Calm and More Calm

29 January, 2021

Calm and More Calm

and three ways to keep it in difficult times

1 / Communicate more successfully

Have you ever considered that in difficult times, the ability to communicate calmly with people can be significantly affected by the way we ask questions. When asked with tenderness and kindness, people open up like "sunflowers at sunrise." The opposite is also true. If we talk to them rudely and sharply - they close.

Here's what can help us communicate - the ability to ask questions. Properly asked questions can give strength, both to ourselves and to the people we ask. A well-asked question can relieve our tension about the topic of a conversation and give the other person the opportunity to share their problems with us and feel relieved.

Here's what you can do for this purpose in your conversations with others:

Be soft and predisposing in your speech. Start with a phrase like, "I wonder if ...."
Use open, not closed questions. They encourage the other person not just to answer "yes" or "no", but allow the conversation to "flow".
Listen carefully and actively to what the other party is saying to you. You can repeat one of the other person's phrases with a questioning intonation to see if you understand it correctly, or you can go one step further with a question like, "What can I do to help you?"

2 / Build resilience

What is resilience and why is it important?

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, USA, give us the following definition of resilience: “Resilience is the ability to overcome adversity. But resilience is also our ability to grow because of the challenges we face.”

The main groups of factors that predetermine and strengthen our resilience, according to Assoc. Prof. Karen Reich, are:

Biology: the development of the human race and our genetic predisposition;
Self-knowledge: what exactly is the degree of our awareness;
Self-regulation: how and how successfully we manage our feelings and actions;
Mental flexibility: our ability to look at the situation from different perspectives;
Optimism: our ability to believe that everything will end well for us;
Mastery or personal effectiveness: our ability to start from the position: "I can do it";
Intimacy: the presence of at least one person with whom we have built a lasting relationship and we know that we can always count on them;
Faith in institutions: confidence in the support of family, government, organization in which we work, etc.

What sets resilient people apart from everyone else is that they see difficulties not as threats, but rather as challenges. They have a mental mindset for growth, not a fixed mind, and believe that they can learn and grow from anything. These people accept challenges and overcome them, instead of withdrawing or being afraid of them.

To help you strengthen your resilience, we have also created our 30-day resilience and optimism programme.

You can see it here:

3 / Calm practice

In difficult times when we are facing stress, one of the tried and tested ways to maintain resilience and optimism is to practice Mountain Meditation. Here is our adaptation of the original version created by John Kabat-Zin. This meditation helps us to seek inner stability and peace, even in times of unpredictability and chaos.

Here is the practice: Try it!

You can download all information above from here.

13 September, 2024