Resilience for REAL Rewards
Resilience is our ability to bounce back when things don’t go as planned. Resilience is not the absence of distress or difficulty, it is the ability to adapt and grow following adversity. The person who feels no emotional distress when difficulty arises is not displaying resilience. The person who fails miserably, feels intense negative emotions, and survives to try another day is displaying resilience.
Being resilient allows us to deal with difficult situations, and it helps us to grow by encouraging us to look at the positives and to manage stress. However, it’s not about trying to carry on regardless of how we feel, and it’s not about being superhuman! Instead, it’s about understanding why we feel the way we do, and developing strategies to help us deal with situations more effectively.
Things to do:
R: Recognise your negative mental patterns.
Attempting to minimize or ignore thoughts and emotions serves only to amplify them. Recognise your patterns. You have to realise that you’re stuck before you can initiate change. The first step in building resilience is to notice when you’ve been hooked by your thoughts and feelings. When you’re hooked, the attention you give your thoughts and feelings crowds your mind; there’s no room to examine them. One strategy that may help you consider your situation more objectively is the simple act of recognising the thought. Just as you call a spade a spade, call a thought a thought and an emotion an emotion. For example: “I’m not doing enough at work or at home” becomes “I’m having the thought that I’m not doing enough at work or at home.” Detach from it.
E: Emotional Agility. Develop emotional agility.
It is possible — without too much effort — to literally switch the neural networks with which we process the experience of stress in order to respond to, rather than react to any difficult situation or person. This quality of emotional agility hinges on the ability to mentally “decentre” stressors in order to effectively manage them. “Decentering” stress is not denying or suppressing the fact that we feel stressed, frustrated, anger, helpless — rather, it is the process of being able to pause, to observe the experience from a neutral standpoint, and then to try to solve the problem.
A: Act on your values.
Before you can complete this step you need to know what your values are. What are your priorities? What drives you to do what you do? When you unhook yourself from your difficult thoughts and emotions, you expand your choices. You can decide to act in a way that aligns with your values. Is your response going to serve you and your organisation in the long term as well as the short term? Are you taking a step toward being the person you most want to be and living the life you most want to live?
L:Learn to move on.
Using your highest value as your driving force make the next right decision to expand your comfort zone. Take one little risk each day. With each risk you take, your confidence builds and your world is expanded and enriched. You realise that you are in control and have choice. You do not have to live from a place of past experiences but can create new effective pathways to succeed.
What 3 things can you proactively do to practice the skill of resilience?
Watch this video to understand what resilience and adaptability skills are: