Dr. Neeta Bhushan became a mental health educator & transformational speaker after discovering her inner grit and perseverance, which enabled her to overcome all of the hardships she’s experienced thus far. She understands that difficulties are unavoidable and that without them, humanity cannot progress. In the end, how much stronger someone gets due to their anguish counts more than their level of agony. Neeta co-founded Global Grit and Dharma Coaching Institute to help people discover their inner power and grit.
The power of being resilient helped Dr. Bhushan overcome an abusive marriage and live with the grief of losing both her parents and brother before the tender age of 19. When asked what resilience means to her, Dr. Bhushan replies “Your ability to bounce back. Most people think that building resilience is all about mental toughness. It is not. If you take a glass of water and let it go, it’ll shatter into a million pieces. But when you take a basketball, it’s tough but has that softness where you can bounce and have the agility to flow. It’s not so rigid.”
Dr. Bhushan’s ‘That Sucked. Now What? How to embrace the joy in chaos and find magic in the mess’ is an unapologetic guide to personal growth that draws on and welcomes “the suck”—while assisting the readers in breaking through to long-term, bold resilience.
It helps the reader discover why it’s so difficult to get back up after falling, and how four essential aspects of life determine one’s particular Bounce Factor. Jay Shetty, Jenna Kutcher, Jim Kwik, among other industry heavyweights have praised the way the book helped them shape their lives for the better.
Dr. Bhushan explains, “It’s about the acknowledgement of what happened and not denying that it didn’t happen. It happened and is all right now. It’s about following the mantra of now and realizing we’re not going to sit in this suck. We still want to feel it. And acknowledge it.”
The Fly Forward framework from Falling to Igniting, Rising, Magnifying, and subsequently Thriving that Dr. Bhushan talks about in the book allows the readers to take any setback that life throws at them – no matter how big or small, with grace.
According to Dr. Bhushan, the various ways in which someone can achieve unshakeable resilience is by following the following steps.
Making peace with your upbringing and acknowledging it
- Taking into account the things we were taught when we were young. Were we allowed to feel our feelings? Were we allowed to speak our truth? Were we allowed to talk and be listened to by our elders?
Welcoming good stress
- Analyze your current environment. Are we complacent? Are we allowing ourselves to be challenged when we’re thinking about building unshakable resilience? Are we exposing ourselves to the things that scare us?
Addressing your emotional capacity
- Are we allowing ourselves to feel those emotions? Do we judge ourselves? If we are judging our emotions, where’s that coming from? Is it coming from our upbringing? Is it coming from the fact that we couldn’t hold our anger? So that when somebody else shows their anger, we can’t hold it or we can’t work?
Building your (RSA) radical self-awareness
- RSA is that subtle awareness. Some people call it intuition, others call it leaning into ourselves. It is that muscle that we tend to build when we know things are out of integrity, things are out of alignment, and things no longer are feeling good to our nervous system. Asking questions like- Do we want to go to that party or are we doing it for the show? Are we overextending ourselves right now, or am I just going to push until I burnout?
Having survived so much pain and heart-wrenching adversity, Dr. Bhushan still carries kindness in herself that allows her to share with the world.
“It’s my mission to help other people embrace the magic in their mess, to embrace the joy in chaotic moments. And to give permission to people to break down, to move through with grace and ease. We’re choosing to go through these hard emotions with a sense of clarity that is hard because it’s easy to distract ourselves. It’s easy to shove it under the rug. It’s easy to bypass our emotions. But that is not how one builds unshakeable resilience.”