And I’m not asking about how tough you think you are. I want to know how tough you’ve proven to be. Meaning you’ve faced down the demons of tragedy, failure, and loss and somehow you crawled through to the other side.

If you’re like most of us, you don’t know how tough you are. Maybe you’ve won a few battles, but your real mettle has yet to be tested. You’ve yet to stare these demons in the eye – so you’re not sure if you’d laugh or retreat with the barest of whimpers.

This is a good thing.

This means you have time. Time to prepare. Time to steel your mind against the demons’ meddling. Because they’re not going to attack you until they see that you’re already weakened. And this my friend is the problem.

Right now, you’re doing okay. Life is pretty good. Mortgage is paid on time, your paychecks keep clearing, and while there may have been a round or two of layoffs at work, you’re department is “fine.”

Fine. What a terrible word.

Fine is a façade.

Fine is a fragile picket fence dream that’s a paycheck away from the poor house.

Fine is what cooks this demons meals. Because when you’re fine, you spend your energy maintaining the status quo, believing that tragedy happens to others. So you don’t prepare because that superstitious part of our brain foolishly believes that by preparing, you’re tempting fate.

But that’s bullshit. You will face some kind of hardship in your lifetime – and probably multiple hardships—and if you’re really unlucky, they’ll all be happening at the same time.

The question you have to ask yourself right now is whether you’ll face that tragedy with the emotional tools to persevere or will you find yourself swept into the depths of self-pity?

I hope you never have to find out. I hope that you’ve somehow been blessed with a Pollyanna life. But you haven’t and you know you haven’t. Life is a ride of ups and downs and it’s up to you to prepare for the downs when you’re up so that you can focus on the coming ups when your down.

Right now you’re “fine” and you could go on being “fine” until you’re no longer “fine” or you could actually prepare. I vote for the preparation, but you are not a democracy and I wouldn’t get a vote even if you were.

The Challenge.

If you’re ready to move past “fine” to actually being prepared, Kathryn Britton is starting the first of four Resiliency challenges at Ruzuku on Monday. It’s one of four challenges she’ll be leading throughout November about how to build resilience – how to develop key emotional skills to better handle the hardships life throws at us.

From handling disagreements with our spouse to coping with the dreaded pink slip, these exercises enable greater emotional control and even allow you to react more quickly and more appropriately to stressful situations.

But they take practice. And that’s where Ruzuku comes in. Ruzuku is a learning community built around support and encouragement. You commit to a challenge and then report periodically on your progress all the while supporting and being supported by the community.

At Ruzuku, you’re not just thinking about change, you’re making change with the support of a community going through the same thing you are.

Kathryn’s first resiliency challenge is focused on calming our negative emotions by identifying them. Here’s how she describes it:

Negative emotions such as fear or anger cause swift physiological changes to prepare us to fight, flee, or freeze. Negative emotions are more powerful than positive ones because quick responses to threats meant survival in early human history. Positive emotions could be put on hold. So the first step for dealing with a negative event is to calm down your physiological response to threat. One very effective approach is to name the emotion without judging it. Research shows that naming without judging has a quick calming effect on the part of the brain that controls the fight-or-flight response.

And who’s Kathryn to facilitate this particular challenge? For starters, she’s graduate from the University of Pennsylvania’s Masters of Applied Positive Psychology program. I interviewed her a few months back, so you can get a better sense of who she is by reading the interview. And she wrote a great article, Building Resilience for Hard Times.

Take the Challenge. Change your life.

Published Wednesday, October 28, 2009