestors because of language, and when popular language falls out of context, it needs to be called out. And the definition of resilience happens to be one of those terms that is falling out of context and it needs to be redefined. It is not okay to be resilient as it is currently defined. You cannot be resilient a hundred percent of the time. I am not saying give up. I'm saying take some rest if you need. I'm not saying be lazy. I'm saying take a break from hustle, changing the definition of working hard to working with focus and allowing yourself to relax, knowing that you did your best and being able to bounce back when you don't get what you desired. That is resilience.
Speaker 1:If you are a multi-tasking, multi-passionate woman like myself, I'm sure you receive the message to be resilient a lot. You're probably also being told you're very inspirational because of your resilience. You are probably juggling different roles mother, wife, professional daughter, active community member, one or more of the above. Yet when you feel overwhelmed, the well-intentioned advice is often Sister, have sovr, have patience. While patience is a beautiful concept, it needs to be distinguished between urging someone to be patient and inadvertently encouraging them to suppress their feelings. Forcing yourself into benefit-finding, trying to find things to be grateful for. That will have an opposite effect on your bounce back ability compared to if you just let yourself say that you don't see the benefit in this situation.
Speaker 1:Yet Resilience against the inner critic. If you have high rejection sensitivity, you are again advised don't think about it too much. It doesn't mean anything, it was just a joke, get over it. But practically speaking, in light of high rejection sensitivity, it becomes your part of resiliency plan to do this work where you give yourself room and emotional safety to deal with all of the triggers that your nervous system is dealing with, things that are unique to you. Nothing outside of Allah shields you from your inner critic, not confidence, not being self-assured. You need resilience for it, your ability to rebound, and a huge part of it comes from Dura'ah. You cannot rationalize or think your way out of shame and into resilience. You have to move into shame. You have to let it vibrate through you. You have to be able to create your own emotional safety around it.
Speaker 1:The problem in the society that leads to the very skewed definition of resilience is that nobody is really allowed to feel feelings. Nobody is actually even taught to feel their feelings. Most of us can't even name a feeling we feel. We describe how we are feeling and intellectualize it so we can move on and continue to be productive, or we blame people or circumstances on how we feel because of them, but actually that's not processing a feeling, that's not acknowledging it and understanding it in its entirety. That's why we have to start relying on the skewed definition of resilience that go ahead and quickly get over it.
Speaker 1:Resilience isn't in quickly getting over your feelings. If you are not used to addressing your emotional capacity, then it's most likely that you're suppressing it and that leads to less resilience. Blowing past feelings or thinking that feelings are weak because they get in the way of productivity is exactly how society has started to define value and resilience. I will remind you that one whole year in the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam's life was named after sorrow, a feeling that he felt for losing his closest loved ones, khadija Radialanha and his uncle, abu Talib Radialanha. He deeply mourned and felt the weight of their loss. His resilience was not in masking his pain. Then, with this newer definition, we have to really slow down and question why are we internalizing this urge to get over your feelings so quickly? Why are we buying into this agenda? Are we becoming emotionless robots? Society values productivity over processing emotions, so they can sell us stuff and so that we can use this stuff to feel better quickly.
Speaker 1:True grit is not about suppressing feelings, but about channeling our energies for growth and favorable outcomes. Resilience is not about how much you can push yourself beyond your limits. It's not about ignoring your mental and physical boundaries. The corporate workforce that exploits your labor will have you taking more workshops on resilience to try and raise your productivity, but that will have an exact opposite effect of burning out, dreaming early retirement, cutting corners to get the work done so you can finally take some rest and, if you have your own business, also be careful to not fall into this trap. You are the one setting your highest standards and you are the one chasing them relentlessly, as in. Create your resiliency plan with consciousness, with awareness. All of this does not mean that you don't work hard, that you don't put in extra hours because you care about your workplace or you don't put in weekends because you're new at the workplace and you want to learn, or that you want to be a team player and you want to make a good impression. Working hard with good ethical conduct is highly admirable, but make sure you're not doing it with the energy of constantly pushing yourself.
Speaker 1:Resilience is not about suffering in pain and stress all the time. You can work really hard and not be in pain and stress. To review some main points resilience is your ability to bounce back from setbacks, and for every human being that time is different and highly dependent on the extent of the setback. Your resilience depends on your ability to listen to your body's demands. It's not about getting over yourself quickly, and suppressing feelings is also not resilience. It's not supposed to be a mask for hustle. Pain in the world is inevitable, but suffering is always optional. The suffering is the judgment we attach to the pain. That intensifies it. That's why resilience needs to be done without suffering.
Speaker 1:Work hard, dedicate yourself and rest hard. Do it with awareness and consciousness and you will come to see that resilience and grit is actually an amazing gift that your body contains. With that, I pray to Allah SWT. Ya Allah, most gracious and the most merciful, guide us to truly understand the essence of resilience that you have woven into our souls. Strengthen our hearts to endure the tests, not by suppressing our body's rights that it has on us, but by allowing them in a way that it brings us closer to you. O Allah, grant us the wisdom to juggle the roles you've blessed us with and help us understand what true resilience looks like. Inspire our hearts to live the true meaning of labyrinth patience, as it might relate to expressing what we need, seeking support and turning to you, o Allah, for solace. May our resilience always mean growing in faith, humility and closeness to you. O Allah, please keep me in your dars. I will talk to you guys next time.