With the vaccine rollout bringing light at the end of the tunnel and the Government’s ‘roadmap’ to lifting social restrictions revealed, the Bank of England has predicted a strong ‘bounce back’ for the UK economy. The ability to bounce back, at least on a personal level, is closely tied to your level of resilience.
For your workforce, the nature of the last 12 months will have seen them regularly calling on their personal resilience to get them through. Where there is volatility, unpredictability, complexity and ambiguity – all of which have been at the forefront of the business landscape in recent times – those that score highly in resilience typically respond the best.
Whilst some individuals have naturally higher levels of resilience than others, everyone can develop and improve their personal resilience via the seven learnable skills…
Emotional Awareness
Understanding, reacting to and, where possible, leveraging control over your own emotions gives you the power to move yourself into more useful or productive emotional states.
Impulse Control
Resilient people can tolerate ambiguity to prevent rushing into decisions. They sit back and they look at things in a thoughtful way before reacting.
Causal Analysis
Individuals who score high in resilience can address problems from different perspectives and look further than the most obvious causes to find a solution. Causal analysis for all external events, not just problems, allows a measured and more informed reaction to them.
Empathy
Recognising and understanding the emotions of others, or simply taking them into account, helps to build relationships and social support that are an important aspect of resilience. Resilience is not a solo pursuit: “no man is an island”, after all.
Self-Efficacy
This is confidence in your ability to solve problems: partly about knowing your strengths and weaknesses and knowing you can rely on your strengths to cope. In other words, it’s not just about feeling good about yourself, it’s a skills-based mastery based on the notion of coping.
Reaching Out
Taking appropriate risks, being willing to try something new. People who score highly in resilience are willing to make mistakes and appreciate that failure is not just a natural part of life, it’s a fantastic learning opportunity.
Optimism
This means having a positive outlook. However it’s about realistic optimism, rather than “pie in the sky” thinking. Those who are blindly optimistic do not have a brand of optimism that facilitates problem solving, it actually interferes with it. For optimism to help resilience, it must be wed to reality.
At Eliesha, we have developed a number of virtual training sessions which can help you to deal with challenging times, including Resilience, Emotional Intelligence, Adaptive Leadership, The Individual Change Journey, Creative Problem Solving, and more.
If you would like to discuss any specific requirements for how we can support your workforce to develop the skills they need to succeed, please get in touch!
