The Resiliency System
Five skills that train your nervous system, so you can steady yourself first.
The first thing I teach
I teach two things. The first is how to calm your body and direct your mind. The second is a plan for your parenting. The Resiliency System is the first one, and the second one is built on it, because a plan for your parenting only works as well as the mother running it.
Nobody handed you a manual when you left the hospital, and nobody told you that steadying yourself is a skill you can learn. This isn't something you were supposed to already know.
Your nervous system is not a problem to fix.
It's doing exactly what it was built to do, which is respond to what's happening. The trouble is that it can respond to a spilled cup the way it would respond to real danger, and nobody ever showed you what to do while that is happening.
Resilience is not being calm all the time.
It's being able to ride the ups and downs instead of being thrown by them. Life is a rollercoaster and it doesn't stop being one. What changes is whether you have something to hold onto on the way down.
I believe everyone should be trained in this
Knowing how to handle your emotions, calm your body, and direct your mind shouldn't be something only a few people ever learn. It's empowerment training, and it changes your life. It changes how you look at yourself and how you take care of yourself, and it gives you what you need to handle the challenges life brings.
The five pillars
Five skills that work together
Nothing here is about fixing something broken in you. The steadiness is already there. These are the skills that get you back to it on the days it feels far away.
Pillar One
Self-Awareness
Understand what drives the way you think, feel, and act.
Noticing what is happening inside you, in your body, your thoughts, your emotions, your impulses, without immediately reacting to it.
There are two kinds of self-awareness. The first is the long view of your own story: how what happened before shapes the way you react now, and what your strengths and values are. The second happens in the moment. It's noticing what your body is doing, what you're thinking, and what's going on around you while it's happening, and that's the kind that gives you a pause before you react.
The first step is learning to watch yourself without judging what you see. This is about learning to work with yourself, not criticize yourself.
The key idea. You cannot work with what you cannot see. Awareness creates the pause. The pause creates choice.
Pillar Two
Self-Talk
How you talk to yourself matters.
Directing your inner voice on purpose. Thoughts are mental events, not facts. You can learn to notice them, weigh them, and choose differently.
Two things are always going on at once: what's actually happening around you, and what you're telling yourself about it. Most of the time you don't notice the second one, and it decides a lot of how you feel.
The next time you hear the voice in your head, pause before you believe what she says. Check whether it's true, and whether it's helping you.
The key idea. The story your mind tells you about what is happening shapes how you feel and what you do. You have more influence over that story than you know.
Pillar Three
Self-Compassion
Cheer yourself on and love your whole self.
Responding to your own struggle with the same kindness you would offer a friend. Not skipping past the hard thing, but meeting it with gentleness instead of criticism.
Most of us are our own worst critic. Self-compassion is learning to motivate yourself with love instead of fear, and remembering that everyone is imperfect and everyone makes mistakes, including you.
The key idea. Compassion creates safety, and safety is what lets you see clearly enough to change something. Criticism skips all of that and goes straight to shame.
Pillar Four
Self-Care
Treat your body with good food and plenty of sleep.
Not bubble baths. This is what your body actually needs to function, because your nervous system runs on sleep, food, and movement. Not enough of these will undermine all of your other efforts.
Most mothers put themselves last, because there are so many other people to take care of. I call the answer bare minimum me first: sleep, food, quiet, and some time alone. You first is stabilizing, not selfish.
And when your children watch you take care of yourself, they learn how to take care of themselves.
The key idea. A tired, underfed nervous system cannot settle itself no matter how much you know. This is the physical half of the work, and it is not optional.
Pillar Five
Self-Protection
Handle stress from the inside and from the outside.
Working with stress in both directions. From the inside, soothing your own nervous system once it is already going. From the outside, choosing what you take on and setting the boundaries that keep you from being worn down in the first place.
It starts with understanding how stress works in your body, so you notice it early. From there it's two kinds of work: setting boundaries, with the people in your life and with your own expectations, and building your own list of what calms you, then practicing it until it's there when you need it.
The key idea. Stress is information, not a personal failing. Once you can read it and answer it, in your body and in your schedule, stress stops making your decisions for you.
How they work together
Each pillar makes the next one easier
When Self-Awareness is strong, you catch what is happening before it takes over. You create a pause between the trigger and the response.
When Self-Talk is strong, you can aim that pause at a thought that is actually true and useful, instead of a story that escalates everything.
When Self-Compassion is strong, you can make a mistake and recover without the shame spiral. You can repair with your kids because you can repair with yourself.
When Self-Care is strong, your nervous system has what it needs to settle.
When Self-Protection is strong, you notice stress building early. You know what wears you down and what helps you recover, and you choose accordingly.
The goal is not to eliminate stress or difficulty.
The goal is to have a way back to yourself, no matter what life brings.
When a mother trains her own nervous system, it becomes the foundation for her parenting. And she gets to enjoy her life so much more.
Where I teach it
Learn the Resiliency System with me
I built the Resiliency System over more than thirty years of working with mothers, and raising five children of my own. I teach it in Calm and Confident, twelve weeks of resilient nervous system training where we go through all five pillars together.
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