Managing resilience in today’s fast paced world of high expectations is tough. Change and challenge are often the norm whether it comes from a new program being unveiled, a complete reshuffle due to a merger or parents moving into a care facility. Too often, the challenges become just too much and frequently trigger inflexibility, feelings of overwhelm and loss of composure.
You can build your capabilities so challenging times don’t take you out. Watch your resilience meter grow to full potential. Emotional Intelligence (EI) skills are fundamental to managing these stress points and maintaining health and well-being. Six EI skills are pivotal to building your reservoir of emotional reserves: emotional self-awareness, self-regard, impulse control, stress tolerance, optimism, and flexibility. A healthy use of these skills will build your positivity and create the leverage to promote success at the workplace and personally.
Resilience is of growing interest as researchers demonstrate its influence on physical and mental health, well-being, the aging process and overall quality of life. Additionally there is growing recognition of the benefits to teams and workplace productivity with a resilient workforce. There is also a connection with the willingness to take on risks and to explore creative options. If we feel more positive about ourselves and life, we have the energy to experiment.
What is Resilience?
You have many strategies available to help expand your resilience. But, the key part of the definition of resilience is to bounce back. The definition has expanded to include the ability to contain challenges and to develop reserves that can be tapped into when one is faced with environmental pressures and demands. When we speak of resilience, we are referring to the ability to keep things in perspective so that many potential challenges are simply taken in stride. When a large challenge surfaces, there is likely to be stress, but the reserve strength built with resilience allows us to contain the issue rather than going down a negative and downward spiral that starts feeding itself.
Assets and resources within us, our lives and our environment facilitate the capacity for adapting and bouncing back when there is adversity. Our resilience is likely to ebb and flow not only across our lifetime but even across the day or week if there is a lot going on. Yet, the more habits we have developed to build and maintain our positivity, the less we will give in to negative emotions and the more we will intentionally seek positive emotions that will enhance our capacities.
Dr. Barbara Fredrickson, author of “Positivity” and “Love 2.0”, provides a great deal to help understand the field of positivity, which is closely related to resilience. Should you be working as a coach or team facilitator it’s likely you’ll use the two concepts interchangeably. As a lead scientist in the field of positivity, Fredrickson demonstrates through her research and that of colleagues that living with a high level of positivity has measurably positive results.
Benefits of Positivity/Resilience
– Psychological benefits include being more optimistic, more open minded and more willing to check out possibilities. First, being positive feels good. Being open minded is critical to noticing and considering multiple options to a challenge. It means that money, resources, or possibilities aren’t left on the table because our vision is too narrow to see them. Negativity constricts our thinking and our vision. It’s costly.
– Mental benefits include expanding awareness and mindfulness. It opens our thinking capacity to new possibilities. With positivity we can be better at savoring what works instead of being focused on what doesn’t. Right away you can see the difference in your stress levels and the toll taken when you are focusing on the positive compared to the negative.
– Social benefits pay out at the individual, team and workplace levels. With positivity we have more resilience. Emotions are contagious, thus sharing positive emotions and actions creates an upward spiral of expanding relationships, which then creates reserves for getting through hard times and conflict together. Resilience is indispensable if collaboration is truly going to occur. There is also interesting research showing that when we approach people with an emphasis on positive engagement, racial bias is reduced or disappears.
– Physical benefits include a higher quality of life and a longer one. Positivity results in lower blood pressure, less pain, fewer colds and better sleep. There is even research showing the power of hugs, wonderful, feel-good, authentically caring touch.
