From the course: Leadership Skills for The Future
Increasing resilience
- Resilience is the ability to recover quickly from adversity. A skill that all great leaders need. People who are resilient not only perform competently under stress, but they recover quickly from negative circumstances and use those experiences to grow, becoming more resilient in the future. Throughout your career, you'll need to not only bounce back from challenges yourself, but help your people and your organization do so as well. It turns out the resilience is actually a two phase process. The first phase is self-protective. You need to assess and reduce potential sources of adversity before they happen. The second phase focuses on wellbeing to effectively bounce back from adversity when it does happen. Many of these strategies are related to positive psychology and how to increase happiness. So implementing them gets you a double bonus. The first strategy is engaging in self-care. Self-care is what you'd expect it to be. Things like eating nutritious food, getting quality sleep and exercising. I also highly recommend starting a regular mindfulness practice, like meditation or yoga. The science on the benefits of mindfulness are truly astounding. Effective leaders know that the busy and stressful times are when you should double down on self-care. Keeping yourself physically and emotionally strong helps you not only avoid burnout but actually perform at your peak level. The second strategy is spending time with your supportive social network. This would be your trusted friends, family, and colleagues who provides you with encouragement, love and support. The key here is that you turn to them when you're under stress. The third strategy is to express your feelings about what's happening, especially the intense feelings that come with adversity like haustration, anger and fear. The fourth strategy is a daily practice of gratitude. Study after study has proven the immense benefits of gratitude. I suggest you end everyday with a simple ritual. As you go to bed, identify three things you're grateful for. The goal is to find three new things and only repeating after you've gone 30 days. This forces you to keep expanding your perception to see the bigger picture in the longer term view of your life. Finally, the fifth strategy is keeping your sense of humor. You may not be able to see any humor in the situation itself, but make a point of finding ways to laugh. Play games and sports with a light-hearted view. Watch comedies, go to amusement parks, and hang out with children and pets. As you develop these practices, you'll boost your resilience and your happiness. As a leader, you can also help others do the same. Think about how you can give these strategies to your people. Many organizations are now implementing on-site coaching programs, covering counseling through insurance, providing opportunities to play and even offering mindfulness programs.
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