Sadly, I recently lost a dear friend, who was also my coach and my mentor. Sue came into my life when it was out of control. She came into my life when I felt like I was having a mid-life crisis. Needless to say, I believed she saved me.
As I grieve for the loss of my dear friend, I am pondering about the other times I have dealt with a crisis or felt really stressed. I have been pondering how I have managed to turn it around, what I did well and what I didn’t do very well. How have a formed a resilient back-bone as I do believe resilience is one of my strengths.
I mean the fact is, people going through crisis all the time. People experience stress at all levels daily. No-one is an exception. It’s a negative fact of human life.
As I go deeper into my ponder about this, my thoughts led me to people that have experienced crisis at the worst level and how they have survived. For some reason, the story of Australian, Stuart Diver came to my mind.
In 1997 there was a tragic landslide at the Thredbo ski resort in New South Wales, Australia. In the middle of the night, more than 3,500 tonnes of rock and mud came sliding down the side of the resort killing 18 people. There was one survivor, Stuart Diver. For more than 60 hours, Diver layed in sub-zero temperatures, wearing minimal clothes, wedged under a rock, waiting for rescuers to reach him. He layed knowing his wife Sally had died, as she got caught in the sliding rubble. He heard her screams for help, he heard her suffer. Whilst he was rescued and was the sole survivor, he was then thrown into the spotlight of the worlds media attention and had to survive the next few years grieving with the public watching.
To help him heal, after the incident Diver wrote a book with an Aussie journalist, Simon Bouda. The book is called Survival, and is where he has documented his account of the catastrophic event, the aftermath and the impact to his overall health.
In an extract from the book, Bouda wrote in the forward:
“ It was not the tragedy of Thredbo that made Stuart Diver the person he is. It was his self-disciplined, positive character that enabled him to be a survivor of the Thredbo tragedy. As you read Stuart’s story it is in his hope, and my prayer, that you will discover an approach to life that makes every single day a day of challenge – a day for which to be thankful. For truly, life is precious. Stuart has not sought answers as to why the slide swept away half of his life. He does not want to dwell on the ‘if only’s’, the ‘why’s’, or even the ‘maybes’, for nothing can turn back the hands of time. Nothing will bring back his beloved Sally, but her spirit lives on to encourage and to challenge.”
Almost 20 years on, Diver tragically lost his second wife to cancer. He is now a single dad, and outwardly talks to his determination to teach his young daughter tools to help her cope if anything big happens in her life. Stuart Diver has an extraordinary positive mindset and he believes it’s futile to look at life any other way.
“You’ve got a choice. Sure, have your emotional lows and go to those dark places, but make sure at the end of the day when you go to bed that the last thing you’re thinking is ‘how bloody lucky am I, how great is the world, let’s move along and see what we can achieve tomorrow’.” (smh.com.au, July 17, 2017).
So, this is when I pause and simply go wow. There are many people around the world like Stuart Diver who have experienced tragedy that I can only imagine and tragedy that I hope I will ever experience. And I guess if I was to go through the thousands of stories of survival and how people got through the crisis, there would be many common threads around having a positive mindset, reaching out to others for help and making a choice to move on and experience a better life each day.
Which leads me back to ponder what I have done to overcome a crisis or stress and what I have studied and learnt to help deepen my coaching capability for my clients.
What I have developed is a tool called getting your Stress to Calm on through the NAV-PLAY technique. NAV, which stand for Name, Accept and Validate is reframing technique used to help connect with emotions and release them. PLAY is an acronym I have developed to take your NAV to action – ie Perspective, Laugh, Action and Yeah!
Let me explain this in the context of how I use this technique as a tool for resilience and getting through a crisis or managing stress. I have also drawn some of my knowledge from Tony Robbin’s strategy on dealing with a crisis as well.
So firstly NAV – when you are feeling stressed I encourage you to pause and do this exercise. Even if it means ducking into a toilet, or your car, just find a quiet space:
N – Name what is going on with you. What emotions are you experiencing? Eg sadness, anger, frustration, anxiety. What are you feeling and where is this feeling in your body eg in your stomach, your head, your chest? Where did this emotion come from, what has triggered it? Give this a lot of thought and if you can, write these thoughts down.
A – Accept it – accept what has happened. Tony Robbins says to accept it for what it is and don’t see it worse than it is. Don’t over dramatize or catastrophise the situation because if you do this, you will give up because you’ve made the situation too big. Focus your attention on the truth of the situation and accept the truth. For example, if you have lost a lot of money in your business, dig for truth as to why. Accept this and make a choice to make it better, to change it.
V – Validate the situation. Validate by telling yourself the truth and getting to the root cause of the truth. What happened, how did you get here, why etc. When you have conscious awareness of what really happened then you can create an impact of change. If you hide from the truth, you hide in shame. Shame has no shadows, it will follow you and the black clouds will always hover. Validate your situation and tell yourself the truth. Be honest that something is not working and something MUST change.
When you feel stressed, the most important thing to do is to slow down. Slow the mind down. This NAV technique helps you do this instantly. It slows your mind down to think constructively. When the mind starts to get calm you will start to have perspective. When you have perspective you can then shift to the PLAY side of this technique.
P – Perspective opens the mind up to possibilities. When we have perspective we trigger our parasympathetic nervous system to release “happy hormones” like serotonin, dopamine and endorphins. When this happens we start to feel emotions like joy, gratitude, hope, interest, inspiration, love and serenity. We feel excited and open to possibilities and opportunities. We start to see the through the lens of the glass being half full (optimistic) as opposed to half glass empty (pessimistic). Choices are at the forefront of our thoughts.
L – this is for “laughter”. What I have learnt about going from stress to calm is changing your state, your physiological state. And the best way to change your state is to move your body. Laughter I believe is a good way to do this as it moves your face muscles. When we are stressed, often in the moment everything seems bigger than it is. As we start to feel calm, we start to see the situation for what it is, so this is when I say have a laugh because it’s not worse, you’ve just made to feel worse..it is what it is.
As I said at the start, I am grieving right now for the loss of my friend. I am not laughing at what has happened but I have found energy in knowing death is a part of life, it’s inevitable. Yes it’s sad, deeply sad, but is my moping going to help? Is my excuse to hide from the world and not attend to my responsibilities going to help? Expressing my emotions and being vulnerable is all part of the grieving process, I can’t hide this and I won’t. But I can have perspective and have joy knowing what a wonderful person and coach my friend was and the legacy she has left for me. I can laugh at her funny little ways and the things she made me laugh about. I can stand high instead of slouching down. Changing my state does change my energy. Smiling at what my friend gave me rather than frowning at the loss gives me calm…this is what she would have wanted because these are the resources she taught me.
So “L” is all about changing your state. Getting your energy on, getting into a peak state. Even as I am writing this, I am feeling my chest light up. Switching on your parasympathetic nervous system to release excitement, motivation and the feeling of contempt. Taking action is the best way to change your state. Tony Robbins emphasises this in his strategy – he says to take massive action.
A – the A of course is for action. When we are in peak state this is when we when must take action. Make good choices and implement them. Feed off your motivation and go do something. And don’t write a plan, or worse do a plan for the plan – just do it! Do what Nike has been saying for years, just do it. The best way to move through a crisis or feeling stressed is to take action. One of the best strategies you can do is to get help. Stuart Diver advises this and my coaches Tony Robbins and Sharon Pearson, say to do this. Both Robbins and Pearson both agree the fast track to action is to model someone who has what you want to have. In the context of this topic, there are many autobiographies written by survivors, like Stuart Diver, who give advice on how to manage challenging times in your life – model what they say! I am a bit fan of modelling the behaviours of those that you inspire to be like. It’s not creepy, it’s not stalking, it’s smart. Learn from what they have experienced, learn from their mistakes, and their tragedies. Learn from the strategies that have healed them, helped them and enabled them to grow. Reach out to these people, they exist, they are real and often provide mentoring and coaching services and free resources. Oprah has a wonderful podcast, it’s free…who wouldn’t want to listen to Oprah to get your buzz back on!
In fact one of our 6 human needs is Growth. When we experience growth we feel dam good inside. Progress is a foundation for inner world strength. When we do better, we are better. Modelling from other people is a fantastic strategy to experience growth and to help you achieve your goals faster.
And finally, Y – this is yeah!
Whenever we have reached the top of the mountain and overcome our pain and feel the pleasure, we should always stop and give ourselves a big YEAH, a high-five and a decent tap on our backs. Every time we crack the nut of overcoming adversity when it hits us, we should always celebrate our ability because we are worth it.
I do believe the more we can practise going from stressed to calm, the more capability we will have when life throws us a shit bomb or when things happen out of our control. Mindfulness practise is the medicine to heal your pain so you can have pleasure…now why wouldn’t you want to take that.
I hope you have found my ponder today useful and something you can start to implement. Simply by starting your days with meditation or exercise will always put you in a positive state and when we are in a positive state we will always be open to possibilities.
If you would like to discuss the NAV-PLAY technique in more detail, please reach out and book a FREE Strategy Call today, happy to help, happy to listen. You can also subscribe to my podcast, A Pondering Thing on iTunes and Spotify.
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