The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.
Albert Einstein. (1933). Physics & Reality
We rarely stop to think about how powerful our minds are, but nurses & healthcare workers see first-hand in patients this power in action… sometimes people call it resilience.
What we teach is called The Resilience Principles Paradigm, a description of how thought works, and how we all can use our minds in a more helpful way.
The Resilience Principles Paradigm was created by the late Dr. Keith Blevens (Ph.D.). Dr. Blevens worked for over 40 years in the field of Psychology. He taught and served at 9 universities, helping thousands of healthcare workers in his career. Dr. Blevens was one of our faculty members and he taught many of our nurse students.
The Principles of Mental Life are:
- Mind is not brain; you cannot hold it in your hands. It is a power, the power of mental life. It is the catalyst of the reality we experience.
- Thought is our ability of recognition. Without thought, we could not recognize mental life & reality.
- Consciousness is the incredible nature of being able to be aware — aware of our life, our thoughts, our reality.
In other words, in our Minds we have Thoughts and we are Aware.
The basics are simple, but the work is deep and profound. This work, this paradigm, can help everyone especially nurses helping patients.
It’s not about “positive thinking”, mindfulness, or techniques.
This paradigm is: testable, reproducible, and based on insights.
Before the Resilience Principles Understanding
Until now, we have tried to change how people think to change their behaviors to get better outcomes; unfortunately, we have been looking from the wrong direction after thoughts have manifested, rather than how they started in the first place.
What the Resilience Principles Do for Us
From a Principled understanding of mental life, we now can insightfully understand where our experience is coming from prior to the form life has taken.
To get a feel for why the Resilience Principles Paradigm is an accurate way of describing mental life and why it is different from current understanding, it requires us to listen with an ear to hear something new.
- Listening is one of the most powerful gifts in the universe.
- It is a deeper order of listening than we are used to.
- The act of listening is the willingness to be touched by, changed by, and created by what you hear.
- Insight is a change in understanding—that’s how the Principles work.
- Insight is where ALL change happens.
The Nature of the Resilience Principles Paradigm
The Resilience Principles of Mind, Consciousness, and Thought; are a metaphor to describe how humans experience life. They are natural, neutral elements that cannot be separated; if one is missing, we do not have a paradigm and, therefore, no experience of life.
- Because they are the pre-existing, built-in foundation of our human existence, we all have equal access to them.
- Because they are neutral, it allows us to use our personal thoughts and feelings to create a life of purpose and meaning.
- If you can “hear” the truth of the principles, the profound nature of them, and can see how we are using them to create our life.
- Knowing about the Principles helps us settle our thinking and become present to our life experiences.
In this space, we can have involuntary thinking, which can allow us to have new thinking and new solutions to our problems that we did not see before. This creates a richer, more meaningful experience of life. It is our life.
In contrast, when we are focused on voluntary thinking, we often experience overthinking or intellectualized thinking about our problems. As a result, we can become stubborn or rigid in our perceptions, which feels like stress. This is when we suffer mentally, emotionally, and physically.
The longer we spend in our stressful thinking, feelings of dissatisfaction, anger, depression, insecurity, and fearful thinking appear. In this state of mind, we are now living in a misunderstanding of where our experience is coming from.
The moment we notice that we have been caught up in this type of thinking and remember that we are the thinker of our reality, we always have the opportunity to shift our focus to a more positive direction; this allows our thoughts to settle. Knowing where our experience of life comes from doesn’t seem to be important at first, but it is the difference between suffering, thriving, and joy.
Written by:
Teresa Walding
BSN, RN, NC-BC
Teresa is a Board-Certified Nurse Coach and Associate Director of the Advancing Nurse Coaching Program, which focuses on bringing the Principles of Resilience to nurses and health care professionals through their 80-hour virtual, self-paced course.
