Are You a Survivor?

Three Rules of Resiliency That Could Save Your Life

Posted by Kathy on Mar 30, 2009 in Blog | 2 comments

“There are three rules of survival,

Everyone is a survivor

It’s not all relative

You are stronger than you know”

-Ben Sherwood, The Survivors Club

How resilient are you? Take this testhttp://www.resiliencycenter.com/index.shtml

What makes you resilient when times get tough?  Where does resiliency come from? What is in your character that protects you in time of crisis? These are some of the questions that I have been asking myself. I decided to make a list of everything I survived in my 53 years.  I am asking myself two questions, what helped me survive?  What did I learn from it?  If you want to see my list, you can email me and we can exchange lists. 

First, I believe my resiliency comes from my faith in a God who tells me over and over he has plans for me and that they are good.  Secondly, I have a family legacy of positive thinking. Third, and most important I have personal experience that tells me the above paradigm works. 

This is what makes me resilient. In my most fearful times, I ask myself this one question.  If God were to appear in my living room and say to me, “Hey Kathy, you will survive this,” how would I live my life?  What would I be doing?  Then I try my best to act out the answers to those questions.

The book, “The Survivor Club” points to a couple of things that may determine our survival. People who have faith and attend a church weekly live roughly 6 years longer than those who don’t and those odds increase with the number of weekly events you attend. 

Secondly, people tend to live longer when they have significant emotional connections to others.  The survival rate in the ER correlates to the number of friends in the waiting room.  Survival goes up for those who are married and have a companion.

So faith and connection are huge players in our survival.

There are also character components that play into our survival. I am the last person to say I am good in a crisis. I always picture myself as the one person who goes all catatonic in a plane crash and is found frozen in their seat. Others see me differently. One of my dad’s favorite stories is a time we were out sailing the Chesapeake.  The worst squall in 25 years suddenly blew up with no warning.  It was taking the boats down around us as though they were toothpicks.  The critical choice my dad made was to go up front and begin wrestling to get the sail down.  Huge waves were breaking over us and the wind was pressing us into the water.  When I realized my dad was up there with no life line on my mind went into overdrive. I scrambled across the deck and held on to his legs until he got the sail down.  I vaguely remember some expletives and a command to get below—which I ignored. He proudly tells this story often, though I don’t think I did anything any other daughter wouldn’t have done.  It was a survival instinct, I have them and so do you. 

So what do we do with all of this and why is it important?

It is critical to see yourself as a survivor, because your mindset dictates the outcome of your worst day.  People who survive great tragedy are great ‘Live-rs” In other words, they expect to live and they know how to live. If you knew you would survive, what would you do next?  How would you plan out your life?

Long story short, I expect to survive anything life throws at me until the day that God decides differently.  And when I begin to lose my courage, I call upon the memory of all the things I have walked through, my faith and connections and the idea that I am stronger than I know.

I believe all survivors have two responsibilities, first to tell their story, and second to be great “Live-rs”.  So on your worst day, I hope you will remember that:

You are a survivor

It is not all relative

…and you are stronger than you know.

This blog is dedicated to my buddy, Aaron Jones who survived a real “pickle”(his words). I pray you will never forget that you are a survivor and that it gives you a responsibility to live life to the fullest. I’m holding you to it.