One of the most valuable skills we can develop is resilience. The ability to bounce back from set backs is central to our health and success in both work and personal life.

Imagine going through life to our mid thirties, never having needed to study hard to do well in exams, never being exposed to any form of loss or hardship, always being popular and attractive and finding things just come naturally easy to us and succeeding at everything we try. Sounds great doesn’t it. You might be of the opinion that a person like this will sail through life and be able to take on life’s hardships with confidence. Then we find ourselves abandoned by a partner, or experience loss of a job. There is a high risk in this situation that our resilience will be low is because we have not had the opportunity to build our “resilience muscle”.

Resilience is built over time. Being exposed to smaller setbacks and finding ways to cope and learn about how to improve next time, assists in dealing with the larger setbacks when they come up. Dealing with the small set backs builds resilience on a number of levels:

• Building our confidence that we will be able to deal with future set backs
• Building our coping skills when the set back hits
• Teaching us to learn from our set backs and what we might do next time

Of course, not everyone who experiences large set backs in life will naturally be resilient. They way we “appraise” or evaluate a situation will largely determine whether we bounce back or not. An example of this can be seen with people who suffer major injuries that have life changing impacts. People who are likely to bounce back tend to consider themselves fortunate to be alive and see this as an opportunity to make changes to their life. They tend to explore how they can use their injury to make a difference to others, and overtime believe that some good will come out of their misfortune. The trick to appraising situations is understanding:

• Bad things can happen to anyone
• We can not always be in control of bad things
• What I can control is my reaction to them

How to Build Resilience

There are several things we can do to improve our resilience. Many of these things involve simple being aware and adjusting our thinking.

Monitor Thoughts

Most of the time we are unconscious about what makes us feel low. If we have had a bad day we focus on the series of events that occurred which caused the day to be bad. Resilient people tend to focus the “self talk” that sits behind this. Let’s say you are driving to work and you have a small accident on the way to work dinting another car; misfortune one. Your “self talk” in response to misfortune one: “I’m an idiot”.

You continue to the office and spill a cup of coffee over your new suit; misfortune two. Your “self talk” in response to misfortune two: “I’m hopeless”.

You are now suitably rattled prior to an important presentation to the executive team. The presentation goes badly as you were visibly nervous and lacking confidence; misfortune three. Your “self talk” in response: “I can never do anything right”.

We escalate our negative self talk when we do not challenge our thoughts and appropriately appraise events. One of the things we need to do is firstly catch ourselves responding to particular setbacks, and then replacing negative self talk with healthy self talk.

The difference between our negative and healthy responses is the overgeneralisation of negative responses to being permanent characteristics about ourselves”. Healthy responses evaluate our reaction in a situation and do not imply that these are part of who we are.

Apply Self Evaluation and Learning

Once we start to catch our negative self talk and replace it with healthy self talk the next step is to learn from our actions that lead to the misfortunes. The simplest way to do this is to practice debriefing after these events. Ask your self the following questions:

• What happened?
• What worked well?
• What didn’t work well?
• What would I do next time?

Debriefing helps us to identify positive solutions to events.

Visualisation

We may be able to theoretically see the solutions; however the next hurdle in building resilience is seeing ourselves actually apply the solution. This develops confidence and the belief the solution is likely to work. Visualisation is technique where we imagine ourselves actually physically running through a scenario and doing it successfully. Sometimes it is useful to do this with a supportive person and explain the steps we are imagining ourselves taking out loud.

Anticipate Set Backs

Seeing ourselves succeed during the visualisation processes develops confidence. However we also need to anticipate possible setbacks throughout this process. We need to build contingency plans for what we might do in case something goes wrong and more importantly how we will appraise that situation. By preparing ourselves for what we might do, but also how to thing helps to strengthen the resilience muscle we are developing.

Find Great Support People

Having support people around us does not mean they need to be nice and soft. In fact those who offer us the best support tend to be direct and strong. They are willing to challenge our negative self talk and focus on action in particular situations. As leaders and managers the best things we can offer our people in the workplace to build resilience include:

• The opportunity to debrief with them
• Provide an environment where failure is seen as a learning opportunity
• Role model resilient behaviour
• Share your own failures to demonstrate that things don’t always come easily to successful people
• Focus then on their past successes and draw out the action they took which can be applied to the future

Resilience is something that can be improved. It’s never too late to start. Small steps in this area can make a big difference to our satisfaction, happiness and success.

Rebecca Cushway
Careers Excelled.