5 Ways to Boost Your Resilience at Work
What is Resilience?
Resilience is one of those words that seems to have seeped more and more into the language of the working world. You can even attend resilience training to help you be more resilient. And, particularly as a leader, resilience is an expectation in many organisations.
The American Psychological Association has described resilience as “the process and outcome of successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences, especially through mental, emotional, and behavioural flexibility and adjustment to external and internal demands.”
In the past, resilience may have been described as ‘character’ or ‘fortitude’. Whatever word you use, it’s both a necessity and something that can be hard to embody. Everyone has their limit!
The Stress Bucket
Mental health practitioners use the analogy of the stress bucket.
Imagine a bucket.
Everything you experience – both consciously and subconsciously – adds or removes water to or from the bucket. Experiences either add stress or remove stress.
If the bucket is empty, or nearly empty, then plenty more water can be added. But, as it is, the bucket becomes fuller and more difficult to lift. Eventually the bucket is full and it only takes one more drop to make it overflow. This is the point where we experience burnout, depression, and other mental and potentially physical problems.
Resilience helps us remove water from the bucket and even stops some of that water getting in in the first place.
Let’s take a look at 5 ways you can improve your resilience.
How to Boost Your Resilience at Work
1. Reflect
How often do you make the time to reflect on anything, never mind your day at work?
Reflecting on events enables us to process and make sense of them in our own time. Inevitably, if we make sense of our experiences, we can learn from them. This enables us to have a better idea of what to do next time, or even to avoid something happening again.
The by-product of learning through reflection is that we will feel more confident about dealing with similar experiences in the future. Less stress will go in the bucket, and we have become more resilient.
The following model will help make the most of your reflection:
D – Describe objectively what happened
Give the details of what happened. Answer the question: “What did I do, read, see, and hear?”
I – Interpret the events
Explain your learning: new insights, connections with other learning, your feelings, hypotheses, conclusions.
Answer the questions: “What was the reason I did this activity?” “What might it mean?”
E – Evaluate what you learned
Make judgments connected to observations you have made. Answer the question: “How was this useful?”
P – Plan how this learning will be applied
Comment on its relevance to your course, program, profession, life… Answer the question: “How might this learning apply in my future?”
2. Expect things to go wrong
On the face of it, this might seem like an overtly pessimistic approach to take. I would, however, argue that it is less pessimistic, more realistic. We all know through our own experience that not everything will go our way. I often describe this phenomenon as that thing that hits you at about 4pm on a noneventful Tuesday afternoon! If we are prepared mentally for things to go ‘pear shaped’ then it is less of a surprise when they do.
But this doesn’t mean that we should catastrophise and expect everything to go wrong all the time.
Think of it as a mental risk management system: what do I do if things don’t go as planned? How do I recover the situation and get back on track?
It is our flexibility and our adaptivity in a given situation that makes us resilient.
3. Do the hard things
There is a principle in sport physiology known as the SAID principle. It stands for Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demand. Put very simply, the more you do of a thing, the more accustomed to and usually better at it you become.
If resilience encapsulates “successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences” then we need to do more of the hard stuff to train ourselves to deal with challenges.
If you want to run a marathon, you have to go out and run. Likewise, if you want to be resilient, you have to face up to particular challenges. It is often prior experience that provides us with the knowledge to overcome or deal with a situation. The sense of ‘I can do this because I have dealt with challenging stuff before!’ cannot be underestimated. As someone once said, “nothing easy is worth doing.” This means that you won’t gain much from just doing easy things all the time.
We all value the achievements that were hard won and not the ones that took little or no effort. We value them because they taught us something about ourselves that we can take into our lives and our work.
4. Look after your mental health
In today’s society you would expect this to be a given. But sadly, as we see all too often, it isn’t. The more you are struggling with your metal health, the less resilient you are likely to become. In an article entitled Positive Mental Health and its Relationship with Resilience, Kalpana Srivastava made the following observations:
“Mental health has always been centred on the individual coping styles of stress, problem solving, and facing adversity without disintegration.”
“Resilience is often discussed as that aspect of mental health and coping which is paramount to the ability to spring back during adverse circumstances. The mention of positive health necessarily recounts on the ability to withstand and cope with stress adaptively. Resilience refers to overall physical and psychological health.”
In other words, if you want to be resilient, your mental health is the best place to start.
The NHS Every Mind Matters webpage suggest the following CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy) steps to help maintain a good state of mental health:
- Start with what you’re good at
- Think about difficulties you have overcome
- See how you can apply this elsewhere
- Find an image or metaphor to help you in difficult times
- Take some time to plan ahead
- Reflect, recognise and reward
Read the full guide.
5. Ask for help
It is rare in the modern workplace that someone is not, in some way, part of a team or group. Resilience often comes in numbers and helping each other is invaluable. Positive relationships are good for your mental health. Psychological safety is also a key contributor to collective resilience.
Talking through challenges with colleagues taps into a diversity of thought and experience that helps solve problems. i.e. two heads (or many) are better than one.
Shared experiences help people have each other’s backs, so to speak. So do the hard stuff together, learn from the experience and learn from each other. The ability to withstand often comes from the ability to stand together.
Conclusion
Resilience at work is all about helping yourself (and others) ensure stress doesn’t build up so much that it is no longer manageable. Seeking support from colleagues, reflecting on stressful events and your response to them, and ‘practicing’ difficult situations are all key to building your resilience and leading a less stressful life.
Learn more about how Harrison Network can help you and your teams build resilience in the workplace.
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