During the pandemic, a lot of people all over the world needed resilience to overcome the hardships they were facing—the cabin fever, fear of serious health issues, and the loss of jobs and businesses created a stressful and worrying environment for people to live in. Resiliency is gaining importance in our lives, not just due to the pandemic but because of its significance within work environments, the constant change we are experiencing, and the ever-growing complexities of our business world today.
Resilience in the business world transcends the mere capacity to endure stress; it’s a multifaceted skill set that involves EQ, mindfulness, flexibility, adaptability, and a consistently composed response to the pressures of the workplace. Resilience is accepting, pushing through, not taking things personally, course correcting, and being okay with misfires. Rocky Balboa says, “It ain’t about how hard you’re hit, it’s about how you can get hit and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward. Get up!
Leadership demands that you approach every situation with a level head, ready to tackle each challenge with practical solutions. It’s about having the foresight to anticipate obstacles and the adaptability to address them without losing sight of your team’s ultimate goal.
Building resilience isn’t a switch that you flip on. You don’t just tell yourself, I need to be more resilient because that’s what they see leaders need to do. You need to take an intentional, approach to building your resilience in a healthy and sustainable way. It’s about how you see, experience and approach your work day.
It involves creating a balanced ecosystem of support structures, coping strategies, and mental and physical health maintenance. For individuals, this could mean regular physical exercise, mindfulness practices, or seeking support from colleagues, friends, or professionals. For organizations, it could involve providing employees with resources for mental health and professional development opportunities to build their skill sets and creating a culture that encourages open communication and collaboration.
Years ago, after battling with some health issues and personal challenges in my life, a good friend of mine at the time said to me, “Man, you are one resilient SOB! You just keep coming back!”
From that point on, I mistakenly thought for years that being resilient meant that you took everything on the chin with a smile on your face and just kept suffering. My interpretation of resilience created a toxic-masculine reaction within myself that led me down a road of being closed off and taking every hardship with a smile and an “I’m all good!” My misunderstanding of resilience led to unnecessary suffering on my part. But as they say, hindsight is twenty-twenty.
Now, being older and a little wiser, I can truly understand that resilience means acknowledging challenges and setbacks but interpreting and processing them in a healthier way with better perspective.
As the Stoic philosophers (a philosophy that focuses that emphasizes it’s not what happens to you, it’s how you interpret what happens to you) taught us, there is the thing that happens, and then what we choose to feel about that thing is up to us.
Excerpt from the new book ‘Optimize Your Leadership: An Impactful and Healthy Way to Lead in the New Age’.
