How can I be more resilient going forward? Resilience is one of the key buzzwords from the past couple of years

During a coaching meeting recently, my client asked about how they can improve their resilience. Resilience had been identified during our review of strengths and development areas as one of their key weaknesses, and it made me think about how important increasing resilience is for not only my client, but lots of other people out there in the big wide world. So, let’s start with a definition – what exactly is Resilience? Here’s a standard explanation: the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness. I think we’ve all had to learn how to be more resilient since March 2020, and Resilience has become a bit of a buzzword as a result!

Within the coaching arena that I occupy, I often talk about there being 3 elements that come into play when focussing on an individual’s resilience. To ensure you are able to balance your career and life successfully you need to keep “fit” in three areas – personal, job and career, and through that you will be able to create a way of working and living that is sustainable and enjoyable.

The 3 keys areas are therefore as follows:

• Job Fitness: This reflects on how your day to day role and responsibilities are going. Are you clear about what you need to focus on; are you able to manage your workload; do you have enough challenge and stretch within your role? If you are enjoying what you’re doing and you are feeling happy and confident in your abilities, then you probably have good job fitness. If you are finding work a struggle, and you have lost your enthusiasm for achieving in your role, then maybe you need to look at improving your job fitness – e.g. redefine your roles and responsibilities, speak with your line manager about adding more challenge and stretch etc

• Career Fitness: Managing your career can become more challenging as you continue to progress through an organisation or stage within your life. The aim is to ensure you achieve career fulfilment and continue to do so by giving yourself extra challenges i.e. building effective networks, showing visible success, learning and developing, prioritising and delegating, playing to your strengths. These are all areas that we can reflect on during a coaching session to ensure you are going down the right path going forward

• Personal Fitness: This reflects on your personal health and well-being, as well as your physical and mental health. Some examples of being more personally fit are getting enough sleep, eating well, seeing enough of your friends/partner, having time for interests and hobbies, and being physically fit.  The easiest way to reflect on how this is going would be to review your personal “Wheel of Life”. I covered this in an earlier article: How balanced is your life at the current time?  (https://www.kardooniconsulting.co.uk/how-balanced-is-your-life-at-the-current-time)

Essentially, if all three areas are viewed as being positive for an individual, there is less noise for the individual to deal with, and hence you will feel more resilient and positive compared to someone who is maybe having struggles in one or more of these areas. 

So, what would I encourage you to do? 

• ·To be job fit, ensure you are clear about the goals and objectives you are working towards, and that you are managing your workload efficiently. 

• To be career fit, ensure you address some of the focus areas suggested above; for example, revisit or create a list of your strengths and development areas, and then work through how play to the strengths more, and improve your development areas. (If you struggle to articulate strengths and weaknesses, I can advise you of some online tools to help with this, and I will be posting a blog about this in future weeks)

• ·To be personally fit, review your Wheel of Life regularly to understand how balanced your work and life are currently against how you’d like it to be in the future

This is a whistle-stop summary of how you can increase your resilience going forward. Working on all the elements to improve your own fitness and mindset will take time and commitment, but the end goal of increasing your personal resilience makes it worthwhile. Take some time to reflect, and give yourself 3 goals to work towards in the next 4-6 weeks to start on your “Increasing Resilience” journey. Good Luck!