Resilience is the New Happiness

               Self-mastery. What a journey it is! Habibe Açık, Founder of B-Wise, took us to a journey to discover our “self” and resilience power in quest for happiness.

               Did you notice that popular characters in movies or books are best known for their resilience stories? Yes, they are! Yet, in our daily routines, when we come across a situation that requires resilience, we tend to suddenly become unhappy and desperate. Why?             

    Habibe took us through the resilience process’ four stages: presentation, preparation, recovery, and response Analyzing our emotions, gaining awareness of the circumstances, discovering our emotional diversity and finally focusing on the work form the resilience model.

                Do you know how to design your best resilience canvas? We now do! We reflected on our health living routines, social support system, mental habits and emergency kit goodies. Your emergency kit can have the following: meditation, breathing exercises, stress management techniques, a solid happiness inventory, time off, what if questioning habit, distancing yourself, emotional diversity, compassion, gratitude, empathy and vulnerability. Nice list, no?

 When you write down your life purpose, values, strengths and weaknesses, the picture becomes clear. It was fascinating to find out that our weaknesses are the source of our resilience stories. Habibe guided the circle to become aware of our feelings, mind traps, and perspectives.  

Interestingly, we tend to spend time with people who resemble to us the most. Sadly, this tendency does not improve our resilience ability. Thankfully, to reflect on that, we were in a TurkishWIN circle and met new people this evening.  

We then explored our mind traps. How do we react to new events, do we have assumptions and beliefs that trigger deeper feelings? What is the event, our mind trap, our reaction and the positive alternative? This cartoon sums up the mind trap challenge so well! Habibe gave us tools to reframe our approach to positive alternatives. Thank you!   

We learned tips to become our best selves and make stress a dear friend that we manage. Resilience, it was great to meet you. Now we have tools to tap to our inner resilience for a happier life. We wish you all a wonderful journey. After all, happiness is a journey, not a destination.          

 We thank TurkishWINner Habibe Açık for her mind and heart opening session and Ferko Signature Assembly for hosting us.