We live in a workplace culture where uncertainty is the new normal and multiple demands are coming at us from every corner. Developing resilience has never been more important. Some experts believe that your stores of resilience are even more important than your education level in determining the degree to which you’ll succeed or fail in the workplace. But what is resilience, exactly? And how do you get it?
Resilience is the capacity to deal with adversity and bounce back from it even stronger than you were before. We all know people who seem to have been blessed with stockpiles of resilience. No matter how hard they’re hit, they don’t stay down for long. They spring back into action. While it’s tempting to believe they are simply made of rubber —and it is true that many factors play a role in our resilience—researchers now know that resilience is a set of skills that can be learned.
This is very good news because it means that if we want to, we can all develop the traits we need to anchor us through tumultuous times. What are those traits? According to the Harvard Business Review, resilient people share three main ones in common: a firm grip on reality, a profound belief, often reinforced by strong values, that life is meaningful, and the ability to improvise. Not surprisingly, resilient organizations possess the same traits. Those with a firm grip on reality anticipate worst-case scenarios and put contingency plans in place to deal with them. Those with the strongest values have a firm foundation to fall back on when trouble comes. Those that know how to improvise make do with whatever they have until the storm passes. While the data indicates that you can bounce back from hardship with just one or two of those qualities, to be truly resilient you need all three.
There are different resilience-building strategies that you can employ, and I’ll touch on some of those strategies in later posts, but today I want to focus on attitude, because your attitude plays a huge role in determining whether and how quickly you’ll rebound from a crisis.
Find Life Lessons in a Crisis
You probably know people who become paralyzed in the face of stressful change. Perhaps you’re one of them. But if you’re resilient, you don’t react to a crisis by curling up into a ball. Well, maybe you do at first, but you don’t curl up for long. You look for ways to influence your situation. Then you keep going, no matter how bad the going gets. When my husband fell ill, my resilience was put to the test in ways I could never have imagined beforehand. But before I was put to the supreme resilience test, I was tested in other less dramatic ways at work.
The first time I interviewed for the president’s position, I didn’t get the job. I was told I wasn’t ready. Now being passed over for a promotion isn’t a crisis, but I’d worked hard for the job, and believed I had a lot to offer, so I experienced not getting the job as a blow. At that point, I had two choices: to dwell in my disappointment or shift my focus and try to figure out what steps I needed to take in order to increase my odds of being chosen next time. If you see yourself as a hapless victim of fate, you’ll focus on your lack of control over your circumstances and your attitude will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If, however, you view crisis as a challenge to be overcome, you’ll look for ways to gain mastery over it and, little by little, you will. In the process, you’ll also learn an important life lesson and grow.
Let’s say your employer hands you a pink slip. Let’s say you’re being downsized for reasons utterly beyond your control and notwithstanding your enormous contribution to your company. If you’re the sort of person who expects life to be safe and secure, you’ll feel personally betrayed and wonder how such a bad thing could have happened to you. Then you will desperately try to hang onto what you had—even though what you had no longer exists. But if you see adversity as a normal part of life and focus on the agency you do have over your circumstances—if you choose how to feel about your circumstances and develop a course of action based on the options that are available to you (no matter how limited or frightening they may feel at the time)—the sense that you do indeed have some control over your circumstances will motivate you to keep going. That process will help you build resilience.