Blog | Perils And Pearls

Welcome to my blog: Perils and Pearls

My heart's desire in this endeavor is to offer support and encouragement to the hearts' of women. That you would feel accompanied - not alone - as we travel together and find the jewels in our sometimes perilous journeys.

Part 3: Resilience Is Risky Business – The Role of Personality and Risk

Aug 6, 2025
3 min read

This is my third post on the topic of resilience.(Go here if you want to read Part 2.) We have established that resilience is a real-life response skill that resides in all of us, but our ability to bounce back from adversity can be developed by intentional practices. In this post, I’d like to share more about how our personality and relationship with risk can affect our resilience capacity.

Being in the business of helping people discover and embrace their wiring, I have noticed possible correlations between specific personality tendencies and risk-aversion levels with varying responses or reactions to adverse circumstances.

In my life coaching practice I have utilized a tool with clients looking to map out their next season of life called the LifePlan. The creator of this powerful process, Fortune 500 Business Management Consultant, Tom Paterson,(and author of Living the Life You Were Meant to Live), also employed a spectrum to illustrate the various types of thinkers. Included in the type distinctions is the relationship each type has with risk.

The Thinking Wavelength divides us into five types of thinkers:

· Grinders – those who get the work done

· Minders – those who use both people and organizational skills to manage a team

· Keepers – people who can manage ‘the whole store’ due to appreciation for both the administrative and strategic sides

· Finders – these are the entrepreneurs of the world with their more abstract than concrete thinking

· Theorists- those who belong in the research end of things rather than in business, majoring in postulating theories, rather than executing their large visions.

As you can see from the chart above, each type of thinker relates or responds to risk differently – from the most concrete Grinder who is notably risk-adverse, to the abstract Theorist who embraces the risk necessary to bring about disruptive breakthroughs in their field of passion.

My experience has been the less risk-averse a person is the more likely he or she possesses the tendency to see uncertainty and risk as opportunity,

about which Happiness podcaster, author and Harvard Professor Arthur C. Brooks, writes and speaks.I believe Dr. Brooks would agree:

Every problem or struggle can be an opportunity to create

Back to where I started this resilience discussion...The Japanese art form, kintsugi, is a beautiful illustration of this principle: an unfortunate circumstance results in a valued vessel breaking into pieces. With a vision for what it can become, the artist increases the broken vessel’s value and beauty by accentuating the breaks by filling them with liquid gold.

A problem can become an opportunity to create

Thus, the problem becomes an opportunity to create for the inspired artist.

If you follow my writing at all, you know how strongly I believe discovering and embracing your unique, God-given wiring is the first step to finding your ‘sweet spot’ for living a fulfilling life. What kind of thinker you are is yet another way of understanding your natural internal framework.

This matters because how we relate to risk often predicts how we respond to adversity. Are you energized by uncertainty? Or do you need structure to survive it? Neither is better—but knowing your pattern helps build resilience your way.

Curious about your wiring? I invite you to reflect on how you handle risk...

· Where would you place yourself on the Thinking Wavelength?

· What’s one time your relationship to risk helped (or hindered) your bounce-back?

· What is one takeaway from exploring this topic of risk that you could turn into an enlargement of your resilience capacity?

*If you contact me via ‘chat w/ me’ on Perils & Pearls, I will send you my Whole-Person Engagement Worksheet for your intentional resilience practice.

*And if you have been stirred to further explore your unique wiring – strengths, passions, challenges - & you would like to experience a strength assessment with a certified life coach, I invite you to contact me.

If you would like to follow me on this adventure, and receive notice whenever I post something new, please subscribe. (It’s simple – at the top and bottom of every page on the Perils & Pearls blog site. *No need to be a 'member.')

**A word about POSTING COMMENTS: I LV engaging with your feedback/responses to my writings! But, if you run into tech obstacles when trying to post a comment, please feel free to do as so many of you have done: Send me a private message using the "Let's Chat" option on the Perils & Pearls Home Page.

And if you know people who would benefit from the support, and/or enjoy the short writings, please share the site or a post with them. Heck, just share it on your social media…Let’s grow it together!

Blessed to play a part ~

Part 2: The Complexity of Resilience – More Than Just Mental Toughness

Jul 3, 2025
4 min read

Picking up the topic from my last post... (Go here if you want to read part 1) Resilience can be defined as effective adaptation following adverse circumstances or traumatic events. Who doesn’t want and need a bucketload of that in this frenetic world we live in?!

Resilience isn’t just in your head—it can reside in your body, your spirit, your emotions, and your relationships. It’s a whole-life capacity, and the more we nurture it in each area, the more equipped we become to navigate both small setbacks and seismic shifts.

The more we nurture or practice resilience, the better we get at appropriately sizing life’s struggles. This is a worthy practice that can affect our decision-making and change the trajectory of our lives, let alone improve our day-to-day experiences.

More and more study is being done on the concept of Post-traumatic Growth (PTG) as a positive outcome from coming through traumatic experiences – both acute and chronic. Resilience is a key part of PTG, and feeds the growth of hope in not only fully recovering from trauma, but becoming stronger because of it.

[If you would like to read more on this topic of PTG, my good friend Nancy Jernigan, PhD, discusses it in the e-magazine,Contentment, put out by the American Institute of Stress. Here’s the link to the issue containing her article: Post-Traumatic Growth: Finding Hope in Adversity.].

The photo at the top of this post is one of hundreds in my photo files, taken over the 20 years I (we) lived in SW Colorado and had the San Juans as our ‘playground.’ Something significant my husband and I have always had in common is our souls’ need for immersive outdoor experiences. In other words, we want to feed our mind, body, spirit, soul -and all of our senses - when we engage in God’s creation. So you can imagine the innumerable opportunities for that outside our door in SW Colorado!

What does that have to do with resilience? One of the best ways to nurture our resilience is through immersive experiences. Full-body activities that engage the whole person—mind, body, spirit, and soul— are those that are immersive.

Examples of immersive activities: dancing, hiking, deep conversations, yoga or mindful practices, making music, serving others, prayer or meditation.

Psychologists have recognized the multiple dimensions of resilience: emotional, physical, mental, and spiritual. And these aren’t isolated traits—they intersect. A sleepless night can short-circuit your patience. A broken heart can affect your body. And just as importantly, a grateful spirit can lift the weight of a stressful day.

Along with the different dimensions of resilience, is the effect of each of our unique personality-traits mix on our resilience capacity. As a life coach, I utilize strength assessments with clients desiring to understand and embrace their wiring. It is really the first essential step for designing a plan for your next season, which is usually what brings a potential client to me. Over the twenty years of playing this role, I have observed:

Our wiring, which informs our perspective, has a significant effect on our built-in resilience reservoir. For example, those who lean towards a ‘cup-half-full’ view of life may find it more natural to see a problem or struggle as a possible opportunity to create something new – that’s what resilience looks like. But no matter our natural leaning, we can all build on our resilience with intention and practice, using the inevitable challenges in our daily lives.

The Artist Believes Something New Can Be Made From Broken Pieces

That thought brings me back to the Japanese art form of kintsugi (introduced in part 1 of this series). The artist creating a kintsugi-style piece, must bring into the endeavor the belief that something new – and desirable, functional and beautiful – can be created out of something broken – no longer useful, beautiful or desirable. Inversely, the artist would see opportunity or a new beginning in what others might see as a problem or an ending.

Stay tuned for part 3 in this series on resilience, when I will talk more about how our personality and relationship with risk can affect our resilience capacity.

Meanwhile, I invite you to take a moment to reflect:

Which resilience dimension (emotional, physical, mental or spiritual) needs your attention today?

What is 1 immersive activity you could engage in to nurture your resilience?

Journal it. Tend it. Share it, if you so desire.

*If you contact me, (geriswingle@gmail.com ), I will send you my Whole-Person Engagement Worksheet for your intentional resilience practice.

Blessed to play a part ~

The Art of Resilience: From Cracks to Courage Part 1: The Beauty in Brokenness – Introducing the Kintsugi Way

Jun 24, 2025
3 min read

I recently wrote an article for the American Institute of Stress (AIS) e-magazine, Contentment, on the topic of resilience.

[Go here to read the full article: We Are All Cracked Pots: Strength and Beauty From Brokenness, (starting on page 18), & several other writings on the same topic from various perspectives.]

I believe this to be a timeless topic and a vital key to a healthy perspective on and response to the inescapable stressors of this life. For the next several posts, I will be sharing on the quality of resilience, offering both my personal perspective and experience, and as a professional life coach.

I hope to stir up your curiosity about your capacity for resilience, as well as discussions in the relational circles of my readers' lives; and offer my professional partnership if such would be helpful for a freshly acknowledged desire to develop your resilience.

Let’s start with defining the term: What is resilience?

You might be like me, picturing the bounce back effect: a rubberband snapping back into place after being stretched, a tree straightening after being bent in a windstorm. And yet, as we use the term commonly, the basic dictionary definition of resilience is:

the ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change.

There is also the more specific psychology application of the word, used to mean the capacity of individuals to withstand, cope with, or recover from adverse, stressful, or high-risk circumstances.

Resilience is not about bouncing back. It’s about becoming something more — something beautiful, storied, and whole.

But what if for us, unlike a tree or rubberband, true resilience isn't about returning to our original shape? What if it's about becoming something more; transformed and transported forward by what could have stunted our growth?

Our resilience isn’t defined by how perfectly we recover, but by how intentionally we grow.

What I’m inviting you to consider with me is the object or person whose response to pressure, compression, stress is not just a bounce-back to its former shape or self, but the becoming of something more - a more beautiful version of its former self; and yet, still retaining the marks left from the induced stress.

To help us visualize this process of positive transformation through pressure, let me use kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer mixed with powdered gold. Instead of hiding the fractures, it highlights them. Kintsugi is a process by which a vessel is returned to its former state before the breakage occurred. The process results in transforming the object by filling the broken places with liquid gold.

Share your beauty from broken pieces story on social media using #CracksToCourage — Share your *beauty from broken pieces* story on social media using #CracksToCourage

Psychiatrist and author Dr. Curt Thompson speaks of kintsugi as a living metaphor: an invitation to embrace our brokenness, to allow our wounds to shine, not shame us.

Kintsugi teaches us to celebrate and value the broken parts of ourselves, not disguise them.

I invite you to join me over the next several blog writings, in bringing our curiosity to this unique concept of our breakage being transformed into beauty. To get you thinking, consider this question:

What fracture in your story might hold the potential for transformation?

Comment below or share your kintsugi moment on social media using #CracksToCourage.

Blessed to play a part ~