What’s your definition of resilience, would you say you’re resilient?
Imagine the scenario – you’re in a stressful situation. The deadline of your project has been brought forward and you’re nowhere near ready, how do you react?
Do you maintain a sense of balance, can you think logically and shuffle your workload to accommodate the change, can you see the end goal and motivate others to work with you to get it done. When it’s completed do you learn from the change, make notes, and set up the next project with more contingency planning?
Great news you’re resilient. You didn’t crash and burn, you rose to the challenge and exceeded expectations.
However, what if the opposite happened and you panicked. Your workload is already overloaded and this is the last thing you need. Sound a bit more realistic?
How you cope with change, how you think, how you react and how you communicate with others in stressful situations is down to how resilient you are.
Bouncing back from that initial hit. Okay it’s the last thing you need but it has to be done, so now is the time to regroup, evaluate and work out the logistics, the priorities and capacity.
Is there a compromise, is good, good enough?
We are naturally resilient, some more so than others. However, the more we progress in our roles, the greater the work and responsibility. So being resilient gives us that protection that enables us to keep going and, even if it doesn’t quite go the way we planned, it helps us confidently learn and apply the learnings to the next project.
Resilience means we can bounce back, but continually applying learnings means we can bounce higher than before.