Do you have a hard time holding onto your peace in the midst of the daily ups and downs? Do emotions feel overwhelming or keep getting in the way of your relationships? Maybe you feel “fine” about life but don’t experience much enjoyment or richness in relationships.
All of these struggles are real, and I have experienced them all at different seasons of my life (and sometimes all at once), but the thing that’s made the biggest difference for me has been relational skills. Today I’d like to talk about two different types of skills and how they’ve helped me.
Capacity-Building Skills and Recovery Skills
Capacity-building skills help us build up a home base of joy and peace. The Foundational 5 skills are capacity-building skills, and regularly practicing them has increased my capacity to experience joy and peace in the day to day as well as when life starts to feel like a rollercoaster. Growing capacity gives us the strength to look at the harder things in life.
Recovery skills help us get back to the home base of joy and peace when emotions arise and we lose our peace or stop acting like our best, true selves. The Return To Joy skill (skill 13) is a key recovery skill. Practicing recovery skills has helped me fill in the potholes that have plagued me all my life (like freezing up when I feel fear or fighting to avoid hopeless despair at all costs).
The Capacity-Recovery Cycle
Capacity-building skills are foundational and provide the strength needed to learn recovery skills, which are more challenging. However, as we learn recovery skills and begin to navigate the more difficult areas of life, we need to continue to grow our capacity so we can remain steady under increasingly difficult circumstances. Put another way, building capacity prepares us to learn recovery skills, and as we develop those recovery skills, we continue refreshing and expanding our capacity, creating a cycle that supports ongoing growth.
Most of us would benefit from building more capacity and strengthening our recovery skills, but how do we know where to start? Here are some questions to help:
- Am I able to hold onto peace and joy as my relational baseline in the day to day?
- Can I calm myself when needed?
- Do I regularly notice the good things in life?
- Do I often feel connected with Jesus?
If my answer to any of these questions is “no” then I need to work on strengthening my home base by strengthening my capacity building skills.
- Do I keep hitting the same potholes when emotions arise?
- Do I regularly lose myself, regret how I acted or withdraw when I hit a specific emotion?
If so, then I need to work on my recovery skills.
If you struggle in both areas, we suggest you begin working in your capacity-building skills first.
The good news is we have more options than ever before for working on strengthening your skills! Here are a few ways you can grow:
Learn More
Thrive Premier Training:
- Enjoy the 5-day training that has helped people build their capacity-building and recovery skills for more than two decades.
Build Your Capacity:
- Foundational 5 Intro Course – Receive an overview of the foundational 5 skills and begin practicing them.
- Habit Builder Courses – Dive deeper into your practice with one or more of the foundational 5 capacity-building skills
Build Your Recovery Skills:
- Tools for Navigating Emotions Habit Builder Course – If you need to work on your recovery skills, we are excited to release our first Return to Joy course.