Resilience is very popular as a topic currently. Everyone is talking about how to build resilience in order to cope with the stresses and strains of everyday life and the odd exceptional circumstance.
It has become very fashionable for organisations to look at building resilience in people and they look to the CIPD, psychologists, coaches and trainers to help them with this erstwhile endeavour. YET, there are a number of commonly used phrases that are used when working with resilience that may exacerbate the issue. These phrases are used so often that you probably use them yourself every day without even thinking about them.
1) Resilience involves “bouncing-back”
Resilience is often defined as your ability to bounce back from the stresses of life.
The idea of resilience as an aspect of human behaviour originates from material science where it describes the property of a material to resume its original shape after distortion or stress – to bounce back.
The issue with the phrase “bouncing back” is that there is an expectation that people will return back to a state where nothing has changed.
You show good resilience by possessing:
- a firm, reliable acceptance of reality
- a deep belief, supported by strongly held values, that life is meaningful
- an ability to be creative, adaptable and to improvise.
This has nothing to do with bouncing (backward or forward) as you continually evolve and improve yourself by learning from your environment and your mistakes and in this way develop your resilience.
2) Resilient people are better at managing “positive and negative emotions”
Emotion is a complex state of feeling resulting in physical and psychological changes that influence thought and behaviour. Emotions are controlled through interactions of your amygdala and hippocampal complex within the limbic system of your brain. This part of the brain has no language processing ability. It is your neo-cortex – the thinking part of the brain - that assigns a label to the emotion.
The issue with the phrase “positive and negative emotions” is that it assumes some emotions to be good and some to be bad.
Emotions are emotions. You experience them for a reason. They have developed over eons through evolutionary processes as a survival mechanism. It is not the emotion that is positive or negative; it is the thought process and the behaviour that accompanies it that requires the label.
Anger is often referred to as a negative emotion, yet it serves you well to right a wrong, to be more attentive and careful in your thinking and to motivate you at certain times.
Fear is often referred to as a negative emotion. If it is so negative, why can you get so much enjoyment from horror movies and scary films?
Happiness is often referred to as a positive emotion. It is suggestive of a state of blissful nirvana that you must aspire towards, yet it is not appropriate at solemn occasions. Also, happiness will limit you in your ability to communicate effectively, negotiate well and make critical decisions. It can encourage riskier behaviours, encourage you to take shortcuts and lead you to make more mistakes.
Resilience is developed through the intelligent application and expression of identified emotions, known as emotional intelligence.
3) Resilient people have a good “work / life balance”
Resilience is having a clear, realistic focus of what is important and being able to prioritise effectively.
The issue with the phrase “work /life balance” is that it compartmentalises everything into work activities (meetings, clients, trips, conferences) and life activities (family commitments, holidays, hobbies, keeping healthy).
Think about it. The phrase is actually meaningless. Life is not at one end of a fulcrum with work on the other end! Work is an integrated part of life.
You only have one life – you just happen to live some of it while working and some of it engaged in other activities. Like most people over the age of 20, work takes up a major proportion of your life and has to be realistically integrated into all of your activities to give you a rich, rewarding and meaningful focus.
Resilience is developed though realising what is necessary and important, keeping fit and healthy, and building rewarding, authentic relationships inside and outside of work. It is all about personal organisation and finding ways to relax.
Perspective on issues and your ability to look at problems creatively is lost under continued stress. The popularly of resilience tries to rectify this, however, your good intentions could be diminished by the inappropriate language that you use inadvertently.
Adapted from "The Authority Guide to Emotional Resilience; Strategies to Manage Stress and Weather Storms in the Workplace" - published May 2016. Available to order from Amazon - https://goo.gl/JdQKsX
