Thriving – Your Way
February 28, 2024
The Slowest Season: Change
March 13, 2024
Thrive – to pursue joy and meaning in your life. In this 7-part blog series we are exploring how your resilience skills can help you thrive. We have been focusing on constellations of skills that can be used to pursue the life you want.
You built your resilience skills by getting through difficult times. Those skills are now part of your strengths. Use them to build joy and meaning into your life. Joy comes in many shapes and sizes. Quiet joy – a hummingbird returning to the flower right in front of you with no concern for your admiration. Loud joy – singing and dancing with your family at a concert. Long lasting joy and moments of joy. Meaning, too, comes in large and small packages. Brightening someone’s day to changing a life to making a blanket to raise funds for an advocacy center.
Why do this? Why pursue thriving? Thriving, in the end, benefits yourself, your close family and friends, and the world.
For Yourself
You deserve joy and a sense of purpose. Joy flows through your whole self – body, brain and spirit. It builds positive connections in your brain and boosts your immune system. Joy in the moment adds energy to your day and joy anticipated creates optimism. Having a sense of meaning gives you purpose and reduces your risk of depression. It encourages strength and persistence as you work toward that which matters. Meaning helps answer the question of who I am and why I matter. Pursue thriving for yourself.
For Your Close Family and Friends
Joy experienced together is laughter, awe, a collective delight. It creates strong bonds and memories to sustain lifetime relationships. Your joy shared with those close to you is a gift and an example. Finding meaning together is deep companionship and a sense of team spirit. Often your meaning is being part of your family and friend connections. You are helping, easing the way, or contributing to the collective good. Your thriving brings strength and well-being to your loved ones.
For the World
When you are thriving you have the energy to make the world a better place. Smiles shared in public, work spent on helping others, and energy toward projects that make a difference. When deeply focused on what brings you meaning you dig in, learn more, and become your best self. When pursuing joy you notice and share beauty. Other times you create beauty, which benefits your larger community. Your joy sends out ripples in ways that you can not track. Your thriving, and the thriving of your close family and friends sets up cycles of positive energy that impact other’s ability to thrive.
Joy and meaning have an uncanny way of overlapping. Delight in a hummingbird leads to planting flowers and supporting parks, picking up trash and helping neighbors. Music builds community serves as a fundraiser for causes and spreads messages of inclusion and joy. A shared project leads to coffee with friends, improved mental health and the building of community.
The decision to pursue thriving in your life does not protect you from pain and frustration. No matter what, keep pursuing joy and meaning; it supports your long-term well-being.
Center in your own wisdom; decide for yourself what brings you joy and meaning. Act with courage to increase those things in your life. Connect to thrive; find people who will join you and support you in the goals you have chosen to pursue. Be stubborn about going after what matters to you, even in the face of your own crankiness. Thrive your way, making the decisions that are right for you at this point in your journey. You deserve it, your family and friends will benefit, and the world will be a better place because you will become your better self.
Peace,
Laura A. Gaines
This is the final part in a seven-part series. To get caught up, check out Resilience to Thrive , Center in Your Own Wisdom, Act with Courage, Connect to Thrive, Be Stubborn, and Thriving – Your Way. You are welcome to comment by sending an email to resilience@learnmodelteach.com or engaging on LinkedIn or Facebook.
