When people build a house, some form of protection, they wouldn’t dream of tackling the job without a plan. So why is it that so many people tackle their everyday challenges, with no protective plans in place at all?
In this piece, I will set out what my experience has shown are the 5 key elements of personal protective planning, more often called simply “resilience”. So, what exactly IS resilience? Why is it such a great idea … and how can you get yourself some?
The online Oxford dictionary defines resilience in two ways, which in my world actually seem quite related:
- The capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.
- The ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape; elasticity.
So, when dealing with clients, I help them find inner “toughness” and the ability to “bounce back” from difficulties. See how I think they combine? What this means in practice is that I work with clients to identify the real scale of the challenge at hand, and to learn to see that challenge from a range of angles. How could it be an advantage? How could they learn from it? How could it affect others? In other words, to encourage the client to move on from the pit of indecision where they find themselves, and to explore different ways of seeing what they had begun to feel would be an insuperable problem.
Obviously, this isn’t a quick process for everyone, and isn’t about giving the client a metaphorical slap round the chops accompanied by a stern “Pull yourself together!”. Clients will have different levels of trust in others, even in themselves. Many people are so accustomed to catastrophising that they are experts, coming up with generalised negativity on such a grand scale that nothing is ever possible, in the history of everything, ever! When I get to know clients well, I have been known to term this “flouncing”. It is completely unproductive, and yet so very common in people, in work and at home. Many people will actually doubt they ever had any inner toughness. And that may be the case in some, but not for many.
This may be striking an uncomfortable chord for you as you read this. Well don’t worry – you are in plentiful company. And the fact that you are reading this at all shows that you have made the first, most important step – noticing that where you are now is not where you want to stay. Congratulations. That shows that you have inner toughness … you just need to nurture it.
How can you nurture your resilience? Firstly, by noticing it. Every time something happens where you would prefer things to happen differently, you will begin to notice that you are having to make a choice: go with it, or resist. Start to focus on how you do what you do, and how you think what you think. Don’t worry about why yet, just focus on the how. Notice, and reflect upon, your responses to different stimuli, be they a request to work unpaid overtime, or an invitation to go to the pub with your mates.
“Going with it” is not the same as giving in – let’s get that straight. Going with the general flow, showing personal flexibility, which is key to personal resilience. In other words, you have to begin to recognise where to pick your fights. In extreme situations, the flexibility can go too far and there is a “snap” – back to that elasticity definition again. So the second tip is to keep flexible. The NLP presupposition “the most flexible, wins” (I paraphrase) will help you to judge when it is in your interests to go with the flow, and when it is not. It might help to get an important project done, to work a long day. It might be unhelpful to go to the pub with mates the night before a big exam. Flexibility is not always straightforward, but it is important that you understand the terms under which you are using yours. Learn what works for you.
Next comes the recognition of boundaries. The third element is to recognise boundaries, ie where the “snapping point” is, and to learn to take action to avoid things getting to that stage. You need to understand the boundaries of a situation, to help you to gauge how flexible you need to be. If your boss is inviting you to stay every night to keep him company in the local bar, that’s an easy boundary to spot. You make an excuse and avoid, or go now and again if it suits you. If that becomes bullying pressure to lose control of your consonants with him, every week, that is beyond flexibility and is a straight “no” – well at least it was for me many years ago. Notice your personal response to this scenario. You may be feeling a range of emotions, positive and negative. These responses will pull on your value system, your upbringing, your beliefs, corporate policies, personal commitments … all of these things inform your boundaries and the intensity with which you choose to reinforce them. However, the ability to recognise your boundaries is a crucial tenet of improving your personal resilience.
Once you know how you are feeling about a situation, and you can see how others would like you to respond and how you might in turn respond (based on a conscious choice whether to go with it or resist), you have, in fact built the foundations of your own resilience. Next comes understanding. So the fourth tip I want to pass on, is empathy – to learn to see things from others’ perspectives. The old saying “you won’t understand someone until you’ve walked a mile in their moccasins” has a ring of truth about it. You don’t have to want to be the other person, nor am I encouraging you to sympathise with their situation, pitying them or “taking their part” as people used to say. Instead, I am simply suggesting that seeing things from another viewpoint helps you to understand a situation more fully. The more facts you have about a situation, the better you can respond to it appropriately. Imagine … someone in the office has been out all week, you jokingly accuse them of “skiving” on their return, it goes quiet in the office, someone informs you that your colleague was recently bereaved. You can sense the awkwardness, caused purely by not making the effort to find out more, to see a situation from another’s viewpoint. Empathy, then, is a key leadership skill, and an excellent way to protect yourself. You can understand someone’s situation, but you don’t have to join them in it! Self-protection is a crucial underlying technique to shore up your resilience. “Look after yourself” is not an encouragement towards selfishness, so much as a recommendation that you may need to be strong for others, so you need to be strong enough to do that in the first place.I am sure when you read this you can come up with a range of alternatives to my top tips, but for me, the fifth and perhaps most important tip is maintenance. There is minimal benefit to you, to be resilient … then not … then resilient … then not again. Using the previous four tips, you can learn what works for you, in terms of making you identify as more resilient. Once you have this learning, find a way to make it stick. Perhaps you could associate it with an image, either in your mind’s eye or one of those motivational photographs so beloved of those of us who post aphorisms. Perhaps you could associate it with a sound, or word, or a sensation or emotional response that you feel able to conjure up on demand. You might even be like me and associate it with a smell, a positive scent, a favourite perfume. And then there’s always associating your resilience with a taste (although I wouldn’t advise linking it to alcohol as that is a path strewn with trouble … see above!). Whatever device you use, use it. Think about it often and in as much detail as you can. Repeat it. Learn to be able to create that sensory impression at the drop of the proverbial hat. That will enable you to build your resilience to the extent that you outgrow the image, word, feeling etc. You will naturally become more resilient, because you are reinforcing your learning and applying it to new situations. You will grow and improve. And then you can use the tips all over again!
If this all rings true for you, and you think that this is something that you would like to explore in more detail, then please feel free to get in touch. I would love to hear from you, and help you find out what other tips and techniques would work for you, on your personal development journey.