Personal Resilience
Personal Resilience for Stress Management
In our increasingly pressured, and often frenetic, lives we need to have a range of core competencies to handle ourselves. A key competency is our personal resilience.
- Resilience can be thought of as our ability to bounce back, or even grow, in the face of pressures and threats.
- The American Psychological Association define resilience as the ability to adapt in the face of adversity, trauma or tragedy.
- The degree of personal resilience we have varies, depending on the circumstances and pressures we are under.
- We can learn to develop even stronger personal resilience skills.
- We have a choice when under pressure – to be resilient or to give in.
- "Everything can be taken from a man but one thing, the last of the human freedoms – to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances." (Viktor Frankl)
Building Personal Resilience for Stress Management in Detail
Many workplaces are making increased demands on their people, workloads, deadlines, expectations – often with reduced resources. It is not surprising that more and more people are finding these pressures causing them to feel stressed. Learning to respond to situations by using your personal resilience can be one of the most powerful choices open to you.
"When people feel strong and resilient – physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually they perform better, with more passion, for longer. They win, their families win and the corporations that employ them win." (Loehr and Schwartz)
As we go through our lives we find that different circumstances can trigger our resilience. When faced with certain pressures, we can respond strongly and feel good. Sometimes, the pressures and cause the opposite result and we feel powerless and our resilience is not able to kick in and help us. We can reduce the times this happens to us by developing our personal resilience capability. Understanding ourselves better and identifying some of the areas we can change will make a significant difference in how we handle pressure.
When we are feeling more resilient the typical behaviours we will demonstrate will include: being proactive; confidence; having a focus; organised; adaptability; and energetic. One of the reasons for this is that we are able to call on our personal resilience when we feel as through we are aligned – our values and beliefs are linked through our attitudes to our behaviours. We can also learn to think about "difficult situations" differently and use a more positive thinking pattern and reframe our thoughts.
As part of our journey to improve our personal resilience a key step is to identify what things drain your resilience. When confronted with too many pressures we can find our ability to handle them resiliently is not as great as we thought! This is because our personal resilience can be eroded by on–going pressures. Work out what are the main factors which to appear to cause your resilience to reduce ? and do something about it! To find out more about how we can help you with this, look at our "Building Personal Resilience" solution.