9. How to handle adversity and do it well

We're all faced with challenges. Bigger and smaller ones. But some of us handle these like superheroes, while others collapse under the burdens of responsibilities. What's the difference between these two humans?

Today's episode teaches you how to build resilience and handle life's challenges well, even when faced with adversity. Tune in and build your resilience so that you know you have your back no matter what.

Transcript

Nadja Hagen [00:00:14]:
Are you ready to go from am I good enough to is this good for me? Welcome to the Self Love Sessions podcast. I'm your hostess, Nat Yahen, and I'm the self love coach for ambitious women recovering from people pleasing and starting to love the heck out of themselves. The most important relationship is the one you have with yourself. It sets the tone for all other relationships in your life and your overall quality of life. It's worth cultivating. In the Self Love Sessions podcast, I share nuggets of wisdom on setting healthy boundaries, prioritizing your needs without shame and guilt, and building relationships that enrich your holding life, starting with the one you have with yourself. Let's dive into today's episode. Welcome to today's episode of the Self Love Sessions podcast.

Nadja Hagen [00:01:19]:
In today's episode, I want to reflect with you upon the question how to handle adversity and how to do it well. And it does not might appear obvious, but this episode has a lot to do with resilience, so let's dive directly into it in the meantime. It's about three or four weeks ago that I had my mum on a phone call and she was telling me that a family member of mine got really seriously sick. Not even sick, she just dropped dead without anybody knowing what had happened to her. You can imagine that this was a huge shock. At the same time, I'm a mom to a little whirlwind. I'm a business owner and life is going on. This sounds so cold hearted, and I don't mean it in that way at all.

Nadja Hagen [00:02:20]:
But life is going on. As artists say, the show must go on. It's not a show, it's authentic living here, but still, life is going on no matter what is happening at the same time in your life. And these circumstances led me to reflect a lot about how can I handle these adverse situations. Well, one thing here is that we are living in a world of duality. There is light and there is dark, and both exist at the same time. During the day, we have the sunlight, but we have also the shadows. At night we have the dark, but we have also the moon shining upon us.

Nadja Hagen [00:03:06]:
So wherever we are looking, wherever we are turning, we see duality everywhere. Our world is full of opposites, good and bad at the same time, light and dark at the same time. And this is also valued for our emotions. We have positive and negative emotions at the same time, and this might really be confusing for us sometimes. Resilience was a thing that I didn't possess a couple of years ago when something happened that I labeled as negative. It completely threw me off the curve. And this is unfortunate because, as I said earlier, life still goes on. You still have your work to do, you still have to take care of yourself.

Nadja Hagen [00:04:00]:
You still have to provide and care for your children. All these things do not stop just because you don't feel good enough or you don't feel like doing them because something negative happened. No, life is continuing. So we need to come to a place where we honor the negative emotions that are coming up in our lives, while at the same time being able to take care of our everyday responsibilities. And to do this in a way that does not numb our feelings, that does not push away negative feelings, and that does not harm us or the people around us on a long term base. Sounds easy, right? But it's not easy at all. It takes a lot of awareness, it takes some knowledge, and it definitely takes practice. And these are all the things that I want to share with you in today's episode.

Nadja Hagen [00:05:01]:
So first things first. The knowledge part. The knowledge part here is quite a rational part. It means that we know, consciously know, and we make ourselves remember that we are living in a world of opposites. We are living in a world of duality. That's one of the main characteristics we have on this world. And it doesn't matter if we like it or not. To be honest, I personally have a lot of situations where I would prefer just to have the good and not the opposite.

Nadja Hagen [00:05:35]:
But that's not me to decide this, because the world has been created the way it was created, for whatever reason, even though I might not understand all of them. But we are living in a world of opposites. We are living in a world of duality. We have one thing and its exact opposite existing at the same time. We might not always be aware of this fact because quite often they come across as rhythms. So, for example, day and night is a rhythm. Spring, summer, autumn and winter is a rhythm. But we forget that while we are having a hot, warm, sunny summer here on the other side of the world, it's a cold and maybe dark winter.

Nadja Hagen [00:06:22]:
So opposites do exist, and they do exist at the same time. That is one thing we just need to know. We need to remember ourselves, we need to stay aware of this. So the same is valued for our emotional world. We can feel positive emotions and negative emotions at the same time. And this is quite confusing. When I come back to my initial example of a family member being in a serious health condition, this was a huge shock to me. I didn't expect this at all.

Nadja Hagen [00:06:58]:
At the same time, I was very aware that the doctors are taking care of my family member to the best of their ability, and he was in very, very good hands. So I personally could not do anything to help her right now, right here, what I could do was support her close ones, which I did, to call them, to ask them if I can do anything, to ask them how I can support and help. But at the same time, I needed to take care of my business. It was the day that my podcast actually launched and it was a very successful launch. And for my business, it was a very successful and happy day, while at the same time being a day that brought me shocking and disturbing and really sad news. So how was I able to handle this? And how was I able to handle this? Well, the next part is a skill set part, and this needs practice. Because I know that we are living in a world of duality and I know that we are dealing with opposites all the time. I know that the same is valued for my emotional world and it's the same for your emotional world.

Nadja Hagen [00:08:13]:
I can be proud, excited, happy, grateful, and be deeply concerned, worried, sad and asking myself, why did this even need to happen at the same time? And I think that is one thing. It's so simple, but most people don't get it, right? We think that we are either allowed to be happy or that we are allowed to be sad, but we can't be happy and sad at the same time because rationally, that doesn't make any sense, right? But you know, the point is, emotions are not rational and you can indeed be happy and sad at the same time. That is absolutely possible. And it's also absolutely healthy and normal. When you come to the point in your life that you accept that you can feel positive and negative emotions at the same time, that your emotions are indeed very deep and colorful and very complex with a huge variety. And they don't need to be justified rationally with logic at all. If you know this and you can accept this, you build up resilience in ways you have never known before because you don't expect yourself to be either happy completely or to be either sad and worrying completely. You can let both emotions exist in your emotional world at the same time and you know that is okay.

Nadja Hagen [00:09:56]:
It's not about pushing away the negative emotions, and at the same time, it's not about making the positive emotions bigger than they actually are. They are both there, and that's totally okay. For most of us, this challenge steams from childhood. So when little ones are having big emotions, we tend to ask them, what's up? What are you feeling, and why do you feel this way? First of all, it's sometimes really difficult to express why we are feeling a certain way we do, and it's not necessary either. But that's a topic for another podcast episode. But when we force children, or when we have been forced, as younger versions of ourselves, to justify our emotions, we are doing more harm than good. Because emotions are not rational. You can't justify them, at least not always.

Nadja Hagen [00:10:56]:
You might sometimes know very clearly why you are sad or why you're feeling happy. But it's much more complex than this, isn't it? Right. Unfortunately, a lot of humans had really lost their deep connection to their own emotional world. And that shows in the way we handle emotionally challenging situations and in the way we possess or do not possess resilience. Because resilience is all about acknowledging the negative while at the same time also acknowledging the positive. I can be mad about something and be grateful at the same time. This sounds so simple. And when you got it, it is.

Nadja Hagen [00:11:46]:
But before you come to the point that you can say, yeah, I got it. Finally, you need to be patient with yourself, and you need to practice. You have practiced to be rational for a very long time. So now it's time to practice the opposite. There they are again, the opposites. And another thing to know here is that life comes in very various shades. There is not only black and white. There isn't only good and bad.

Nadja Hagen [00:12:17]:
There are all shades of gray and not only gray. We live in a colorful world. We have pink, green, yellow, black, white, red, and all other colors you can imagine and all at the same time. So it's not easy to navigate this colorful life with all its expressions. And our emotional world isn't less colorful than the world itself. Show yourself, grace. Be patient with yourself. You deserve all of this.

Nadja Hagen [00:12:53]:
Absolutely. And it's the key to practice handling your emotions well and with dignity. Because when something negative happens in your life, you don't necessarily have to be thrown off the curve. I mean, there are some incidents in life that definitely do this, and that's totally okay. But in a lot of cases, we make negative things much bigger than they actually are. I'm not talking about the real serious things here, but, you know, the little annoyances that overshadow a whole day and just make us feel bad and forget about all the good things that are present at the same time, too. But we are the ones that decided not to look at the positive and to solely focus on the negative in this moment and we can change this. We can both allow to be present and we can intentionally choose upon what we want to focus.

Nadja Hagen [00:13:50]:
And it's not always easy to change our focus. It gets easier with practice. And again, patience, kindness, show yourself grace. That is super important here. Resilience isn't built within a day if we are not resilient by nature. Resilience is a skill set that we can learn and practice as we can do with other skills. You learn to walk. Did you actually know that a child falls down at least 1000 times because he or she goes her first successful step? Isn't this mind blowing? Would you try something for 999 times and still try it for the thousandth times when you have failed 999 times before? I don't think so.

Nadja Hagen [00:14:50]:
Most adults don't. But we are all here on this world walking around, right? So we had this resilience when we were children and this resilience is still there. It's a journey for you to rediscover what you're actually capable of. And I hope that today's episode gave you some good tips and tricks to do just that. I'm wishing you lots of success and a successful journey in building up your resilience, knowing that you can rely on yourself and that you can support yourself no matter what. And I wish you that you feel your resilience building up within you so that you know you are pretty able to handle life challenges. Thank you for tuning in in today's episode and I talk to you in the next episode. Thank you for listening to today's episode.

Nadja Hagen [00:15:58]:
If you found this valuable, please give a five star rating and tell other women that this show is worth listening to. I talk to you in the next episode. Our it's.