We’ve all heard of the word resilience. It is a term used in all areas of life and relates to our ability to ‘bounce back’, navigate obstacles and deal with change. It is a word that gets bandied about regularly in the media, in meetings at work, at Saturday football – pretty much everywhere. It is becoming one of those words that we use without thinking too much about.
At birdsoup, we’ve been talking about resilience A LOT! It’s come up in many of our meetings with clients and advisors, we’ve had to draw on our own resilience to launch the company and we believe it should be an important thing to think about in the work context for individuals and their organisations. In the week of International Women’s Day, we have focused on issues we think most apply to women in our blogs. This one is different: resilience is something we all have.
How do we know if we’re resilient or not? Consider these:
Have you ever felt crushed by an event at work? Unable to get over what is happening, stuck in a rut, continually going over and over the details but unable to do anything about it? Or
Do you love change and thrive on finding new solutions to problems and feel perfectly able to move from one set up to another?
If the answer is ‘it depends on the situation’, then you are like most of us: resilient in different ways in different situations
Several qualities can be used to measure resilience and some of these will be more developed than others in everyone and will explain why we are more resilient in some situations, whilst others trigger negative behaviours and feelings.
The good news is you can learn to become more resilient. The first step is to identify when and how you are most/least resilient and the behaviours they trigger. There are a range of techniques drawn from the field of mindfulness and CBT through to positive psychology that can be used to make improvements.
Here’s a well-know exercise to try (taken from positive psychology)
At the end of every day,,think of 3 good things that happened to you. It can be work-related or (if things are that bad) a cheerful encounter on the bus.
Notice how hard/difficult it was for you to think of them and if that changes by the end of the week.
My 3 good things for today have been:
Having a really inspiring meeting
Walking over London Bridge in the sunshine
Writing this blog
Tell us yours
