How being resilient can boost your Happiness at Work
We’ve been hearing a lot about post-Brexit resilience, not least in terms of the FTSE and the Eurozone economy. But what about personal resilience, the essential ingredient for dealing with difficult work and life events? That magic ingredient that enables you to bounce back when under pressure. To retain your equilibrium and stability, and maintain strength and capacity to cope.
What’s interesting about resilience is of course that it’s learned. It takes adverse circumstances to develop it because you can’t be resilient in a bubble when you don’t interact with anyone or anything. So you need to wrestle with tough stuff if you’re going to build this precious resource.
Now you might think that resilience has been worn down by the Brexit decision and its aftermath. But here’s what’s really interesting. We’ve been gathering data about resilience for more than a decade and after the last recession we examined where people were at. You’d expect people’s resilience to take a hit under these circumstances, wouldn’t you?
You’d be wrong.
When we looked at the data we had before the last recession and compared it to the resiliency data during the recession, we saw that people actually felt that they were more resilient when things were toughest. They reported that their capacity to be resilient actually increased – by about 12%. After the worst part of the recession, the data actually dropped back: our post-recession data showed that people were about 5% less resilient than they were pre-recession. But let’s get some perspective here: resilience was only down by 5%.
I think that’s amazing.
It tells us that despite everything, in times of high levels of uncertainty and rapid change, most of us have a huge and untested capacity to cope. And it reminds us that we are highly adaptive to our environments. In fact we’re much tougher than we think.
So how can you boost your own post-Brexit resilience to help you at work?
If you’re feeling wobbly about your own post-Brexit resilience, and there’s no doubt that some people are, here are the top ten tips for becoming more resilient:
- Ask yourself ‘have I got a learning history?’ If you don’t think you have, sit down and reinterpret your life story through this lens and show yourself that you do.
- Analyze your problem-solving strategies. Are you aware of the processes you actively use? Stand back and think how you set about managing difficult issues because being aware of them will mean you can quickly access what you need when confronted with adversity. In turn that will mean you’ll be less likely to freeze and do nothing rather than fight to manage your situation.
- Assess how you build proactive coping into your working life? Proactive copers are people who:
- Make connections before the proverbial hits the fan so they know who to turn to for help when they need it
- Interpret events in an upbeat way
- Focus on the process and not the outcome because that’s what they can influence
- Connect with the people who give you strong social support and foster those links so they are there for you when you need them.
- Stand back and think about negative emotions. How do you manage them when they come along and how do you force yourself not to get swept up by them? Exercise, listen to music, take a walk or visit a museum or gallery. Because forcing yourself into another environment will give you a perspective that you can’t have when you are up close and personal.
- Decide when you’re going to master negative events by simply not dwelling on them. The old Freudian notion that if you don’t vent, you’ll burst isn’t actually correct. A recent study showed that people who didn’t express any thoughts and feelings post-9/11 reported better outcomes than those who did. Those who’d ventilated the most emotionally coped the worst and this was true two years later.
- Analyze how well you take care of yourself. Lack of sleep and poor health will of course make you feel less resilient. Go to bed early and try to make that routine.
- Ask yourself ‘how much do I believe that I bounce back? If you think you do, you probably will. Because you’ll engage in the very behaviors that mean you do.
- Understand that you don’t need to ‘manage’ your stress: it’s there for a reason, because it’s telling you that you need to do something different. What does that difference look like?
- Decide that you will get through this, that you’ll learn and that as you do so good things will emerge. Start by reflecting on all the things that this opportunity is giving you and what you have to be grateful for.
If you want to find out more about how resilience can have a positive impact on your Happiness at Work, have a look at what we do and get in touch with us.
Jessica Pryce-Jones
Photo credit: mclcbooks via Visualhunt / CC BY-NC-ND