One of the most essential qualities a leader can possess is resilience. Regardless of whether it’s facing new professional or personal challenges we are all seeing faster and more continuous cycles of disruption and change these days.
An article in Forbes defines resilience as “the capacity for stress-related growth” and states resilience has two parts related to the way you bounce back and grow:
- From big work or life adversity and trauma
- From dealing with daily hassles and stress
Most of us are fairly familiar with the list of top ten most stressful life events referred to as the Life Change Index Scale. This tool developed by Holmes and Rahe in 1967, scores and measures “big” life events often associated with life changing events like experiencing the death of a family member, terminal illness, divorce, marriage, moving, changing jobs, etc.
However, the definition Forbes provides in the short list above captured our attention because of the second bullet point. Learning how to cope with those everyday stressors we encounter is a capability that adds both depth and breadth to our resilience reservoir.
Here are three tips to help guide you, on how to make shifts to boost your day-to-day resilience.
- Get Social Support. Connection really matters. It isn’t just a matter of accepting help from others — it is also important to give help to experience the full benefit of positive stress reduction.
- Seek Out and Imitate Resilient Role Models. Make a list of people and leaders you admire and then study or, even better, speak with them. Use those face-to-face conversations as opportunities to continue expand your leadership network, too.
- Decide to Pursue Resilience. Resilient people leverage mistakes and turn them into lessons learned (rather than deny them). They see obstacles as challenges and allow adversity to make them stronger. They can also find meaning in life’s challenges rather than seeing themselves as victims.
We believe emotional resilience can be learned and developed. Stress and change are a part of life, there are always opportunities to practice resilience — the payoffs are significant. As a leader, your people are watching you all the time. What you model can spread throughout your team and organization. Let’s explore how we can grow your everyday resilience.
