Resilience is more than the ability to bounce back. It is about being able to adapt to change and adversity, recover quickly from setbacks and continue with clarity in the direction you have already set.
Building resilience is a life skill everyone can benefit from. How then do you go about doing that?
First, start with understanding yourself better. Self-awareness is the key to understanding not just who you are but WHERE you are in your resilience journey. From here, you can at least begin to plot a course to the point where you feel more able to handle any impending change.
You can begin to understand yourself through a process of reflection. Sit down and ask yourself a few questions:
- What do I see as the current strengths and weaknesses in my approach to change?
- How would I describe myself when faced with adversity or hardship?
- What is the worst that could happen to me now…and what coping skills do I have if it did?
- What behaviours do I frequently exert when in challenging positions? Do they help or hinder me? What would work better?
After a period of self-awareness, as that final question may suggest, you need to build resilience by slowly changing negative or neutral behaviour into positive and helpful behaviours. This self-management, consciously undertaken at first, will through repetition become habitual.
Essentially, having become aware of unhelpful behaviour and replaced it with helpful behaviour around change and your reaction to challenging events, you begin to build muscle memory in how to deal with things. This memory – over time – becomes nature and something you can call upon to assist when the next crisis hits.
Many people run this process on an unconscious level every day. Being knocked down and building themselves back up, without knowing that that is how you build resilience. Doing it consciously, and in a specific context, heightens your ability to respond.
We know this from our experience in training and building resilience in elite sports. If you consciously work on the areas you know you are weak at and use expert outside guidance to precisely hone the areas that will make a difference, you will get better at what you do. Add in an awareness of your strengths and how to harness them and you will have confidence that you can rise to any challenge that you face.
What to do next?
Are you ready to build resilience in preparation for the next crisis? We all know there will be something next, something bigger and more difficult around the corner that we all need to deal with. It could be economic, environmental, personal or in your business…whatever it is, it is coming and you still have a chance to build your personal and professional resilience to meet it head-on.
Get in touch to discuss how we can help you build your resilience.
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