Resilience has become a hot topic at work over the past few years and for a good reason. As we’ve had to learn how to navigate an increasingly uncertain world — at a speed we’ve never encountered before — building personal resilience has been described as an antidote to the stress and burnout that often accompanies extreme uncertainty.
As I share in my book Mindset Matters: Developing Mental Agility and Resilience to Thrive in Uncertainty, resilience is an essential part of our psychological toolkit if we want to thrive in fast-paced, evolving, and complex working environments. Change and uncertainty are part of everyone’s future at work, so it’s not surprising the World Economic Forum reported in 2021 that resilience and adaptability are the most critical skills we need in our working lives.
What does it mean to be resilient?
Psychological resilience is the ability to recover, adapt, and grow following adversity. Resilient people push the boundaries of their skills and abilities. They test new ideas, safe in the knowledge that if they encounter failure, they can overcome a setback and learn and grow from the experience, helping to build the psychological strength to handle challenges in the future.
Those who build their resilience are more likely to demonstrate confidence as they test new ideas without being limited by the fear of failure, and they recover stronger when things don’t go to plan, making them more likely to drive innovation. Research has shown resilient people adjust and cope better in adverse or stressful situations compared to those with lower resilience reserves who may struggle to cope with challenging experiences — which means building resilience can directly reduce stress and burnout.
How to build resilience
In my free coaching program “10 Days of Resilience,” I share simple, evidence-based strategies you can use to build your resilience. The idea is you test each resilience technique and choose a few you want to use in your everyday life, slowly making each practice a habit that helps you build your resilience over the long term.
You will probably find some strategies that work for you right now and others that work for you as you encounter different challenges in the future. The more you can learn about what resilience means to you and what you need at any given time to build your resilience reserves, the better equipped you’ll be when you face new obstacles.
Here are three quick strategies to boost your resilience:
1. Focus on boosting optimism
Keeping a gratitude journal is a tried and tested way of boosting optimism and has been linked to improved heart health and lower levels of depression. Every evening, jot down three to five things you’ve been grateful for that day. It could be as simple as your morning coffee or enjoying a walk outside, or it could be bigger things such as having a supportive friend in your life or a healthy family.
2. Create your support committee
Support from others is one of the most critical factors for the development of resilience. Take some time to map out your support structure; consider who you rely on for support and how each person helps you. Reflect on where you feel you have a great support system in place and where you may have some gaps or areas of your life where you would benefit from more support. For example, you may find that your manager is an excellent source of support in your work life, but you would benefit from more support in your personal life (or vice-versa). Once you’re clear on where you need more support, you can seek out people to help with that — maybe a coach, mentor, or a particular support group.
3. Learn how to steer your energy
Your energy is a limited resource — just like time, we only have so much of it. And yet we rarely consider how we use our energy and whether we’re replenishing our energy reserves when we feel drained. Before going to sleep tonight, reflect on how you’ve “spent” your energy today. Consider where your energy levels were when you woke and why you felt rested (or not). Then think about your energy throughout the day. Where were your levels by the evening? What events drained or recharged you throughout the day? Finally, what would you like to change or do more of to feel renewed tomorrow or in the future?
These coaching tips are part of the “10 Days of Resilience” program; you can check out the entire (free) program to test out the other seven strategies and access the coaching workbook.
Resilience over the long term
As I share in my “Enhancing Resilience” LinkedIn Learning course, resilience is a simple concept. Still, there are a few things you need to know as you focus on developing resilience over time.
Your resilience reserves will fluctuate
Resilience is dynamic and changeable. Your resilience reserves will fluctuate depending on factors such as the number of challenges you’re facing or how significant the challenges are. Some days you might feel that you can take on the world. On others, you might feel depleted psychologically after facing what would usually feel like a minor obstacle. This is entirely normal.
What you need today to build your resilience isn’t necessarily what you’ll need tomorrow. Ideally, you want to figure out what resilience means for you as an individual and create a toolkit of resilience strategies to store in your back pocket to put into practice when you face new challenges.
If you’re facing a particularly challenging day or week, remember you can feel more resilient to adversity in the future.
Context is important
When it comes to resilience, it’s not all about you (it’s just partly about you). We often focus on the actions we can take as individuals to build resilience, which is a critical part of the resilience puzzle and the reason why it can be so powerful to practice strategies that help build your resilience day-to-day.
However, this is only part of the story. Factors external to you — such as the environment around you or support from others — also considerably impact resilience. So, while it’s essential that you’re accountable for what you can do to build your resilience, it’s equally crucial that you consider (and potentially make changes to) the environment around you if a specific situation is negatively impacting your resilience.
Resilience isn’t grit
We often think of resilience as pushing through difficult situations and facing challenges head-on, which isn’t entirely accurate. This can be part of your resilience journey — sometimes, we need to get our heads down and battle through obstacles to achieve results or grow, whether that be personally or professionally.
At other times, however, resilience might be allowing yourself to experience uncomfortable emotions or accepting undesirable outcomes rather than trying to change a situation you cannot control. Resilience isn’t about removing emotions and plowing forward like a robot. It’s about building your self-awareness to understand yourself and what you need to do to learn, adapt, and grow in any given challenging situation.
Gemma Leigh Roberts is a leading expert and author on resilience, well-being, and mindset. She is a chartered psychologist, the author of Mindset Matters: Developing Mental Agility and Resilience to Thrive in Uncertainty, and the founder of The Resilience Edge. Over 500,000 people subscribe to Gemma’s Mindset Matters LinkedIn newsletter, where she publishes articles on how to create a mindset to achieve results. Over 4 million learners have taken Gemma’s LinkedIn Learning online courses on topics such as psychological resilience, emotional intelligence, and growth mindset.
Gemma works with organizations, including BP, Oracle, HSBC, Allstate, Microsoft, and Spotify, to help create resilient teams that can navigate change effectively and environments where everyone can thrive in uncertainty. You can contact Gemma on her website and follow her on LinkedIn for work-related advice and Instagram for coaching tools and videos.
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Topics: Soft skills
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