Resilience is about your aptitude to bounce back from problems and remain determined in the throes of hardship. Often there are many deviations along the way, alongside snags and challenges. So, it’s essential to build your resilience to help you recover quickly from difficulties through building skills you can utilise.
Stress and fatigue work issues are down to the increasingly fast pace and intense work generally carried out worldwide. In 2014 a survey encompassing over 100,000 employees (including Europe) showed that employee depression, stress and worry amounted to 82.6% of emotional health cases in Employee Assistance support. The increasing levels of workplace stress are a real alarm because they contribute to a lack of wellness and a dip in productivity.
There are four components of resilience – Confidence, Social Support, Resolve and Flexibility. Here are 7 tips to help you build your resilience going forward for 2017.
1. Believe in yourself and understand your strengths. Know that you are able to resolve your problems and remember where there have been problems before and congratulate yourself for getting through them and learning from them. Acknowledge that you have the skills to get through the issues and don’t avoid challenges. Celebrating your successes helps create a more positive air and stops you thinking about the things that haven’t gone so well.
2. Appreciate Social Support and build relationships. Relationships with family and friends can provide the encouragement needed. While in the workplace, find a mentor who can listen and suggest options help you give you choices and make you feel that there are alternatives – so it’s not all closing in on you. Create a network of work friends who can give backing. As a business, network to build a supportive team and discover people who have the skillsets you haven’t.
3. Have pragmatic work and personal goals to give you a sense of where you are going. Each day, take one small action to move you forward. Remember it’s always bite-size and then it won’t overpower you.
4. Be flexible, so that if you need to deviate from the route planned for your business, you can accommodate it and who knows what it could open up for your business and career. Work on remaining optimistic with the support of the people around you. It’s rare for things to stay the same at work so accept that there will be changes all the time and understand your reaction to change
5. Stress can affect us all, at some point. If you feel you are getting stressed find someone to talk to and take time out to relax. When you take a break you come back with fresh eyes and often see things differently, often finding a better solution to the problem. Remember to make time for yourself by planning your meals and exercise otherwise you will end up ill and not then able to cope.
6. Change the way you think. Train yourself to be more optimistic by thinking positively. If something goes wrong, don’t blame yourself and stop the thoughts such as “My Manager doesn’t like me” or “I can’t do this role”. Usually when there are people involved, they are often pre-occupied and have other matters in their mind. So it’s actually nothing to do with you.
7. Lastly remember what my husband always says to me – Does it really matter? What’s the worst that can happen? Put the issue into proportion, in a few weeks there will be something else and you will realise it wasn’t really that important and that it’s not forever.
Hope these tips help you create your 2017 resilience and a Happy New Year.
Nicola
