One aspect of understanding someone is listen to their story and hear what they talk about – material, physical, practical issues? emotional and relationship issues? or spiritual issues of meaning and purpose? Another aspect is to find out what kind of ideas they have about themselves in relation to others – in particular to explore to what extent they see themselves as connected to, and identifying with, others, and to what extent they see themselves as separate and independant. I’ve explored this latter aspect in Parts 1 and 2.
But another key issue for all of us is how we cope in the face of challenges, and how we adapt to change. Just as I have a map of body, mind and spirit in consideration of the kind of world a person lives in, so I have a map of coping strategies, and again there are three – action; control and withdrawal. Let me reiterate that this is a dynamic map and whilst some people almost always seem to default to the same strategy, most of us are more flexible and use each and all of these strategies to different degrees.
Let’s explore to activist – the person who when faced with a problem or a challenge, rolls up their sleeves and gets stuck into it –
You can see it takes a certain self-belief to be able to cope with challenges this way!
We’ll have a look at control as a strategy in Part 4
Heroes Not Zombies 
[…] in different ways. In this series we’re looking at ways of coping in parts 3, 4 and 5. In part 3 we looked at the activist way of […]