Establishing Resilience
I believe self-awareness and resilience to be two of the most important traits someone can possess. Here, Alan Weiss writes a great piece on resilience.
Resilience is the ability to recover quickly, to “spring back” from an upset, defeat, setback or other unanticipated obstacle. Resilience counteracts fear. If you have history of and /or confidence in your resilience you don’t fear (dread) defeat and disappointment to any great degree.
Consequently, resilience is one of the greatest emotional tools to combat fear.
I’ve studied resilience quite closely in my coaching work and co-authored The Resilience Advantage with Dr. Richard Citrin. I have found that resilience can be developed methodically although some people possess it inherently.
Even for the latter. It’s important to understand the components since that “conscious competency” makes it replicable.
To actively develop resilience, consider the following deliberate actions until they became your default behaviors:
Recognition of success: This is the willingness to identify past successes, retain their impact, and duplicate their causes.
Positive self-talk: The habits of looking at “challenges” and “not” “problems” and asking how to do something and not resolving that you can’t do it.
Healthy feedback intolerance: Most unsolicited feedback is for the benefit and ego of the sender, not the recipient. We need to disregard all of it if we’re not going to become ping pong balls.
Appropriate avatars: Whom do we really respect and admire who can provide us with a sample of how we should act and behave under a variety of situations.
How can we become both gracious winners and gracious losers at times.
Dynamically growing skillset: As we improve and grow, we should continue to raise our own “bar” and metrics. This is the key to becoming better and not merely older.
Social Cue adeptness: We need to be aware of our environment, our impact on others, and appropriate behavior for the circumstances. Many of us have heard from a spouse or partner, “You’re not at work now, change your tone.”
Judgement (principals and taste): Thomas Jefferson said, “In matters of taste, swim with the tide, in matters of principle, stand like a rock.” We need to modulate our reaction based on the import and gravity (or lack thereof) of our situation.
These traits allow us to have more trust in our judgement which allows us to act more rapidly, not second guess ourselves, and be far more fearless. This trust informs our decision making which creates a far higher likelihood of success. However, if we suffer a setback, the resilience created by our hyper-traits more probably turns the setback into success (or at least a learning experience). Winston Churchill famously observed that “Failure is seldom fatal and success never final--it’s courage that counts.”
That courage resides in resilience.
The trust in our own judgement is our gyroscope which keeps us balanced and on a desired route.
© Alan Weiss 2020, excerpted from Fearless Leadership, reprinted here with permission.