Personal Resilience

Personal Resilience is a very handy skill to have in the workplace.

Resilience is not human nature. It is an ability you develop. A core competency for surviving, growing and developing. It makes life that little bit easier, especially in this fast moving and modern world we live in today.

A positive outlook on life is key for personal resilience. Say you’re facing a difficult situation – take control of your responses. By this we mean, focus on what you can do to deal with the challenge and not on what you can’t do. A positive attitude can make all the difference. Practice your thought awareness and being optimistic. Maintain perspective and pervasiveness at testing times. Choose your response, for example; ‘’my boss didn’t agree with that decision I made’’ instead of ‘’my boss doesn’t agree with any decision I make’’.

Building up resilience is learning from your mistakes and failures. Don’t dwell on your errors, extract the positives and move on. Remember – what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger.

Stress and lack of resilience go hand in hand. A resilient operative has good stress management. There can be extremely stressful times in a business environment, and can have a huge impact on everything we do. Resilience is a skill that helps manage stress levels, allows you to relax when necessary and keep your eyes on the bigger picture in tough situations.

To be resilient you need to have good physical and psychological strength. Having a healthy body and mind will help you manage your emotions such as stress and anger. Sleep and exercise is the answer. Also key for fitness, stamina and health, strengthening your ability to manage uncertainty without becoming ill.

Resilience is also the capability of exploiting both internal and external resources. It isn’t about being super woman or super man and handling everything on your own. You need to know when to reach out to your network of people for help and support.

It can be difficult to judge how resilient you are and insight to how well you deal with perceived adverse situations in a positive and rational way. Simply talking to a valued colleague could help you gage how resilient you are. Also, reports such as ‘Emotional Intelligence System for Business’ (EBW) and ‘360 Feedback Report’ both can measure personal resilience as well as comparing it to other colleagues’ results.

In summary, resilience is a multi-faceted skill. It is the ability to ‘bounce back’. A resilient individual possesses strong self-esteem, copes well with change, recovers quickly, is driven and has a clear direction.