The Power of Resilience Stories by LK Tommi

Every experience that we have is a story. It has a beginning, middle and end, even the tricky experiences. They do end. It might feel like a continuous struggle when you are in a tricky experience, but it does end. Sometimes one experience might go into a different experience, so it feels like forever, but it does end.

When we write down the experience as a story, our mind gets the chance to look at it in a different way. It is like getting a different view of the events and can be a really insightful process of what the person has learnt through the experience. The key to resilience is finding the learning.

When we have an unresolved experience, we leave the experience loop open in our brains. The brain then looks for evidence to see if it can resolve the problem, challenge or experience. If it can be awesome, the loop is closed; if not, the experience loop remains open. When we have too many experience loops open in our brains, this is when the brain becomes overwhelmed.

Story writing is a great way to try and resolve the experience because it helps the brain to sort through the information or problem. Ultimately, relaxing and freeing the brain to think of new ways to solve the challenge or problem and closing the experience loop, saving the brain from going into overwhelm, you can also create the ending of how you would like it to be solved.

I love empowering young people to recognise their resilience stories. Let me share this resilience story with you.

A young person wanted to become a tow truck driver. He was young and had no money even to start thinking about buying a tow truck. He worked hard and for extremely long hours for large tow truck companies, but the pay could have been better. No matter how many days or hours he worked, there were no savings for a tow truck. One day though, he decided to follow his dreams. He found a tow truck and entered into a deal to buy it. No, it wasn’t a new truck, and it would soon need repairs. This did not deter his dream, and he found ways to fix the truck, work harder and resolve the tricky decisions that came along the way, including the challenge of how to run a business when you have never done so before and being at a young age of 20. There were definitely times where he thought, yep, I can’t keep going, but then he found ways of keeping on going and growing his venture into the amazing business it is today. And now he doesn’t have one truck; he has two trucks and employees.

The essential resilience skills that he learnt was he learnt about his:

• thinking patterns and recognised when they were negative, and the skill of how to change them
• emotions and what each of them felt like when they were going up and down and, at times, all over the place, and he discovered new ones that he had not felt before; he owned his emotions.
• energy and how to raise his energy when it was getting too low or was becoming scattered to the point of not being able to focus on the problem. He learnt the skill of being calm, centred and focused.
• life lessons of perseverance, patience, determination, the power of having a goal and seeing it happen, that he could recover and move on from tricky life experiences, the ability to manage a business, see good qualities in people and believe in them, and so many more.
• he discovered himself, who he is as a person, and who he wants to be in business.
• he now embraces self-discovery as a way to develop his business.

He wouldn’t trade any of the difficulties he had along the way and embraced each and every experience as if it was a long-lost friend waiting to be greeted and connected with what there was to learn.

If you are going through a tricky life experience and want to write an ending to the story, then let us do this together.

I would love to write a book about people’s resilience stories from all age groups (young people, teens, older people). They should be celebrated and be out in the world for everyone to read.

If you would like to share your resilience story, don’t hesitate to contact me, and we will write the story for the world to celebrate with you.

Write your resilience story and be the author of your story today.

My name is LK Tommi – I’m an educator working in the education and psychology field, and the author of a resilience-based book and journal series supporting children and teenagers to better understand their emotions, thinking, energy, and behaviour, and how it all connects with their everyday life experiences.

The people that know me well will tell you how much I love to chat.

Please connect with me at Facebook and Instagram: The Resilience Tutor

Website: www.theresiliencetutor.com.au