Self-Care: Redefining Resilience: Building Grit and Grace for Everyday Life

Self-care is an essential part of living a healthy, balanced life. It involves taking time to nurture our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being. Self-care looks different for everyone – it’s about understanding your own needs and making self-care a regular priority. In recent years, the concept of self-care has gained more mainstream attention. However, it’s also become a bit of a buzzword that people throw around without much meaning behind it. True self-care goes far beyond treating yourself to a face mask or a bubble bath. It’s about building resilience and coping skills to handle life’s inevitable ups and downs with grit and grace. This podcast will explore the deeper meaning behind self-care and why it’s so vital for wellbeing. We’ll discuss strategies for redefining resilience, developing grit, and accessing grace so you can not just survive, but thrive through daily life. Redefining Resilience Resilience is commonly defined as the ability to bounce back from adversity and difficult experiences. However, resilience researcher Brené Brown believes we need to take a more nuanced perspective. In her book “Rising Strong,” she writes: “The truth is that we don’t bounce back from hard hits. We crawl across the floor with our guts hanging out, holding onto whatever we can to keep moving forward – this crawling, this collecting all the scattered pieces of our spirit that are strewn across the floor becomes the very essence of our resilience.” Rather than quickly returning to baseline, Brown stresses the importance of allowing ourselves to feel grief, struggle through discomfort, and fully integrate challenging experiences before emerging more whole. We must honor the entire arc of the process. This redefined view of resilience aligns closely with the Japanese concept of “wabi-sabi” – finding beauty in life’s imperfections and impermanence. When we accept hardship as a natural part of the human condition rather than failing to measure up to unrealistic standards for invulnerability, we can access deeper reserves of strength. Redefining resilience as a slow, messy process of reconstruction broadens the bandwidth for what it means to be “resilient.” Resilience isn’t about achieving a finished product at the end – it’s about doing the ongoing work to collect those scattered pieces, sit with discomfort, and keep believing in your ability to heal. Building Grit Redefining resilience as an intimate rebuilding process also sheds light on the importance of grit. Grit goes beyond resilience by adding a key ingredient: courageous perseverance in pursuit of long-term goals and personal growth. Research shows grit is a better predictor of success than IQ or talent alone because it fuels the ability to keep showing up through waves of failure, criticism, fatigue, and plateau. However, we must avoid the trap of toxic grit – feeling like we must keep pushing dangerously beyond our limits. True grit pairs perseverance with self-care and support. We can build grit by getting clear on our core values and sense of purpose and learning to detach our self-worth from immediate outcomes. This intrinsic motivation allows us to stay focused despite external feedback and setbacks. Here are three key strategies: 1. Reflect on why your goal matters: Connect with the meaning and motivation behind your goal when things get frustrating. Let your values reorient you towards “true north” when you feel lost. 2. Celebrate small wins: Break your goal down into achievable milestones so you have tangible progress to celebrate frequently, which prevents burnout. Make a visual chart to watch your small wins accumulate. 3. Don’t compare your Chapter 1 to someone else’s Chapter 20: Be inspired but not intimidated by others who are farther along. Appreciate where you currently are on your unique path, which has its own timing and trajectory meant just for you. Accessing Grace The pro