What is Resilience?
The capacity to adapt to, or withstand, or to bounce back quickly in the face of trauma, threats, adversity or other highly stressful factors.
Resilience comes from the lessons and skills we absorb as we grow and face challenges whatever they are, i.e. creating a ‘thicker skin’ and potentially learning to take situations less personally, therefore not allowing them to affect you too much.
What Resilience is NOT!
It is not about:
‘manning up’
‘toughing it out’
striving for perfection
ignoring your emotions
quick fixes
Why is Resilience Important?
It’s absolutely vital to keeping us on track as we strive to reach our goals. Resilience can help protect you from a variation of mental health challenges, such as anxiety, depression, etc. When you experience a stressful situation or adversity, you can feel anger, grief, pain and/or anxiety. Building resilience helps us to recognise those feelings, focus on the positives, whilst learning to better manage our emotions, and therefore our reactions off the back of them. Resilience encourages us to see the positives and to better understand the reasoning for how we feel. It therefore helps us to develop coping strategies to deal more effectively with situations.
The 6 Domains of Resilience
1. Vision: purpose | goals | congruence
Vision is about your sense of purpose, goals, and personal vision for yourself. Having clarity in this domain allows you to be decisive when facing tough choices, and to maintain perspective when facing challenges. Whether your goals relate to family, to work, or a side project, what’s important is being specific and clear.
2. Composure: regulate emotions | calm & in control
It’s about regulating emotions. The fight-or-flight response of the brain loves to flare up when facing conflict or hearing about a sudden change at work. But being able to overcome that instinctive emotional response and maintain your composure often means being able to recognise hidden opportunities and solve problems in novel ways. Composure is also not just the big crises that we face, but also the little everyday things. Getting emotional in a traffic jam is never useful, for example. Maintaining composure means keeping calm so you can save your energy for what is important.
3. Reasoning: problem solving | resourcefulness | anticipate & plan
See opportunity in change. A high Reasoning ability means that a changing environment is welcome since it always brings hidden opportunities. By maintaining your composure and knowing what you want to achieve, change is no longer a threat and you can look for things that others might have missed, helping you to succeed.
4. Health: nutrition | sleep | exercise
Good health means looking after your body through what you eat, doing exercise, and getting quality sleep. A healthy body provides a strong foundation for your own resilience so you can focus on your sense of purpose and goals.
5. Tenacity: persistence | realistic optimism | bounce back
Einstein pointed out the importance of persistence for success when he said that “It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer”. Mistakes creep in everywhere, so what is important is how we react to mistakes. It’s important to be able to objectively look at our mistakes, find lessons in them, and not define ourselves by them.
6. Collaboration: support network | social context | manage perceptions
Support and be supported. In a complex world, few of us can achieve anything meaningful alone, so it’s crucial for us to build support networks so we can both have a safety net and also be that safety net for others. Interestingly, research shows that when it comes to peace of mind, it’s not actual available support that matters, but instead it is the perception of available support that’s important. So even if you have 100 people ready to support you, if you don’t realise this, you will not feel supported. Keep this in mind for others as well, and show the people you care for that you are there to support them whenever they need you.
What is Resilience in Business?
Business resilience planning encompasses business continuity and crisis management. It enables businesses to plan, carry out a strategic risk management procedure, and successfully overcome a hostile environment and overall disruption. It forms the ability to continuously maintain business operations whilst preserving not only your brand, but protecting your people and your assets too; all in the face of adversity.
Why is Resilience Important in Business?
Benefits of planning a range of potential and less-likely business disruptions:
Reduce financial risks
Enhance reputation
Minimise threats, disruption and risk
Speedy recovery
Risks of not planning business resilience:
Financial loss
Damaged reputation
Disruption to business continuity
Environmental impacts
Inability to support community
Slow recovery
10 Ways to Build Resilience as an Entrepreneur
A great article I found was from Forbes, which has some great tips!
How Resilient Are You?
Resilience is a quality that we all possess at some level. Some people can harness it more easily than others.
Why not test yourself to see just how resilient you are…
Some Top Coping Tips from Psychologists
Reframe your thoughts & change how you respond to situations
Identify your support system and let them be there for you
Focus on what you can control
Cultivate an optimistic mindset - turn setbacks into growth opportunities & maintain a healthy perspective
Be proactive & learn from experiences
Some Great Quotes on Resilience
“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”
― Winston Churchill
“It is your reaction to adversity, not adversity itself that determines how your life’s story will develop.”
― Dieter F. Uchtdorf
“Do not judge me by my success, judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again.”
― Nelson Mandela
“Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.”
― Confucius
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