What is resilience? As defined by the Webster’s Dictionary, it is “an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change.”
The past few months and looking forward to the coming months, resilient people and businesses will recover and succeed. The recovery and adjustment will not be to the old ways, it will be to a “new normal” that has been imposed by current situations and restrictions—social distancing being one by-product.
The question for many is how do we build resilience? What are the steps or processes that we can incorporate into our lives that strengthen our resiliency? How do we move forward successfully?
“Resilience is accepting your new reality, even if it’s less good than the one you had before. You can fight it, you can do nothing but scream about what you’ve lost, or you can accept that and try to put together something that’s good.”
― Elizabeth Edwards, Author of Resilience
Here a four ways to build resiliency into our lives as we move forward in our business and personal lives.
- Relationships. Strengthening and focusing on relationships with people who we value as friends and closely linked associates, will provide us with a greater feeling of not being alone. We are stronger together. Who are we spending time with?
- Health and Wellness. Staying healthy and fit is important at all times and a crucial part of building resiliency. Keeping the body exercised and healthy contributes to our overall well-being and our ability to deal with stress and anxiety. What are we doing each day to keep our bodies healthy?
- Setting Goals. When we have a sense of purpose and have set ourselves achievable goals, we will find ourselves in a positive frame of mind. By accomplishing even smaller goals each day we will feel stronger despite what is going on around us. What have we accomplished today?
- Positive Thoughts. By having a hopeful and positive outlook on life, we expect good things to come to us. Positive actions and thoughts lead to positive results. Dwelling on the negative usually brings us down whereas focusing on the positive pushes us up and forward. What good things have we learned from the current situation?
Resilience is found in our response and reactions to a situation. When we choose how we respond and react and accept the inevitable change, we will overcome the adversity and grow stronger as individuals and as businesses.
“No matter how bleak or menacing a situation may appear, it does not entirely own us. It can’t take away our freedom to respond, our power to take action.”
― Ryder Carroll, Digital Product Designer and Author
Paul Abra, Certified Executive Coach, Motivated Coaching
