What is resilience (at work)?
Resilience is a quality referred to a lot around sporting people and those surviving in the face of excessive hardship. But what does resilience look like in the workplace?
According the stress experts, Robertson Cooper, resilience is a capability to maintain high performance and positive well-being, including being able to:
- sustain successful performance and well-being when facing adverse conditions
- recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change
- sustain high levels of engagement without burning out.
Personality plays an important role in making people resilience. There is an element of resilience being determined by what we are born with. Some individuals seem to have high resilience regardless of what they do.
However, we are all able to develop our resilience through practical skills. We can push our resilience to the top of its range and not be limited by our characteristics at birth.
One way to think of resilience is like a reservoir. It is repeatedly being depleted through negative encounters, stressors and poor emotions. We need to work each day to top it up, so that the reservoir is full for when a major setback occurs. For example, a project you may have spent 10 months on is cancelled. If your resilience is high, you are more likely to stop, reflect, be upset but move on to other tasks more easily, than if your resilience is low. When resilience is low, we can become more rigid and extreme in our behaviours such as shouting, mood swings and exaggerated reactions.
There are many practices that can build our resilience daily, such as exercise, meditation, mastering difficult tasks and just plain having fun!
When you feel pressure getting on top of you in the workplace, there are two activities that will immediately reduce your stress levels and help you deal with the pressures in a more resilient manner.
1. Physical Activity – decide how you can easily put exercise/intense activity in your work routine if pressure starts to get too high (at the point in time), eg. When there is a near impossible deadline or amount of paperwork to complete.
Examples of activities are:
- spending 5 minutes running up and down the stairs
- walking briskly around the block (sun and a change of scenery is also good)
2. Breath – Focusing on breathing is a quick and readily available way to relax. A useful technique that can be used almost anywhere is:
- Breath in for a count of 9 and breath out for a count of 3
- Repeat this for up to 5 minutes.
Although simple, both these techniques are well-rated by those who have some of the most stressful jobs in our community; emergency services officers.
Decide what you will do next time you feel pressure mounting at work. Put it into place. Experience the benefits.
I would love to hear your experiences and any other tips for building resilience that have worked for you.