The first is about resilience. Resilience is not GRIT which is something I have talked about before in quite some detail, but resilience is somewhat different and I will try to differentiate the aspects. Hollywood does a great job of showing us protagonists who face tough challenges and situations and always make it through. All of them take you through an emotional roller coaster but in the end is usually a positive outcome. Stressful situations can be emotionally draining but when you are resilient you learn to weather them and become stronger as a result.
You need to build your resilience skills so that you are prepared to face tough situations at work and in your personal life. Maybe your job requires you to be more resilient or maybe you know that you’ll be facing more adversity in the future and you want to be prepared. Regardless of your motivation the first step to any type of process improvement is assessing your situation. Let’s talk about where your resilience skills stand today. To help you identify your own resilience level, let’s look at two components, one is stress and the other is coping skills. Think about it this way. At work you you’re bound to have a range from a low to a high level of stress. And throughout your life you’ve had to develop coping skills to help you deal with the stress, be it low or high.
When stress is low and coping skills are also low, not much is happening. You just might not experience much or maybe not engaged enough to notice that you’re not using your coping skills to deal with a minor event. But if the level of stress increases and your coping skills are poor, you will likely experience a rise in anxiety and lose confidence, a combination of unpleasant thoughts and feelings you definitely will be aware of. On the other hand when your level of stress is low and your coping skills are also honed, you’re in a situation where you have a sort of behavioral reserve, a safe place where you’re feeling strong and ready to face a greater adversity. The ultimate level of resilience we want to achieve is developing coping skills that are effective even in situations where stress and uncertainty are also high.
In the meantime, we can just be in the holding zone. As this is not a specific test there are a number of tests out there, that maybe more suitable for you that help you assess your current circumstances from either sites like MindValley, LinkedIn and a plethora on Google even that will ask you pertinent questions to evaluate where your stress levels and coping mechanisms are. This is more about bringing our attention to these situations that unfortunately we get caught up in our daily lives to such an extent, it’s difficult to step back and reflect on our own current plight or not as the case may be. It is all in aid to help us through life in the most advantageous way.
The second part which I believe interacts quite well with the above is ‘embracing unexpected change’, all too common in these days, through this unpleasant and constantly moving peril that seems to affect us all. What would be tremendous is to have a positive outlook in the face of change. Look, you can feel sorry for yourself or you can take or you can take steps toward your next win. You can blame others for setback or own the situation and choose to learn something. You can curse bad luck or start working to improve your odds. Let’s start right now. Think of the biggest change your facing and name the one thing you’ve done whether it’s a thought or behavior that you know is not productive in dealing with this change, now choose to let it go. OK, now name one new positive thought or behavior you’ll adopt today. There you go, you now decided to embrace change successfully. This nowadays I find both of these concepts strengthening, simple in their implementation, however, when repeated and consistent they are the foundation to some further techniques that help us build confidence and adapt to change in a different way that is positive and we all need a bit of that right now. As mentioned, they embrace all aspects of our lives and in further columns we well address some more of these to help focus in the right direction. Later returning to a concept called visible thinking especially in the workplace, mainly education biased, however, my aim, is to provide thoughts and actionable suggestions that hopefully will assist us now.
