Heather Murphy | Resilience in Your Roots

Stories in Our Roots

Heather Murphy | Resilience in Your Roots

Episode 20 • 22:36

Stories in Our Roots  0:03  
Welcome to the Stories in Our Roots podcast. I'm your host, Heather Murphy. In this podcast, we dive deep into how knowing the stories of our ancestors can make a difference in our lives today, discovering our family history is more than a hobby. It is the way to connect deeply with ourselves, those we love, and the world around us. 

Heather Murphy  0:25  
Welcome to Episode 20 of Stories in Our Roots. I am your host, Heather Murphy. Today, as I read the news, I saw a headline and it said, "Mental health is one of the biggest pandemic challenges of 2021." There is no question that 2020 has been hard on everyone. No matter your situation in life, whether you are finding yourself having to teach school when case numbers are high, or your kids are home, and you're the one that is responsible for making sure they're sitting in front of their computers all day. Or maybe you have to worry about family members getting sick. 

1:12  
And then this year just hasn't been about the pandemic, it's been about standing up against treating people unfairly. It's been about an election that has caused so many situations of us versus them. And so much animosity between people this year has been quite the polarizing us versus them scenario. And the load has just been so heavy for all of us. So many of us are experiencing the feeling of being overwhelmed and anxious about the present and the future. Even becoming hopeless, as you're not sure if the world is going to recover from this if our country, if your neighborhood, your family stress just continues to build all day long. It builds and it builds and it builds and you go to bed and you wake up in the morning. And it just seems to continue. There isn't really a reset button. You may find yourself acting like you wouldn't have a year ago, maybe you are more reactive to what people say or do not only out in the world, but even within the walls of your own home. Sometimes you may find your mind just running and running and running. And sometimes it's so hard just to even catch your breath. 

2:43  
If you're listening to this podcast, chances are you are interested in learning about your family history. I want to tell you today that it is completely possible for you to use something you love learning about your family, to help you become more resilient, to better adapt to the stress in your life, to gain clarity of mind and hope for the future. Now, first of all, I want to talk about resilience. Because resilience, the word resilience has been kind of surging in popularity the last few months. But what does it actually mean? The definition I like best is that resilience is the ability to adapt to adapt well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy or stress. In other words, it's the ability to be flexible when life gets rough. When Plan A doesn't work out, you come up with plans B through G until something works for you. When tragedy strikes, when hard things happen. You have the strength and clarity of mind to move forward instead of becoming immobilized. 

3:58  
Now let's break down what resilience actually looks like. It's built of several components that work together. The ones I want to talk about today are self awareness and self care, purpose and goals, connections and relationships, and perspective and optimism. 

4:19  
A resilient person is self aware and they know to take care of their own needs. They spend time thinking about how they're doing checking in with themselves. I know a lot of times it's just easier to kind of block that part of you off and just focus on your external responsibilities on keeping your family fed or your boss happy, or whatever other obligations you have. checking off that list day after day and repeating it Now journaling is a great way to spend time with yourself to really check in and see how you are doing. 

5:12  
This pandemic actually reminded me of how important journaling has been in my life. Early in the summer of 2020, I started waking up early on Sunday mornings when everyone else in the family was still asleep, finding a nice cozy corner of the couch. And just writing, writing about how I felt about good things going on about challenges that I was having, just getting it out on paper. And after a couple times of doing that, I had these flashes of memories back to when I was in my mid 20s, or college or high school, have me sitting on my bed and doing the exact same thing. I actually have journals and journals and journals from that time period. And I remembered how important it is to get the thoughts bouncing around in my head out of there and organized on paper. 

6:18  
When you journal, you're able to see your thoughts more clearly. And instead of bouncing around, you're able to grab a hold of them, and see what they actually are. See how you're feeling and how the different thoughts relate to each other. And sometimes you can be surprised with how you really feel because it's kind of covered up by everything else that's going on in your life. That quiet time you spend with yourself is so important. It helps you become aware of your needs. Because you can't take care of yourself if you don't really understand what's going on. You may scroll through Instagram and Pinterest. And I get great on ideas on how to improve your mental strength or how your physical strength or your spirituality. But if you're not really clear on what it is you're actually struggling with what actually could help you, you may end up chasing the wrong solution. 

7:30  
When you're resilient, you have a sense of purpose. You have goals big and small, that give meaning to every day. When you go to bed tonight. Do you feel satisfied with how you used your time during the day? Or is it just a complete blur? Do you look forward tomorrow, forward to tomorrow? Or do you just think it's going to repeat be a repeat of the last day and not anything to move your forward? Now many of you may have task lists of the different chores and children responsibilities and work responsibilities that you have to do. But those things aren't going to help you get out of bed in the morning. Having a purpose having a sense of being able to work towards something more meaningful than yourself. That's what's going to get you out of bed. 

8:28  
So what is your purpose? Some people think of purpose as this overarching purpose of your entire life like your your life's purpose. And that certainly can be true. I have read Jay Shetty's book, Think Like a Monk, and he talks about that in there the your dharma, of finding this purpose that you have this gift that you have, and then sharing it with other people. I think purpose is not just serving yourself, but using your talents to serve others. You don't have to have this overarching purpose. You can also have a daily purpose or a weekly purpose. would your life be more meaningful if you caused one person to smile every day for a week. Or if once a month, you found a way to share your musical talents with someone else. Or if you volunteered regularly for a cause you believed in. When we have things that are important to us, we're also more likely to figure out how to continue doing them when other things kind of interrupt the process. When we encounter challenges. We're going to keep working at it. It helps us to persevere when we understand how important something is to us. 

9:57  
When you're resilient you have strong relationships and connections, you know that you're not alone, you feel a part of something bigger, whether that's your family and friends or various communities which you belong to, you know that you can lean on the strengths within those relationships during the hard times. There are certain types of trees whose roots intertwine with each other, and help strengthen each other in times of storms. And I see these relationships and communities and connections like that. It's a symbiotic relationship, where when you're doing well, you can help other people and when you need help, they can help you. It also helps you to think outside of yourself to consider the needs of others and be more compassionate and understanding. 

10:54  
Perspective and optimism are key traits in resilient people. Do you realize without your struggles, you could not be resilient. Resilience is the ability to adapt to challenges. So if you don't have challenges, there's nothing to adapt to. If you always got your best case scenario, if things always turned out the way that you wanted them to, you'd never learn how to adapt and be flexible. If you never experienced struggles, would you be able to have compassion? If you never experienced instability as a child in your home? Would you be as an effective mentor in your public school at which you volunteer? Or could you if you've never experienced loss? Would you be able to comfort a friend in their time of need? Resilient people look for the silver lining, they look for the good that comes out of the bad in life, they have hope for the future because they can see the good in their past, even amidst the storms. People who are optimistic trip over a clump of clay, pick it up and ask what can I make with this? 

12:12  
Now family history can actually help you build all of these traits of resilience, especially when you are intentional about it. Just sitting down to work on family history to fill time or just as a puzzle to put together won't help quite as much, though, you'll still have some benefit from doing that. If you approach it in a completely different mindset. If you approach researching your family history, not as a puzzle. But as a way to become more resilient as a way to find your purpose or to connect with others, then you might be surprised what you can find within your family. 

13:00  
Now, some people sometimes use family history as an escape. And I can totally get that it's nice sometimes to just shut off the world and go and do something else. But it can be even more meaningful if you use your research and time connecting with your ancestors as a tool. So often, our minds are crammed full of everything that we do during the day, all of our obligations and all the stresses and everything. And so it's tempting to just research and shut down our brains. Instead, I would suggest that you use that opportunity to practice slowing down. If we would just practice slowing down more in our lives, our stress level would reduce. So I suggest that you try that with your family history. Instead of sitting down there and thinking in a fear of missing out mindset, I have to cram everything I can into this one hour that I have. Or if you change that mindset of like, I am going to stay up for three hours because I'm so excited about this, even though I'm not going to be able to function tomorrow because I haven't had enough sleep, it can be a different experience. What if you sat down meaningfully? If you thought about what you want to gain from your family history, if you wanted that greater connection or if you wanted strength, or if you're struggling with a certain problem in your life, wondering if you could find a story in your family that could help that come to your family history with something like that in mind. As you research you can gain a sense of accomplishment. 

14:50  
As you learn about these ancestors. It can give you a sense of purpose as you research their stories and share them with others. Family, when you can save to these ancestors, you are not forgotten. You can find a purpose and remembering people. In your research, the most effective research is when you have a goal and a plan. And if you can develop the the skills to research methodically, rather than just clicking on whatever link is happens to be there, then you can transfer that over to the rest of your life, and think methodically, about your obligations in whatever aspect of life that you have. And you can make those goals and think about the best way to get to them, and then work on them. 

15:48  
Sometimes we get frustrated in life, because the plans that we make and the goals that we set, we have trouble achieving or making the progress that we'd like. And sometimes we wonder if even making those plans anyway, even matters because they seem to kind of fall apart. I bet. If you were looking for the birthdate of your second great grandmother, and you looked on the first place that you plan to look, and the information wasn't there, that you wouldn't give up. That you would keep searching and searching and searching. For some of you it might take a week. For some of you, it might take 10 years, but you don't give up, you just change your plan and modify your plan. And you have hope that someday you'll be able to accomplish that thing. 

16:41  
So take that enthusiasm, that perseverance from your family history research, and apply it to the rest of your life. Things don't go the way you want them to. But you just keep trying you make new plans, you figure out different strategies. And that's all what resilience is. It's realizing that plan A doesn't work. And that's okay. And you just keep going. 

17:08  
Family History allows us to connect with other people are living family, deceased family, and even people who aren't related to us. We can have more compassion on different groups of people, when we realize that those groups of people may have very similar experiences to our ancestors. Spending time learning about the lives and experience of your ancestors may take the focus off of you for a moment, so that you can focus on giving service to someone else. Sometimes that service is simply remembering an ancestor. They don't necessarily need their whole history written out. But they want someone to remember them, or the service that you give as you research and you learn about your ancestors. And then you share that with living family members. 

18:00  
As you research your ancestors it gives you perspective, you're able to look over decades, or even centuries, and see that life has ups and downs that everybody has their challenges. It's part of everybody's story. But you can also see how people rise above their challenges, that people find a way to keep living and to thrive in spite of the hard things in life. Learning these stories of your ancestors gives you hope for the future, because you can see the past. And you can see that even when hard things happen, even when people die, or people are mistreated, that that's not the end of the family, that the family can help each other, that friends and neighbors can help each other. That there's always hope for the future. And you can find those stories in your family where you can wonder how did that person keep going, but you know that they did. And you can find strength in knowing that. 

19:07  
I firmly believe that family history is more than a hobby. It is more than just a puzzle to put together when you're don't have anything else to do and you think it's fun. Family History research has the power to change your life. It has the power to bring hope to bring peace of mind. It can change your life. I want you to take some time to think about how you want to improve the quality of your life, what aspects of your life could be improved, and then sit and consider how learning about your family history could help. 

19:48  
Now you might not understand how it could help. But maybe you'll think about a certain family line or a certain ancestor. Go and learn about them. Learn Their story, don't rush off onto somebody else's story. Learn that person's story. Every person on earth has their experiences so that they can help someone else. And that's not just limited to the people that are alive and the people that you run into in your physical ways, your ancestors endured certain things, they had certain challenges so that you could be helped by learning about them. And that won't happen if you don't slow down and be intentional in your purposes. Take some time tonight and think about the things that I've talked about in this podcast, you may find the transcript helpful to go back and review some of the points that I talked about. But really think about looking at your family history differently. Think about how it can change you, because I know it can if you just choose to look at it a little bit differently, and expect the power and strength that can come from connecting mindfully with your ancestors. 

21:10  
Now I also teach people how to become more resilient as they research their ancestors. And I offer this in a one to one coaching program called Resilience in Your Roots. If you're interested you the link is in the show notes to talk to me about it. And also I am starting a waitlist for people who would be more interested in a group option for that program. If you have any questions about anything in this podcast, you want to talk to me, my contact information is in the show notes you can reach out to me and I'd be more than happy to talk to you about how you can gain resilience from knowing the stories of your ancestors. 

21:51  
Thank you so much for listening today. And I hope that as you start out this new year that you can find space in your life, to use family history to make your life better, to make yourself stronger, and to give yourself hope for the future. 

Stories in Our Roots  22:09  
Thank you for joining me today for Stories in Our Roots. Please help this podcast grow by subscribing leaving a review and sharing it with your friends. If you have feedback or would like to recommend someone to share their story head to storiesinourroots.com and fill out the form. Thanks again for listening and I look forward to being with you again next week.