Build coping skills to withstand life's challenges

Your coping skills are your ability to handle life's challenges in the most effective ways, maximizing your chances of success or survival, and minimizing the damages and other negative consequences.

There is a virtually unlimited spectrum of difficult, or even potentially devastating, situations that life could hit you with, sooner or later. It may be a serious illness or chronic pain, an abusive relationship, divorce, big financial loss, burnout, business or career failure, a child with ADHD or autism, and so on. It could be a one time blow, like a loss of loved one, or it could be something that stays a big challenge for many years, even for life, without giving you much of break.

Will you be lost and destroyed under stress or will you have strong enough coping skills to stay in control and do the best that can be done? Will you have the resiliency to come out stronger than you ever were?

While some of the coping skills and strategies (or rather tactics) are specific to the type of challenges you are facing, the most important of those skills are fairly universal. Your ability to cope well and stay in control depends most on your strengths in the following two areas:

• your actions,
• your emotions.

Your actions

Maybe you were content with your level of such thinking and coping skills in quiet times. But now there is a complication. When faced with outstanding challenges you are often in situations of high emotional arousal, under stress. And, as you may have already realized, high emotional arousal can significantly distort our thinking, and very often not to our advantage. How do you deal with that?

A good line of defense is to learn and use more systematic thinking strategies. Think on paper, as much as possible. Learn to think on paper ("paper" could be a text file on your computer). Instead of agonizing or letting your mind race, take a deep breath and jot down your main thoughts. Brainstorm on paper. Follow a sequence of systematic decision making steps, on paper. Go as far as you can with that (even if your switch to pure intuition in the end). The more you practice that, the more robust and uncluttered your thinking will be.

Finally, for situations when you need to make quick decisions on the fly, your intuition is probably your best guide, if you learn to tell apart its voice from the noises of the stressful moments (You can strengthen this ability in the course of working on your emotional intelligence skills).

Your emotions

Emotions are essentially messages from your inner brain to your consciousness. Those messages use a different language than your thoughts, the language of physical sensations in your body. That language is more powerful, direct, and efficient than thoughts in communicating certain types of information that are critical for your survival.

Your emotions can carry valuable clues for finding solutions and navigating through the most difficult problems you may face, if you learn to read them properly. However, like any concentrated power, emotions can turn highly destructive if mishandled.

There are two main ways how your emotions can work as destructive power against you.

First, they can cloud or totally block your thinking, decision making, and creative abilities. Those abilities that you may need most to resolve the threatening situation. They can paralyze your actions. Instead of being keenly aware of your emotions of the moment and accepting them as nothing more as messengers you could fall into the trap of letting them overwhelm you and take full control of your thoughts and actions.

The second destructive force, which is a longer-term effect, comes from emotions that were somehow suppressed, that were not accepted, felt fully in your body or released. Those emotions pile up with time, like unhandled mail, somewhere in the background, underneath your mind. They become toxic waste that keeps draining your energy, narrows your thinking, makes you apathic or drives you to self-destruction. That emotional baggage can hold you back in life and take a heavy toll on your health.

How do you prevent your emotions from turning into your enemy? One of the main strategies is to work on developing your emotional intelligence. Your level of emotional intelligence is not something you are just born with. You can systematically build it, but it takes some time and work.

The first necessary step on that path is gaining a good knowledge base on that topic, mainly through reading. In the process, you can use your growing base for identifying and critically reassessing your beliefs about emotions and your relationship with them. There is much more to it than may seem on the surface.

To survive well and stay healthy in the longer term, you also need a good way to regularly release your accumulated baggage of suppressed or unexpressed emotions. This is an essential component of your coping skills. There is a number of ways to do thid. For some people it is journaling, when you use writing to let out your feelings. For some it is prayer or meditation. There are also special techniques, such as the Sedona Method. Like for other coping skills, you need to work out what works best for you, through trial and observation. Growing your emotional intelligence will help you on that front as well.

Recommended reading for developing coping skills
Some of the most insightful books that can help you strengthen your ability to cope with life’s challenges, as well as move faster to success in any area.

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