What is resilience?
Resilience is having the ability to manage, cope and overcome difficult times, knowing how to bounce back to your normal self after setbacks.
These difficult times can, for example, be changes, pressure and workload, finding it difficult to juggle your working life with your home life or many other stresses in life.
On occasion, these times can cause us stress, anxiety and low mood and sometimes become overwhelming. If we have poor resilience skills it makes it harder to manage and cope during these tough times.
There are four pillars of resilience; physical, emotional, mental and social resilience.
Why is having good resilience skills important?
Having the right tools to develop good resilience skills helps us to come back stronger and better than before. If we lack resilience skills, things can become overwhelming. We can dwell on the problems instead of using effective resilience skills to manage how we feel. We may use unhelpful coping strategies that can lead to us finding it even more difficult to manage the circumstances. This in turn leads to poor mental health and wellbeing, which is harder to come back from, ending up not only affecting our loved ones but also our performance and attendance at work.
The good news
We have an incredible ability to recover from these hard times. We all have in-built skills to develop resilience. It is more about knowing where to start and how to bring them out of us, strengthen them and how to use them to able us to keep afloat when we are experiencing these tough times. Our experts are here to help you to develop these resilience skills.
What are the benefits of having good resilience skills?
- A happier and healthier self and workplace.
- Reduced burnout and exhaustion, fewer employees off sick due to mental health issues.
- A higher success rate.
- The ability to find solutions, not problems.
- More in control of results and outcome of events.
- Improved and stronger communication across the board.
- Able to set realistic goals and expectations.
- Stronger social support network.
- Be a survivor rather than a victim of events.
- Further improving CPD.
The things you can do to start strengthening your resilience
Self-awareness
- Reflect on your own strengths and weaknesses. Be honest with yourself.
- Reflect on your own emotional needs.
- Know how you show empathy and understanding towards others both at home and at work.
Self-care
- Do more of the things that help you unwind and switch off.
- Do more of the things you enjoy. Simple things, little and often.
- See to your own needs.
- Take care of yourself; sleep, mindfulness, eat healthily, exercise, and socialise.
Self-confidence
- Believe in yourself. You are stronger than you think.
- You can do this. Look at your options and find solutions, not problems.
Re-evaluate your environment
- Surround yourself with positivity. Try and remove the negatives.
- Look at your own needs. Prioritise what is important to you.
- Don’t be afraid to ask or seek support from managers, mental health first-aiders, colleagues, friends and family. Seek professional support from Corporate Personal Wellbeing counsellors.
- Don’t ‘brush your problem under the carpet’. They do not go away by themselves.
- Prevention is better than cure. Use a Proactive Employee Assistance Programme.
- Keep focused. What are your goals?