Build Resilience Habits
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The Resilience Engine approach is based on our ten years of leading research and practice in the field. It is real-world, practical, inspiring and scalable. We have ten principles for enabling resilience in your organisation. This article will concentrate on building resilience habits.
Principle 2: Build Resilience Habits
Resilience is a practice. It doesn’t increase on the basis of a single event or intervention. Instead, a steady, bite-sized way of connecting with the ideas and concepts of resilience builds real resilience habits that stick. It’s all about applicability, for you, in the each of the contexts in which you operate.
The contexts in which you draw on your resilience are varied:
- A set of senior leaders who it’s tough to say no to, but if you don’t, you and your team’s capacity for performance is severely under threat.
- Losing your keys every day, aaargh!
- Choosing to take time to exercise, or investing in how to get better sleep
- Noticing and naming anger in the moment, but choosing not to be hijacked by it
- Listening well to your kids
- Taking time to rest
- Allowing time to free-wheel, just notice, then assimilate what your thoughts into useful stuff
- Forgiving yourself and learning, so that you can move on
This kind of stuff happens day in day out. Some big things, some small. Some of it responding, some of it proacting. Choosing between responding vs proacting is resilient behaviour.
Being resourceful like this needs investment in your resilience day to day. The first set of resilience habits, and the most fundamental, rely on core enablers. These are like muscles – you’ve got to spot and connect with them, you have to learn to activate them, then develop them, and to keep their elasticity and strength, keep it up. Otherwise they can go flabby pretty quickly. All of that means habits, not one tick in the box.
So don’t offer your people a quick fix. By all means offer them the golden nuggets of resilience (we have Being Resilient, our online 2-3 hour guide for this) – as long as that helps enable muscle building.
Find out more about how The Resilience Engine can help your organisation here.
Author: Jenny Campbell, CEO of The Resilience Engine