Viewing entries tagged
Resilience
Last year, I had to shut a venture I co-founded. For five years I had put my heart and soul into it. It made a great product that helped a lot of people but we had to close it down for reasons that were out of our control. It was going to be my last big hurrah - but instead I had to start all over again.
It was a low, low point.
The skill of resilience, will help you not just to cope with adversity, but also help you with points two (too much change) and three (overwhelming workloads) above. This is because resilience is a transferable and higher level skill than the skills of dealing with change and overwhelm. Resilient people will be able to figure out for themselves how to deal with change fatigue and overwhelm.
Every now and then our forward progress is dealt a setback – that is inevitable. However, whether we choose to stay knocked down is up to us. To succeed – you need to be resilient.
‘Grit’ is a trait that is developed over time and requires patience as well as the willingness to adapt to various situations and environments. Resilience requires us to see ourselves as ‘bigger than the adversity’ and to keep our eyes on our long term, bigger picture goals.
Around this time of year in Australia, the performance of staff often deteriorates.
Why this time of year? Well, it's halfway between the big end-of-year holidays (and after the end of the tax year). In Australia and New Zealand that’s around July. In other countries, for instance, the US, it's more likely to be in January and February again halfway between the big breaks. It’s also coldest and darkest.
We believe workplace positive mental health is the result of a high performing workplace that is innovative and resilient - two of our big focuses. We’re pleased to be able to present some of its key recommendations :
Let’s cut to the chase, shall we? When people say they want to be more resilient – what they really are saying is “help me stop feeling so bad”, “make this bad feeling go away”, or “how can I get back to feeling ‘normal’ as fast as possible?”
I run many resilience programs and at the start of each program I always ask people what is testing their resilience and why they are in the program. The answers are often different – not just between the participants in the room – but more importantly between the participants in the room and the leader or manager who hired me to run the program.
