Resilience: it's a long game.
Recently I’ve received a few enquiries from senior leaders who want me to do ‘a quick one off session on resilience’ to help their teams overcome the impact of the pandemic. While I’d love to help, realistically there is no quick fix. While resilience can certainly help people evaluate and overcome what we’ve all just experienced, it is not something that can be achieved in an hour-long workshop.
Resilience is something to be practiced and focused on consciously and regularly over time, until it becomes a lifestyle choice. A short session won’t achieve this goal. People need to take time to reflect on what we’ve all been through, to understand their own experiences, because everyone’s experience will have been different. They need to evaluate what they have learned, decide what to keep, what to change, and set realistic goals to achieve this. It all takes time to work through properly and it’s not a process that can be rushed.
We live in a culture of instant gratification, where everything is expected to happen immediately. Most things can now be achieved with a few clicks of a mouse or even by or asking Alexa. Unfortunately this doesn’t apply to resilience. Building resilience requires regular and conscious attention to every aspect of the Resilience Wheel. If you haven’t looked at the Resilience Wheel yet, I would urge you to do so, as it will help you understand all the different aspects that we need to work on to become resilient.
I very much enjoyed hosting my first face to face workshop in about 16 months recently at a high school in Leeds. I asked a group of year 11 pupils how they could move from the path of limitation to the path of possibility. One young man replied ‘think about how much you’ve grown’. Talk about out of the mouths of babes! He was absolutely right - the key to moving forward to where we want to be is often to reflect on past experience and take stock of what worked well and why. We can then apply this knowledge to identifying and achieving our future goals. This critical way of thinking is the basis for building resilience, but it doesn’t happen overnight.
Take some time to reflect upon how you’ve changed and grown in recent times. Photo Dorota Dylka Unsplash
What teams need from their leaders right now is patience and understanding. People have had a lot thrown at them in recent months. They have had to change and adapt to new ways of working, and many are feeling exhausted, depleted and broken. Some are apprehensive about the world opening up again. What people are experiencing currently could be considered ‘long covid for the mind’.
Clients need to understand that there is no fast cure for this. Pushing them too fast to recover, or expecting them to cope with yet more change, could tip them over the edge.
Are you aware what your Tipping Point is…? Photo Joshua J Cotten