Resilience is one of these hype words that many people like to use: it’s hot, it fits in with the image of success and it also creates some camouflage for feelings of disappointment, frustration etc…. We all want to be resilient in some way. Covid pushes us towards our personal limits of resilience, even though we ar not getting sick. To live with all kinds of restrictions requires resilience: never give up! It is clear that resilience is a major asset for someone experiencing change.
Resilience means “bouncing back”
We all have good and bad days, we’re getting our portion of luck, as well as bad luck. And many of our dreams do not come true the way we would love things to happen. Yet, most people overcome these less good experiences and more than once this experience has lead to people performing stronger than before, once they have overcome an accident or loss.
Human beings have a knd of surviving instinct. for some it means that in bad times they even manage to go to “the next level” and do things no one – included themselves- would have thought they could. This is what resilience is about: bouncing back, not falling into îecves when things do not work out well. Sports people are specifically trained and coached for these kind of situations: mental coaching is very hot in sports. Surprisingly, in daily life many of us do without any kind of coaching at all. and we do well. We appear to be much more in control of things then we would have dreamed we could.
Resilience is mental training for life skills
Moreover, we need to train ourselves to be able to face setbacks. Much has been said about society making things so damned easy for people that they become structurally weaker. Our predecessors had far from the luxury we have, and yet they managed pretty well to bounce back. if they hadn’t ,we would not even exist now. Some people today go for survival trekkings, go for a retreat in a monastery, meditate, do physical training… to make themselves stronger.
Mental training proves to be essential to become resilient. Much more than physical training. Mental imaging of things is a prime requirement for becoming resilient. This together with an optimistic view on the future. Yes, things will turn out well after covid. We just do not know how fast that will happen. But remember: when the two world wars just started, no one knwe exactly how long things would last. Eventually they lasted only four years. This is nothing as compared to a full human lifecycle of about 90 years; yet at the time it seemde endless. People with a positive mindset could well use it to their advantage. Also people with a purpose proved to be better survivors as well. If you live for a cause, you know why it pays off to fight.
Leave room for recovery
After every shocking experience, and also after every change event, we need to take and leave some time for recovery. I do not agree with people going from one rollercoaster to another in life and in business. After a while they will miss the energy in people to really make the difference. Even so now: once the lockdowns and restrictions will be over, people will fly into life like birds that have escaped somekind of cage. Newspapers already compare things to the “roaring twenties” of the 20th Century. Be not surprised if people really go crazy: the more we have missed for some time, the more we want to recover.
The same goes for learning experiences in companies: give some time for recovery after a critical change, but keep an eye on things: recovery does not mean restring the old situation. Look at our society now: things will never be exact the same as before the covid pandemic. some trends will stick and determine our life in a definite way. Other things will be picke up again;
IIn sports recovery means “rest”. If an athlete does not rest, he or she may get injured one day. We too may get injured if we live on a rollercoaster of change. The injuries may be mental ones, which are the hardest to recover from. So recovery has its meaning in all circumstances.
Grow!
Whenever you’re ready, you will at some point in time also re-assess the situation and evaluate what you have learned. With the right mental state of mind you will definitely draw some learnings from the experience and many of us will start to become an improved version of ourselves. This is where we grow. Things have not been in vain. We may have experienced all kinds of pain and frustration, but in the end, some good things also came along the way. With these in our hands, we can become a better version of ourselves. wouldn’ that be a great idea to focus on, now we’re experiencing this pandemic?
What will be your area of growth? How well will you have stretched once we are getting back to a normal life situation? If you want to chat about your challenges, please get in touch. We would love to help you grow!