Find your inner strength

[Badshah Mamun]

Find your inner strength

By Ann-Maree Moodie

You can bounce back from workplace knocks.

Your job's on the line, the car keeps overheating and your partner is grumpy with you. Now the garbage bag has split on the way to the wheelie bin, dumping wet rubbish over your feet.

How well do you cope?

The answer to that question depends on your level of resilience. While some people get bogged down with the hurdles life presents, others seem to have a far easier time.

Broadcaster Anne Deveson asks why in her book, Resilience.

"We battle with serious illness, one of our children is at risk, we lose a job, we lose someone we love, friends grapple with divorce - one person remains locked in anger while the other lets go gracefully.

Why? What is the difference between them? Are some people more resilient than others?" she ponders.

Stuart Taylor, the managing partner of business coaching group The Resilience Institute, believes the answer is most definitely yes.

Rather than being a purely innate skill, resilience, he argues, can be acquired. Learn to be more resilient and it could boost your career, particularly during the tough times of the downturn.

"When resilient people experience setbacks, such as job loss, or they have to meet new challenges, they keep things in perspective; always on the lookout for the upside," Taylor says. "This approach also means their ability to get moving [and] capitalise on change is faster."

Let's put this to the test in the workplace. Imagine a middle manager in a company that is likely to start retrenching staff in the next three months. What would a resilient person do?

Taylor suggests a resilient manager would be awake to the possibility of sackings before they happened and would be on the front foot when they happened. He or she would have tried to understand the big picture and would have dealt with the possibility of job loss.

"This person has sought the counsel of trusted advisers and sounding boards to ensure his thinking is realistic yet optimistic and his emotions are balanced and functional," Taylor says. "By the time the news is delivered, this person is starting to enact one of his options on his terms and is able to be a strong leader, offering support and compassion for members of his team who are also affected."

But what if the same situation befalls someone less resilient?

"He will be less aware of the imminent threat and blissfully continuing with the intense, frantic busyness and work-life imbalance [typical of] his career," he says.

Taylor says a typical reaction from this sort of person is catastrophising, fear, anger, sadness and disengagement.

This type of reaction impedes the person's ability to think clearly and delays the pursuit of other options and opportunities.

"They become unable to lead their team in any effective way, as they have become introspective," Taylor says. "Their primary goal is to save themselves first. As a result, they burn more bridges with their inability to control their bitterness as they walk out the office door."

So how do we foster resilience in ourselves?

As the author of The Resilient Spirit, Polly Young-Eisendrath says resilience comes from experiencing problems. "Until we reach our limits, we don't know how to overcome them," she says. "Until we feel our greatest fears directly, we don't know our courage."

One way to learn resilience is to practise seeing other perspectives.

"A resilient person is skilled at identifying a destructive emotion and shifting it to a more functional emotion - this is called emotional regulation," Taylor says.

"This can be done by tackling the identified emotion head on. For example, if I am angry at the driver who jumped the queue in the traffic, having compassion for this person can diminish the rage. I might say to myself for example: 'Perhaps they had a real reason for pushing in - as I have done before.'

"Resilient people tackle stronger, more ingrained destructive emotions using cognitive combat by disputing the inaccurate thoughts and beliefs that led to the emotion in the first place."

Taylor, a former executive with KPMG, understands this well after being diagnosed with brain cancer in 2002. He was told he had two years to live but has gone on to defy medical expectations.

"From my own journey in business and with cancer, I believe one of our best teachers is challenge and adversity," he says. "Having one's resilience tested is undoubtedly the crucible for building resilience, be it as a four-year-old or a 40-year-old."


Published: 21 March 2009

Source: http://content.mycareer.com.au/advice-research/search/find-your-inner-strength.aspx