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Ricardo Panela: My relationship with the word 'resilience'
This week our guest blog post comes from young baritone Ricardo Panela. Read his refreshingly honest account of the determination required to keep going in this rewarding, tough and at times unforgiving business.
Ricardo Panela: My relationship with the word 'resilience'
I will instead talk a little bit about my relationship with the word 'resilience' throughout these 6 years that I've been freelancing in the U.K.
While this may be the reality for a very talented and lucky minority, most of us will find ourselves in a position where a missed audition is a missed job and, as such, income which is not going to happen. Besides dealing with the psychological aspect of rejection, we also have to deal with the practicality of unemployment.
Once you've been balancing these things for a while and just generally living a life with all that's good and not-so-good about that, there will come a moment of exhaustion where you simply cannot remain on a positive mindset no matter how hard you try. You go and talk to people and everyone says how privileged you are to have a unique talent and that things will get better, etc., but no piece of well meant advice seems to be enough to fill the void.
With this in mind, how does one make the concept of resilience work? How does one manage to have a rational approach while simultaneously trying to shake off all the negative feelings which seem, at times, overwhelming?
The bad news is: I don't really know.
Why not, then - for a change - to stop trying to fight them and allow yourself to fully experience the negative emotions which adversity inevitably brings?
From my experience, I find that trying to force myself into a positive mindset under difficult circumstances is not only unnatural, but ultimately exhausting. It forces you to try your hardest to make your body react in a way that feels contrary to the situation at hand because your subconscious is clever enough to figure out it's being conned by your conscious mind.
On the other hand (and please bear in mind that is nothing more than my personal experience and how my brain is wired), I find that allowing myself the time and space to feel terrible while slowly trying to defuse what triggered the crisis and combing through the situation at a rhythm which isn't faster than my body can take at the moment, really helps me to shift things back into place.
By allowing myself the time and space to react naturally to things, I allow my brain to experience what it needs to experience and to process what it needs to process in a way that's natural and adequate to the current situation. We're only talking about brain substances such as endorphins and serotonin in the end, and while you obviously need to keep a watchful eye and make sure the situation isn't dragging for longer than it should, the concentration of the brain substances will slowly re-balance itself and gradually allow you to objectively assess the situation.
I find that after a while, this shifts my brain back into 'problem-solving' mode and enables me to go and find solutions to what has now become a clear question.
This is what resilience is for me: the ability and the willpower to constantly solve problems in a way that is natural to who you are.
Treating ourselves with kindness may seem like a challenge at times, but at the end of the day we experience so much strain and difficult circumstances on a daily basis as part of our jobs, that we owe ourselves the kindness we'd show others in the same situation.