Share your stories and ask creative development coach Lorraine Blackley for advice about getting through adversity, as part of the Generator topic 'I've lost confidence and had a few knockbacks -  I'm beginning to doubt my talent. What can I do?'

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When the knockbacks come hard and fast and are of the magnitude that people in Christchurch and Japan are experiencing we can sometimes wonder how to keep going and what is the point? When the world we live in is changing we need to evolve our consciousness and our functioning.

Two words come to mind, community and resilience.

Community - a pulling together and making sure of everyone’s wellbeing and not just your own. We have seen this as a natural human response to the current adversity in the local, national and international responses to Christchurch and Japan. Is humanity being called into a greater sense of community to increase our resilience in these times? Even as an individual facing your own private adversity, the message is don’t go it alone. Let someone know. Find someone to talk to and if friends and colleagues aren’t helpful, find professional or voluntary organisations to listen and assist.

Resilience is the positive capacity of people to cope with stress and adversity. This coping may result in the individual or community “bouncing back” to a previous state of normal functioning, or using the experience of exposure to adversity to produce a greater ability to cope with future adversity.

Use this Q&A forum as your community and share stories of adversity you have faced personally or professionally and how community, resilience or anything else has helped you. We can find courage and camaraderie in others stories.

Please feel free to ask me any questions you need about getting through adversity.

- Lorraine Blackley