Your Resilient Coaching Studio

Good evening. It's 7 o' clock here in Massachusetts, 6 o' clock in Minneapolis. I'm Rick Cram and welcome to your resilient coaching studio. You know, there's when it comes to pain management and being resilient or even trying to thrive with pain, there is something that I like to remind myself about as well as remind other people about. There's no perfection in pain management and there's no perfection in a lot of things in this world, including with yours truly. I'm on live now and I'll talk to you about anxiety for Amar and for any of you that are experiencing anxiety.

You brought it up last night when I went live. I thought I was slated to go on live last night at 8 Eastern and I did. And then I see finally I looked correctly at the schedule and I saw at the top of the Cadre app that we're supposed to be together right now. So I wasn't going to let you down. For any of you that were looking forward to this, let me know if my audio is anything less than perfect as well. But hello, Luke, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for making all of this possible.

The idea about plan to be your best as you navigate pain is all about trading the journey of pain for one of resilience. I talk an awful lot about resilience. Perhaps you think an awful lot about resilience and there's a lot to be said for it. There's lots of, a lot of ways to pursue it. I believe in pursuing ways to do it in your own unique way. My resilience isn't necessarily going to work for you. Mine isn't going to necessarily work for a lot of people. A I think the important path to be on is to find your own strengths, build the new ones you need to and take everything you've lived through in the past, all of your values, your sense of who you are and use that, use all of that combined to find your own unique resilience.

The other thing I often talk about sometimes too much on the focus of resilience but also on how to thrive. The plan to be your best method is all about that, how to find that, how to find those strengths, how to find those tools, those strategies and skills that will help you face. Hello Omar, this is for you. Thank you for your questions last night, for all of your comments. You mentioned anxiety and we're about to talk about that. And it's also for any of you who join us tonight or see this recording who all experience anxiety, whether It's a flash of anxiety or perhaps even I just got the message that lost connection.

So I'll pause and hope that this renews perhaps. And actually, Amar, if you wouldn't mind letting me know if you're. If you. If I am still with you, but I'll continue, hopefully that this will catch up with the connection being renewed. The whole idea about the three Steps of Resilience really came about to address those things that are challenging, like anxiety. It's a form of pain. Just like when we have pain of one kind or another. Whether it's physical grieving or excessive stress, it can be overwhelming and it can hijack our focus, SAP our energy, and frustrate our home.

Amara, if you're still there, if you wouldn't mind letting me know if I'm still coming through or not. And hopefully this recording will still be captured and smooth out with the live stream. But there's this powerful sense of urgency, urgency in all of that, in the physical pain, in grieving, in stress. There's an urgency sometimes when there's a lot of stress involved, to let me actually hit debug and see if that helps. The idea of how do you get out of that sense of urgency, that urgency of thought, Thought, the urgency of emotions, everything for relief or to how to find a way to trade that stress and anxiety and that pain for moving forward and being comfortable, being safe and confident and feeling whole and, yes, feeling balanced.

So the three Steps of Resilience is designed to do a number of things, including address this. The three steps are tune in, plan, and be your best. Let's do this together. Let's plan, or rather tune in and start with the idea of taking a moment to just breathe and relax. Be aware of not only your breathing, but once you're aware of it, a few natural breaths. Join me in taking a really deep breath, deeper perhaps than you've taken in hours, maybe even in days or weeks. See if you can take a deep breath in where you feel it, in the depths of your core.

Let's do that together. Keep pulling it in deeper and then let it out, just in a very relaxed way. Often a breath is what will help center us into the moment. And then we'll think through, what is it as we tune in. What are you experiencing? If you're experiencing anxiety, what's causing it? And what are your thoughts about it? What are your feelings about it? Go ahead and actually be very honest with yourself. I believe it's the honesty is the truth. And as they say, truth will set you free when you're and when I am denying or rejecting truth or reality, I'm fighting with something that's true and real.

And that fight will consume some of our focus and some of our energy. But once you think through and understand and validate excuse me, validate what you're experiencing. In a way, by validating it, you're giving yourself permission to be a little bit more objective. And now think through what you need. What have you done in the past that's helped you trade that anxiety for calm and for balance? What have you done perhaps before, but not for a long time. Do you need to express it? Do you need to journal about it?

Do you need to write it out? Even maybe even just type out a few words in your notes? Do you need to talk to someone? Talk to someone about it and let it out? Express it? The word express struck me a couple of years ago and as some of you may know, I deal with intense daily pain since the seventh surgery on my left knee in 2019. It's in the state of trauma and it's a trauma experienced for me every day. The anxiety that I experience is a very difficult time relaxing because I never know when the next blast of pain will come.

I was honored to be a guest on this wonderful the Spoonie Sisters podcast recording today and I probably had a dozen or so blasts of pain on, literally doubling over, not able to catch my breath and writhing in pain. And it's that stress that I work on a lot with my breathing and with this three steps of resilience. Once we understand more of what we're experiencing and why, then we can go to the plan step. Armed with that knowledge, armed with even a sense of wisdom. What might you do now? Maybe actually let's even wait just a second.

Don't do anything just yet except add to your list of things that you might do in that be your best third step in this plan step Try to get even a little bit more into the moment, calm and think about what you've got control over. Would you agree that anxiety in part is stress over something we can't control and the benefit the health, the lowering of the cortisol stress hormone happens when we are calm and able to plan a couple of thoughts of what I do when I'm anxious. I trade whatever I'm thinking about.

I trade that urgency in that moment for a long term perspective. If we think with that urgency, we don't have control over what we're trying to fix in the moment. Maybe we're trying to control or fix something over which we have no control in this moment. But if we take a long term perspective, allow ourselves to say, all right, I can live with this right now, it might be a past pain, it might be fear of the future, future pain might be pain that you're experiencing right now. But if we take a timeline, instruction and out we're right here in this particular moment on the time timeline, but with a long term perspective, suffer.

Suffer is a tough word, isn't it? And yet there's one definition of the word. Suffer means to allow. Allow this moment to be as it is. But trade that urgency for a long term perspective. That's something that you might consider adding to your list of what you might do in this moment. I actually just saw a little while ago a video about breathing. In fact might have been from a conversation I had yesterday with someone who specializes in helping people do what is perhaps just as natural as our heart beating.

And that is breathing. Oh, it was this wonderful post and this fellow described for people who are on the verge of or in an anxiety attack to take a lot of really long, deep breaths. Take one where you first do this, you lock up all your muscles. Physically try to concentrate on locking up all your muscles, tensioning them everywhere you can. Your back, your neck, your shoulders, your arms as legs, as much as possible, your core, keep it locked and breathe in for 20 seconds. And then here's when the magic happens.

And I believe it because I've done this. After 20 seconds, you let it all go, you completely relax and you let the breath leave. And what that does, the reason it works, is because it's telling the brain relaxing from an extreme state to a relaxed state. And the brain can actually be the anxiety that you have. So those are a few options. What are you going to pick? It's time for you to be your best, time for me to be my best. And being our best means we're going to follow through, act on it, go ahead and do it.

And then as you can, write down what you just experienced. If it works, celebrate it. If it's something that you might need to try again, try it again, or do something else again like before. There's no perfection in pain management. There's no perfect way to be resilient except your only, your true unique way. So we got together, as I often say, you'll hear me often say, three things. Come as you are, leave stronger because your best is greater than pain. I hope this helps. If you need to do, watch this again, think it through contact me if you can.

One of the ways you can contact me is send me a message through Instagram. com rickcram R A C K C R a M. All lowercase of course, but I'll respond to every message there and hopefully my scheduling will be as it should be. Next week I'll be on either Monday or Tuesday. I'll be checking with Nikki, see when and where she wants me, and I'll look forward to seeing you again. Again. Come as you are. Leave stronger. Your best is greater than the pain. Take care It.