3 rules for resilience: Don’t bounce back, bounce forwards
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Resilience. It’s one of those words that gets thrown around with reckless abandon when times are tough
It’s all well and good to tell someone to ‘build resilience’. But if both parties don’t have a firm grasp of what building resilience actually involves, this sort of call to action can cause more harm than good.
Those who are let go have to adjust to their uncertain new reality, managers have to deliver the news and cope with the consequences. Even if you’ve not been touched by the redundancy or restructuring process personally, chances are you have a friend or family member who has.
Resilience gets framed as a ‘fight’ or ‘struggle’ at times like these. We’re told that we need to ‘push through’ and ‘bounce back’. I’m not a fan.
In fact, I don’t think that this (or any) extraordinary situation demands us to look at resilience any differently.
At its core resilience is a growth practice. It’s about looking at a situation or challenge as a learning opportunity. Difficult situations provide us with a unique opportunity to create and embed new, positive habits that help us perform at a higher level.
After all, why bounce back when you can bounce forwards?
There are Three Rules for Resilience
Rule 1: Redefine Success
What does success mean to you?
Promotion? Outperforming your peers? Buying a bigger house?
It’s easy to fall into the trap of only thinking of those significant life events as successes. Fundamentally, this is a limiting belief.
We all experience success every day. Sure, these successes might not be life-changing, but they’re still wins nonetheless. Celebrating these little wins will go a long way towards developing a resilient, growth focussed mindset.
It’s important to remember that, ultimately, you define what success means to you. Whether others would count getting your child to try new food, or delivering a project on time as a success worth celebrating is irrelevant. Let’s face it, causes for a celebration are thin on the ground these days so, it’s in your interest to grab hold of every victory.
When things are looking bleak, take a little time every day to write down one thing you’re proud to have achieved that day. Then, stick it somewhere prominent; on the fridge, or perhaps the pinboard of your home office.
Do this consistently, and you’ll see that even the darkest days hold glimmers of gold.
Rule 2: Stay on task
Our minds are awash with an endless flow of information. And whilst in times gone by technology was tipped as the cure for information overload, the reality is it only makes things worse.
We’re constantly being interrupted by notifications, alerts, and alarms from work and home that make it near impossible to stay focussed. Possibly, home working hasn’t helped, either. We can’t count on the protection afforded to us by an office any more. Despite the best of intentions, home tasks bleed into work time, and work tasks steal home time.
As much as we like to pretend to ourselves that we’re superhuman and eminently capable of juggling work and home, in reality, we’re not. All task-switching does is cause our stress levels to rise exponentially. As a result, it’s all the more difficult to ride out bumps in the road.
You can’t control your workload, but you can control how you manage that workload. The solution is to pick a task and stick with it. Be intentional about the time you set aside to manage your emails, attend meetings, and attend to your core duties. Set aside blocks of time and give your full attention to each task in turn. Unexpected crises permitting, of course.
Think of yourself as a production line. Manufacturing companies spend unfathomable amounts of money tooling up and waiting for machines to operate at peak efficiency. They incur these costs every time they start up and shut down the machinery. This is why manufacturers avoid using the same line to make multiple products where possible. Whenever you switch tasks, in effect; you’re asking your mental machinery to make something else. This will, in turn, incur a shut-down and start-up period where you’re not productive. Let’s pretend it takes you 15 minutes to return to full productivity every time you switch tasks. Now, think about your average workday. Easy to see how time disappears, isn’t it?
When you’re managing your time effectively, you’ll inevitably be less stressed. A less stressed you is better positioned to counter the bad things life throws your way. Greater resilience will follow.
Rule 3: Stand back
Problems are easier to manage at a distance.
Compare how you respond to the same bad news delivered to a close friend versus when it directly affects you. No doubt you’ll find it easier to devise a solution for the friend than you do for yourself.
This is rooted in the way our brain sees the threat. When something affects another person, our mind knows that we’re not under threat ourselves. We’re simply an observer. That’s not to say it we’re unaffected emotionally- seeing a friend in pain is a distressing experience in and of itself. However, because we’re at no personal risk; we’ve got the headspace to rationally review what’s going on and then propose a solution.
By contrast, when the bad thing affects us directly fight or flight kicks in. Our first instinct is to get away from the problem. When that’s not possible, stress descends like a thick black fog and our ability to see and think clearly is lost.
The ability to take a step back in a moment of challenge and appraise our thoughts and emotion is fundamental to resilience. In practice, this looks like pausing the moment we come across a stressor, taking a step back (physically if necessary), checking our emotions, understanding the implications, then taking a decision. Naturally, some stressors are so sudden and so powerful, this process is impossible. You can liken it to trying to run from a 300-foot tsunami as it makes landfall. However, it works beautifully for those day-to-day stresses that seem determined to knock us off-kilter. Difficult conversations with colleagues, stressful performance meetings, and even disagreements at home become significantly less taxing when you mentally observe them from a distance.
If you want to grow, you need to be resilient
Resilience is a skill, and like any skill, it improves with practice. The more you do it, the better you get and the more resilient you become.
As much as we’d like it to, the world isn’t going to get any less stressful any time soon. Competition for jobs and business is going to become all the more fierce in the months and years to come.
This means resilience, both organisational and personal, is no longer a nice to have confined to self-help books. It’s a core business skill. Investing in it is simply good business sense.
A resilient workforce is a robust workforce. Your people are empowered to challenge and be challenged by one another. They’re less inclined to take time off (or leave altogether) because of stress. They will see setbacks and difficulties as opportunities for renewal and growth.
In short, they’re equipped to bounce forwards, not just bounce back.
If you’re ready to reap the benefits of a more resilient workforce, we’re the training provider for you. We’ll craft a resilience workshop to take your people from where they are to where you want them to be.
Let’s start a conversation. Fill in the contact form, and we’ll be in touch.