S2: EP-76 Developing Inner Resilience With Lisa Abramson

On this episode join Mary and her special guest, Lisa Abramson. Lisa is an executive coach, mindfulness teacher, author and mom of two girls. She teaches overachievers how to develop a resilient mindset and create success that’s sustainable.

Do you consider yourself an overachiever? Do you constantly find yourself pushing to climb “the ladder”? Do people comment on how driven and successful you are? At the same time do you find yourself feeling unfulfilled? Do you find yourself asking “What do I really want?”. Have you ever found yourself having a crisis of the soul?

As an overachiever you might find yourself approaching mindfulness by wanting to dive right in. In order to be successful and create a sustainable mindfulness practice it is important to create a practice that is attainable. For Lisa that meant a commitment to meditating for 4 minutes a day. We also have the opportunity to weave mindfulness into our day. 

Notice how you feel when you take a drink of water.

Check in with yourself as you are walking from your desk to the bathroom. 

If you find yourself mindlessly scrolling on your phone, pause to see how you are feeling in that moment. 

In order to do this you have to be able to recognize your body sensations and emotions. Doing body scans, starting at your head and moving down to your feet. Noticing how every part of your body is feeling can be a great way to begin to recognize what is happening in the body. 

Creating mindfulness can be an opportunity to create courage, compassion, and care. Big emotions often keep us from showing up with courage to create the things we want in our lives. We can build a capacity to tolerate those emotions through mindfulness. We can sit with those big emotions and bring compassion to them.

We all have an inner critic. You can’t always silence your inner critic, but through the practice of mindfulness and self compassion we can change our relationship with our inner critic. We can learn to be on our own side. We can acknowledge our inner critic and tell it “I heard you and I got this”. Notice the patterns of  your inner critic. When do you hear from it the most? When you are tired? When you need something? The give yourself self-care when you aren’t in crisis. 

If you want to create more resilience and begin to explore self compassion, a great place to start is through guided meditation. Having someone guide you is very helpful and can get you in the zone more quickly.