Professional Skills

Posts Tagged ‘resilience’

What would you say if I asked you to describe what it means to you to be personally
resilient?

Webster’s defines the word resilient as bouncing back, or elastic. (Webster’s New World
Dictionary, 4th Ed, 2000).
 
Some of you might say personal resilience means the ability to overcome hardships, such
as a personal loss, or extreme organizational changes such as layoffs, all while
maintaining an optimistic outlook. 

For others, resilience might mean taking the phrase, “Feedback is the breakfast of
champions” to heart, allowing you to let any and all comments you receive from
customers, colleagues, or supervisors roll off of your back without damaging your
feelings or your sense of self-worth based on what someone else has said.

There are likely as many answers to my imaginary questions as there are people and
points of view in the world, because each person’s take on this topic will understandably
be shaped by their own experiences.

People who know me well would tell you that I enjoy studying leadership and personal
effectiveness from multiple angles. When I look through the slightly worn lens of history,
for example, the British explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton and his crew on the Endurance
stand out as one of my favorite illustrations of resilience.

Shackleton and his team withstood life-threatening conditions and months of multiple
setbacks in their expedition to the Antarctic. Historic accounts of the expedition note the
team’s level of personal sacrifice in pursuit of their mission along with Shackleton’s
dogged determination and strong leadership as key to his ability to eventually bring the
team home. (“Shackleton, Sir Ernest Henry.” The Oxford Companion to Ships and the
Sea. Oxford University Press. 2006. Retrieved January 26, 2010 from Encyclopedia.com:
http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O225-ShackletonSirErnestHenry.html.)

To me, however, Sir Ernest Shackleton and his team incorporated more than physical will
and determination as their way of demonstrating resilience. Records also show that they
read, sang, played cards, enjoyed meals together, wrote letters to loved ones, and rough-
housed with the sled dogs they brought on the trip in an effort to pass the time and release
stress. This is one very important aspect of becoming and remaining resilient: time for
renewal.

When I think about resilience with an emphasis on how it helps hard-working
professionals to be effective in today’s workplace, here are a few tips that you can use to
build your own level of personal resilience.

• Resilience is about having the capability to bend rather than break. As the dictionary
  definition states, the ability to “bounce back” is the literal interpretation of resilience.
  Think for a moment about the way trees blow in the wind. Strong, healthy branches
  are usually able to bend gracefully in the wind and adapt to current conditions;
  weaker branches break and fall to the ground, especially when the winds blow the
  hardest. Which type of branch do you feel most like today? What can you do to give
  yourself some of the renewal time you may need in order to bend and “bounce back”
  more gracefully when the wind blows within your organization?
• Resilience is like a muscle – you can develop it. Our access to information has never
  been more immediate than it is today, and unfortunately, much of the news has been
  bad in recent months. This constant barrage of negative news takes its toll on your
  body and your mind whether the events in question affect you directly or not -
  especially if it is the main source of information you are taking in each day.
• It may sound overly simplistic, but you can help yourself to bounce back by making
  more intentional choices that balance the amount and type of information you take in.
  I invite you to try an experiment that has worked very well for many of my coaching
  clients: for one week, avoid turning the television on first thing in the morning when
  all of the network news shows are shouting their headlines. Use that time to listen to
  music while you get ready for work, or to just enjoy some rare silence (if your
  household allows). Take note of how you feel each day. What do you notice about
  your energy level and your state of mind? At the end of the week, do a reality check
  with yourself about how much you did or did not miss the “news” that you elected not
  to take in. You may find that a small “news diet” like this can make a big impact on
  how equipped you feel to meet the challenges of each day.
• Resilience is not always about extreme acts of heroism; small acts of grace work
  wonders too. Those of you who have burned hours of midnight oil on work projects
  will understand what I mean by this statement. Organizations often hold up these
  “heroic moments” as exemplars for everyone else to emulate, forgetting that efforts
  like that are meant to be an exception, not the rule, in most healthy workplaces.

Some of you may read this post and say that late nights and weekend projects are the
norm in your office; you may even thrive on that type of pace. If you do, perhaps you
are already quite resilient! But for those of you who work in organizations that do not
typically operate this way, your level of resilience is being tested when you are asked
to perform at this level on a regular basis. It is at these times when your reserves of
resilience are at risk of being depleted; the same is true of those around you if they
are working at that pace too. So, what small act of grace can you extend to yourself or
others at those times? For example, are you holding yourself and others to “real”
deadlines, or have you just become so used to working with an eye on the clock that
you’ve forgotten what is really driving those deadlines?

 
Whatever your definition of personal resilience is, I would love to hear your thoughts
about how might it help you at work if you could feel and demonstrate more resilience
each day. What would that look like? I look forward to your comments and ideas.