A study conducted by Leadership IQ in August 2020 found that individuals with a certain quality tended to thrive when dealing with our recent shift to remote work. Not only were these individuals able to respond to a change in their situation effectively, they were also able to maintain a sense of optimism and positivity.
What was this elusive quality?
Resilience.
The ability to bounce back from difficult situations.
The good news? Resilience can be a superpower you master! Resilience, as it turns out, can be learned. Here are a few tips to get you started:
- Be willing to try again after you ‘fail’: Reframe the idea of ‘failure’ as bad, and treat every step along your journey as necessary to reach your end goal.
- Don’t downplay your micro progress: Acknowledge every step in the right direction as an accomplishment, no matter how tiny it may appear.
- Embrace the ‘grey’: Avoid villainizing a situation as ‘all bad’, seek to identify what positives you gain through each experience and what invaluable lesson you learnt.
- Practice, practice, practice: How? When you next encounter a known challenge, reframe your focus to intentionally seek out how to build your ability to respond to and address a difficult situation.
Remember – change takes time. Give yourself the time and space to develop resilience. It is okay to dwell on or analyze a problem. Give yourself a reasonable amount of time to acknowledge what happened. Then, prepare to try again.