As lockdown eases and we are beginning to think about returning to the workplace, or a mix of home working and workplace, it is natural that we are having a range of feelings and emotions. Some of us are anxious and concerned about hygiene and safety while others may feel relieved or excited about returning to the normal place of work. We can all pro-actively develop a set of skills and behaviours that will improve our inner strength, our fortitude and to better cope with challenging situations. We can build personal resilience:
Here’s a few simple steps that will make a difference:
Step One: Map Your Experience – Looking back to learn, looking forward to achieve
Think back to some of the situations you have faced over, say, the last decade. Now remember your initial reaction and how you felt. What brought you through? Who was there for you? What strengths did you find in yourself? If you are reading this, then you survived and perhaps even came out stronger. It’s a great idea to map your own experiences, identifying all the significant life and work events where you have overcome difficulties, be they great or small, seeing through your own eyes what you have achieved.
Step Two: Identify Your Personal, Family and Social Supports – Reach out to others
Personal resilience is not about going it alone. To be resilient depends on your ability to identify good personal, family and social supports to whom you can turn easily and regularly. Talking things through, off-loading emotions, exploring possible solutions or ways to cope, getting the encouragement you need and simply sharing your experience.
Step Three: Dump the Drains – Protect yourself
Energy drains are the enemy of resilience and so it is time to ‘dump the drains’. Some people are draining, time you spend with them saps your energy and makes you feel so much worse. Let’s be realistic, this is easier said than done. Personal resilience involves protecting yourself, especially at times when you are particularly vulnerable, anxious or have heavy emotional or physical demands made on you. It’s easy to spot energy drain factors. They may be people who make you feel worse about yourself, seem hypercritical or intolerant, or who make you feel inadequate. Being with them (physically or virtually) may well be tiring or irritating. The effect on your personal resilience can be harmful.
Step Four: Know your Tipping Point – Quality time for rest
For each of us our “tipping point” will be different. So, it is important to think about the signs or symptoms that indicate that you or those around you are reaching your limits. Know your personal tipping point and read those. Perhaps the signs are physical — tiredness, headaches, aches & pains or an upset stomach. You may find it harder to sleep at night, or become irritable, aggressive, impatient and snappy, being tearful, unable to concentrate. Relationships may seem to be on edge and mood swings seem to be too frequent and too extreme. Knowing the thing/s that cause us stress is the first step in confronting and managing them. These can then be nipped in the bud before they become major problems.
Step Five: Being Change Aware – Know yourself
There is a tendency to suggest that all of us react to change in similar ways. We don’t. We experience change in different ways because our personalities vary and our life experiences which shape us influence that way, we see the world and adapt to events.
If we are looking to build our resilience then we cannot find our way through thinking there is a set way we should approach it, a set range of emotions we shall experience, or a right or wrong way to feel about the changes. Comparing ourselves to others in this way seldom helps. What we need to do instead is become “change aware” – and by that, I mean understand ourselves better so that we become aware of how we can prepare for on-going change and how we might adapt. Know yourself better and explore what conditions you need for you to be able to manage change in your own way and find your own way through.
Step Six: Positive Thinking – Altering our mindset
It’s not always easy to stay positive. There are some situations so tough, seemingly so unrelenting that being positive flies in the face of reality. Of course, people should be allowed to voice negative thoughts and concerns as they may well be pointing to something very important and should be heard. So, my point is not that we should always be uber positive – it’s just that for our own wellbeing, and for our support of others, positive thinking is very helpful. There is also well-researched evidence of the benefits, both neurological and biological, to positive thinking. It reduces stress, strengthens our immune system, heightens our sense of wellbeing. Easier said than done, but with practice and a few relatively straightforward approaches we can alter our mindset, nurture our positive thinking and build our resilience.
Step Seven: Eat and Drink for Energy and Strength
Nutrition research over the last few years reinforces one common finding, what you eat is closely aligned to health and performance. Good nutrition is also a major factor in building strong levels of resilience, improving our energy levels and our ability to manage stress. Whether it is breakfast, lunch or dinner make each time you eat an ‘event’, a precious moment when you take the time to enjoy the experience.
Through changing our behaviours we can start to re-educate our minds about food and drink and continue to build our resilience.
Step Eight: Pace your Efforts – Quality time for rest
Good athletes prepare physically, emotionally and mentally for the big events. They plan with a degree of precision to ensure they are in peak condition at precisely the right time. Moreover, they know the importance of downtime after major exertion and make rest and recuperation an equally important aspect of their training regime. Perhaps most striking of all, athletes spend 90% or more of their time training and preparing for what might well be just 10% of their time or less, ‘performing’.
Yet for many of us, especially in the modern world of work, we are being asked for “high performance” for virtually 100% of our working hours. It is simply not sustainable to peak perform all day every day; we have to learn to pace our efforts, prepare for challenging times and build in quality time for rest and recuperation.
Step Nine: Sleep Well- Refreshed and restored
Scientific and medical evidence shows that having sufficient sleep plays a critical role in good health and wellbeing from infancy through to old age. Quality sleep helps to nurture mental wellbeing, physical health, quality of life, work performance and productivity as well as human safety. In short, lack of proper sleep decreases an individual’s resilience level. You can take some simple steps to start improving your sleep patterns, keeping a sleep diary is a good place to start.
Step Ten: Collaboration and Cooperation – Our personal networks are essential
Collaboration and co-operation are key to building our personal resilience where we can feel both supported as well as offering support to others. Seeking and giving feedback, being prepared to learn from others, sharing knowledge and ideas and listening frequently and generously are all important ways of cooperating and working together. Collaboration and cooperation are central to resilience. Collaboration is essential for creativity, certainly, but also for diversity of thought and action — ways to come up with solutions based on a variety of inputs from a range of people working through to a final outcome. Collaboration recognises that often we do our best work together.
Step Eleven: Change Wise – Fresh eyes on past experiences
Being “change wise” will help to build your personal resilience to withstand challenging and difficult events in the future. It uses a relatively simple technique called reframing.
Often people think that an event happens to them and it makes them feel a certain way. In fact, there is another step in the process in between which determines how you feel – this is your thoughts/interpretations and beliefs about the event. Reframing your mindset about an experience helps to build a positive outlook about handling future difficult or potentially challenging events and enables us to move on earlier from setbacks. It uses “the benefit of hindsight” (reflective thinking) and proves the value of that well-worn phrase, “if I knew then what I know now”. Revisit your own past then imagine how you might deal with things differently now.
Step Twelve: The New Normal – Creating a vision for the future
The day after is never the same as the day before. Nor should it be. The new normal should build off our experiences, apply the lessons learned, create a new vision for a better future.
All of us share the opportunity for making this happen as well as carry an individual responsibility for turning our words of resolve into action. Things have changed and will continue to change, that is obvious. Our work environment may well have changed, how we do business with others, how we interact both formally and informally with our colleagues, our managers, our customers will seem so different. But have you changed, and if so, how are you recalibrating your life when there are so many other competing demands and uncertainties?
At the heart of resilience is self-awareness, self-control and being adaptable. It is not about avoiding experiences, even those that are particularly difficult, but it is about allowing yourself and others to think about them, articulate them, share them and finally learn from them so that you become stronger through the experience. During these past weeks so much has happened so quickly and so drastically. It takes time to take it all in and even more time for us to learn from the experience so that we can shape, adapt and even embrace the new normal.
You are resilient and strong. You have come through things. You can ride the waves of your life.
For more information on building resilience and any other Occupational Health and Wellbeing issues please take a look at our website where you will find details about the services we can offer, and further resources available to download.
Jayne Carrington
August 2020
