10 Tips for building Resilience

With the arrival of Covid-19 our natural Resiliency levels will be being tested and I thought it might be useful to highlight 10 tips, around maintaining and building your Resilience, that have worked for me and my clients over the years.

What will, potentially, add the most value for you is to pick 3 that you are drawn to or have the most energy for and spend time on those to start with and when you feel ready, maybe focus on a few more.

Spending time working on all 10, over the coming days, weeks and months will have long-term positive benefits

Here is the list in full and I’ll expand upon them below:

• Self-compassion - it’s ok to have the thoughts and feelings you are having.

• Empathy and Emotional Intelligence - support others to have their thoughts and feelings.

• Humour - find something that works for you and make sure you have a good laugh!

• Focus - on what has stayed the same, even when it feels like “everything” has changed.

• Connect and communicate - humans are social creatures, therefore, make the time to connect.

• Mindlessness(!) - find opportunities to zone out and become absorbed in something.

• Adaptability - our openness to change and creating options and choices.

• Learn!!! - reflect on the new skills, behaviours, mindset, beliefs, capabilities that you’ve gained.

• Volunteering - do something for someone else, an act of kindness has a positive effect on us.

• Food and activity - where possible, eat a little healthier and do some form of exercise, daily.

Self-compassion:

It really is ok to have the thoughts and feelings you are having about any given situation. I’ve had most of them around Covid-19; sheer panic around how my business is going to survive and how I’m going to pay my mortgage! Through to renewed energy around how I can focus on supporting others throughout 2020.

The most important thing here, is how you decide to behave in relation to your thoughts and feelings.

Allow yourself to have any thoughts and feelings and the key is to notice when they might be “taking you over” into a negative spiral and that’s the moment for you to start to re-frame and re-phrase your self-talk to bring in alternative thoughts and feelings that can act as a counter-balance.

Talking to others will help with this.

Empathy and Emotional Intelligence:

This is linked to the first tip. Remember, empathy is about understanding how someone else thinks and feels without you making any judgement about them, easier said than done, I know! Also, please remember that saying “I know how you feel”, is NOT an empathic statement! We never know how someone else thinks or feels.

Therefore, use your own Emotional Intelligence i.e. understanding your own thoughts and feelings, to support others to work through theirs. From this supportive 2-way conversation, enable each other to make healthy choices about what you will both do next. This might be different for the both of you.

Humour:

Having a laugh is awesome! Please take the time to listen to or watch something that makes you smile or laugh out loud. As many of us are self-isolating there could be more opportunities to do this. One of the greatest by-products of humour for me, is that it provides a sense of Perspective, which is a key Resilience Strength.

Humour enables Perspective

Focus:

When we are in situations that feel like “everything is changing”, it’s really important and useful to focus on those things that have stayed the same. Make a list of everything that is still happening e.g.

• relationships

• what you have

• skills and capabilities

• who you can turn to

• the activities you can do

and so on. Clarifying as many things as possible that have stayed the same and are still happening will provide a sense of “grounding” and improve your feelings of being in control.

Connect and Communicate:

Humans are social creatures and we need each other. Therefore, find opportunities to engage with, acknowledge, chat to other humans. Even with Social Isolating, we can do this via Social Media, video calls, talking over the garden fence and through closed windows!

Mindlessness:

For those familiar with Mindfulness, I absolutely encourage you to keep doing that.

This is also about having an absorbing interest and losing yourself in an activity that really engages you. This can be reading, music, walking, playing a game, doodling, staring into space and daydreaming, a hobby etc, etc

It is possibly one of the best uses of our time to simply lose ourselves in doing something.

Adaptability:

This is all about our openness to change and clearly there is an awful lot of it going on now! Working on some of the other tips around building Resilience will increase your capability to “go with the flow”. Something we are going to need to get used to. A way to improve our adaptability is to chat about options and choices, as much as is practical. When we feel like we have many possibilities then this opens our minds and hearts to new ways of doing things.

Learn:

Whilst this is further down the list, in my experience, this is probably the most important element of building resilience. If you can get into the habit of reflecting, on a regular basis, about what you have learnt from any experience and situation, then you will become more naturally Resilient.

When you do reflect, focus on both:

• the skills, behaviours, information, capabilities, mindset, strengths that you used in that situation and

• the new and additional skills, behaviours, strengths etc that you used.

Focusing on both, will build confidence.

Volunteering:

I have seen a fair bit of research that shows that spending time doing something for others, in a volunteering setting or even just a random act of kindness, has a positive effect on our well-being. I have found this to be true, whenever I have done it.

Food and activity:

As we are going to be spending more time at home, this may be an opportunity to make some small tweaks to the foods you eat. Maybe pick up that cookbook you’ve had a for a while and/or go on-line and check out some simple recipes that use fresh ingredients and experiment. I have seen loads of messages from Retail organisations and CEO’s that they have enough supplies on the logistics chain, we just need to not panic buy and only buy what we need for the next few days.

Finally, take the opportunity, to increase your activity. Even stretching more often can help! We can go for walks, we can do chair exercises, we can run up and down the stairs - just start small and go from there!

A sneaky tip 11 - only watch small amounts of the news, to get enough of the information, then switch over!