Renew, Reflect, Rise: Embracing Resilience & Reflection for a Transformative New Year I Martina Witter

Rivers to Resilience

Renew, Reflect, Rise: Embracing Resilience & Reflection for a Transformative New Year

Join me, Martina Witter, as we explore the transformative power of reflection in bolstering emotional resilience. This solo journey into self-awareness isn't just about looking back—it's a strategy to propel us forward. I share insights on how reflecting on both the challenges and victories of the past year can teach us invaluable lessons and fortify our resilience for 2024 and beyond.

I'll encourage you to pinpoint personal milestones and hurdles you've encountered and reflect on how these experiences can shape a more resilient future. By fostering introspection, we uncover the coping mechanisms that work best for us and learn to adapt, allowing us to reframe our mindset and flourish in the face of adversity.

Listen in as I recount some of my own triumphs, including the success of our Rivers to Resilience course and the growth of our incredible team. These personal anecdotes illustrate how reflection can lead to concrete achievements and overall well-being. I challenge you to embrace a reflective practice, both in your personal and professional spheres, to amplify your resilience. As we wrap up, we're thrilled about the year ahead, where we'll introduce you to experts and individuals with compelling stories of perseverance. Keep in touch through our website and social media for continued insights on nurturing resilience.

Thank you for listening to this episode, and I'm excited to support you on your journey to success and peak performance and personal Resilience.

Highlights

(00:00) - Building Resilience Through Reflection

(02:45 - 03:57) Reflecting on Challenges and Building Resilience
(09:31 - 11:32) Scientific Basis for Reflection and Resilience

(13:18) - Enhancing Personal Resilience

Transcript

00:00
This is Rivers to Resilience, the podcast where we educate, inspire, motivate and transform you and your teams on your journey to emotional resilience. We hear stories and advice from leaders and experts allowing you to harness their wisdom with transformational, evidence-based strategies to building emotional resilience. Join a credited cognitive behavioural psychotherapist and author, martina Witter, as she deep dives into all aspects of resilience building, whilst also helping you to crush stress and improve and retain your performance, productivity and profits. That's here on Rivers to Resilience.

00:52
In today's solo episode, I'll be exploring with you all their role of reflection in resilience and how to enhance your reflection and self-awareness to build your resilience in 2024 and the subsequent years. So reflection what it is all about and how can you enhance your reflection. Well, reflection is the process where you consciously become aware of your mental state, of your thoughts and your feelings, and hiding. That can increase your self-awareness, it can improve your emotional intelligence and that can help you to be more productive and more successful and, essentially, more resilient and to develop a mindset that will help you to thrive and to find advantage in adversity. So reflection it also enables you, enables individuals, enables us to gain insights from our past experiences. So I want you to think about what have you experienced over the past year. You know and reflect on those and by examining those challenges, set back alongside simultaneous other successes, that will provide you with an opportunity to extract valuable lessons from 2023. So reflection is also critical to learning, and being able to learn from previous experiences will help you to grow psychologically, it will help you to grow cognitively, it will help you to grow holistically, and that's what's going to enable you to build your resilience muscles, to build your personal resilience, which will enable you to successfully navigate through various challenges, or just through your career, through your business and through your personal experiences. So what I want you to do is think about. I want you to name one challenge that you may have faced in 2023, and how you overcame that.

02:54
I'd like you to name one success of 2023. So what was that success? Maybe you secured a salary increase. Maybe you delivered a successful project and got positive feedback. Maybe it's personally. Maybe your health has improved. Maybe your friendships and social connections have improved. So what are those successes? And I want you to consider how can you build upon them for 2024, because it's important to always be looking towards the future. So it's being in the present and acknowledging your world wins, but building upon them, and that can enhance your resilience. So, when you're facing or when you face challenges, difficulties, stress which is all part of life you're able to draw upon your strengths because you've reflected, and that will provide a platform for success and a platform for building your personal resilience, and it will give you confidence in navigating through some of these circumstances that you might be facing.

03:58
So reflection can build resilience through insight and learning and that process of introspection that fosters a deeper understanding of your personal strength, so it increases your self-awareness, and that ties in with the first river in our rivers to resilience model, which is looking at self-awareness and enhancing that, and journaling can be completed, as has been mentioned in previous episodes of the podcast. Journaling can be used to enhance your self-awareness and to become more aware of your personal strengths, because sometimes we've just got to stop and take stock and review our journey, where we're at, what's working, what isn't, in order for us to succeed and to build our resilience. Also, this process of introspection gives you a deeper understanding of various that you maybe need to build upon and also coping mechanisms what's working for you, what allows you to thrive in life, what relationships, what friendships are working for you, what activities are helping you to thrive. And understanding how you've handled adversity in the past helps you to better prepare for future challenges, consequently increasing your resilience. And that's what our podcast is all about building personal resilience, helping you to thrive, helping you to feel motivated and inspired, and learning from others' journeys. And I know for myself this year it's been a pivotal year for me. I guess one of my successes has been I mean, one of many has been successfully delivering our Rivers to Resilience course and training to leaders across the UK, the global organizations. That has been one of our wins, consistently doing that and getting really positive, humbling feedback. So that's been a great win for us. But also recruiting associate staff that's been a great win that we're just building upon and looking at enhancing. And on a personal level, in terms of my health, that's been quite consistent and I've been working out looking after my health and well-being consistently. So for me they're great wins amongst many. So I want you to have a think about what are your wins and how you can build upon them. So just to take that time out to gain a bit of insight and to learn Another area, another connection between reflection and resilience is that it helps to build, it helps you to grow and enhance your adaptability, and that's why reflection is important, because it cultivates that adaptability by encouraging you to analyze situations from various angles and perspectives, and that's critical for you to gain insight and for you to grow and enhance your resilience.

06:43
So through this process, you can identify alternative approaches or perspectives that could have been taken in various or different situations and that could consequently have a positive outcome or a different outcome and impact on that situation and the ability to consider various viewpoints. That ties in with another one of our rivers to resilience, one of our streams, which links in with your mindset, and being able to reframe. That's critical in building resilience. But you've got to reflect in order to do that. Fostering different viewpoints will enhance your adaptability and growth and that's a key aspect of resilience being flexible, adaptable, embracing change, leaning into change.

07:29
You're being open to learning from experiences. They're all crucial in navigating through adversity, bouncing back or bouncing forward from setback, and working successfully navigating through challenging circumstances. And then, finally, emotional regulation and coping strategies are byproduct of engaging in reflective practices, so becoming more aware, more conscious of your inner dialogue, mental processes, your thoughts and your feelings. That supports the development of effective coping strategies. So, reflecting on those past experiences, it allows you to recognize, to identify your emotional responses, your feelings to certain experiences, and allows you to understand how you dealt with different emotions during those challenging times. And that insight and understanding will allow you to gain insights for identifying and executing and refining coping strategies and mechanisms that are going to help you to build your resilience. It might be that you need to be more active, you need to be more communicative. You may need to use more stress management strategies sooner rather than later. It might be that you need to beat to your manager or focus on building your social network or building those relationships around you, or maybe delegating tasks. They're just a couple of examples, but that understanding allows for you to build a repertoire of healthy coping strategies, personalize ones that work for you and that will enhance your emotional regulation, psychological regulation, and equip you with skills and tools to manage stress, anxiety and depression and adversity more effectively and allow you to banish those three demons of stress, anxiety and depression through being more self-aware and to also enhancing your personal resilience.

09:31
Finally, what I want to share with you is that there is a scientific basis to using reflection and enhancing personal resilience, as this also underpins our rivers to resilience model. All the strategies, all of the rivers, lead to chemical changes within the brain. Different neurotransmitters are released in chemicals which are connected with psychological and emotional resilience, but also there's a connection with a reduction in stress and anxiety, and it all helps with emotional regulation. Reflective practices have also been associated with changes in brain structures and function. There tends to be a reduction in the amygdala, which is a brain structure which is associated with emotional changes within individuals. But reflection helps to reduce that activation, which essentially highlights that an individual is more effectively able to regulate their emotions, psychological experiences, thus enhancing their personal resilience. So it's a win-win, essentially.

10:49
And for those scientists out there, those of you who are interested in neuroscience, neuroplasticity, sharing this just so you understand that actually everything that we do through our podcast and in the Rivers to Resilience model, it is all evidence-based. So studies also show that that enhanced neuroplasticity leads to the brain's ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections and that involves release of different neurotransmitters such as dopamine and serotonin. And they play clear roles in mood regulation and learning to strengthen in these neural connections through reflection and contribute to building resilience and promoting adaptive behaviors and emotional regulation. And also the body's stress response system is impacted and the release of stress-related hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. They're reduced. And that enhances personal resilience, because we know that chronic stress can impair brain function and reduce resilience. So increase in reflective practice can counter that. Engaging in reflective practice has shown to reduce stress hormone levels, promote relaxation responses and to modulate the body's physiological reactions to stress. So it's win-win really.

12:05
So I'm sharing with this video in our final podcast of the year, because most people are looking at either New Year's resolutions, creating goals, reflecting on what's worked in the past. So we wanted to tie it in with resilience and to help you to understand that, reflecting on 2023, what's your wins, your strength, maybe those areas that you need to develop that can help to build your personal resilience and position you for success in the future. Journaling is an effective way to enhance your reflective practice. You can journal daily. You can maybe use a gratitude journal. There's lots of different type of journals that you can use, so maybe have a think about what works best for you. There's a different methodologies of journaling, so think about what works best for you and making time and space for this. That's what I would encourage you to do during your journaling practice or reflective practice, and now would be, or could be, a great time for you to begin that journey, with 2024 being around the corner.

13:11
So, in summary, reflection reflective practice does build resilience, but you've got to be intentional. Reflection enhances insight and learning, adaptability and growth and emotional resilience in coping strategies, which will all feed into your personal resilience. So what I challenge you to do is to be intentional with your reflective practice, set time aside to reflect personally and professionally, and that is guaranteed to enhance your personal resilience. It's been fantastic having you listen to our podcast and I look forward to continuing to provide you with valuable insights around personal resilience, which is going to help to build your career and personal and your business growth and, essentially, it's going to set you, set you up to succeed and to win in life, and that is what we're all about. So we look forward to having you on our journey in 2024, the journey of our podcast and we'll be bringing some fantastic experts within the field of resilience, and also individuals will be sharing their journey of resilience, which is going to help you to be positioned for success.

14:30 -
Thanks again for listening to another episode of Rivers to Resilience. To keep up to date, connect with us online at wwwRaffertherapyservicescom and on all social media platforms. It's your time to be revived, restored and refocused.

Connect with Martina Witter:

📲 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rapha_therapy_service

👔 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martina-motivator-witter-ba884947/ and https://www.linkedin.com/company/rapha-therapy-services/

📽 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIx331RsTbzTbfmHLgxxvgQ

📲 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RaphatherapyservicesLimited

📲 Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/mrobertaw

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