The leap back: building resilience in yourself, your team and your organisation

Somewhere around the 21km mark of the New York Marathon, my story could have ended in a medical tent.

I'd received news before that race that would have given me every reason to not run. And yet I crossed the finish line. Not because I'm special, and not because I'd talked myself into relentless positivity. I got there because of a handful of things I've since come to understand are what make us resilient - the connections waiting for me at the line, the choice to focus on why I was doing this in the first place, and a fair amount of rock tape, physio and sheer determination to not give up.

I've thought about that day a lot as it holds much of what resilience is – the lead up, the race, the post analysis. Here's what matters: resilience is not a personality trait some lucky people are born with. It's a set of skills we can build in ourselves, our teams, and in the organisations we lead.

Resilience isn't a fixed reserve you either have or don't. It changes over time, and it can be built. That's the whole premise of the work.  It also not something that once attained never declines.  Every day we are facing mounting pressures and new challenges, resilience is dynamic. 

It also isn't the same as being upbeat or positivity, and it certainly isn't toughing it out quietly whilst holding a composed outer image. I've tried that, with mixed results. Staying composed, staying positive, staying "on" isn't always resilience; sometimes it's just suppression. As I've written before, resilience isn't about ignoring what's hard, it's about the skills we build to help us manage and navigate through it. The leaders I respect most aren't the ones who never get knocked. They're the ones who feel it and find their way back to steady a little faster each time. The knock doesn't get smaller; their bounce back does.

Start with yourself: you are an energy system

One of the most useful ways I've found to think about personal resilience comes from the HeartMath work: we are energy systems. We wake each day with a certain amount of energy - some days more than others - and throughout the day we expend and renew it. Resilience, in this frame, is about the choices we make in how we use and manage that energy, so it doesn't quietly drain away.

There are four domains of resilience:

o   Physical - endurance, strength, and the flexibility to keep going. For me this is non-negotiable: regular exercise, good sleep and diet are what protect my capacity. And I make sure some of that movement happens in nature, because it refuels me ten times faster than any other kind of exercise — hiking settles my thinking and hands me the odd hit of awe.

o   Emotional - a positive outlook and the ability to self-regulate, so we're not run by our reactions.

o   Mental - attention, focus, and the willingness to hold more than one point of view.

o   Spiritual - a commitment to our values and a tolerance for the values of others.

Most of us are naturally stronger in one domain and have built capacity across one or two others. The growth is in the ones we've neglected. Ask yourself: which is my natural domain, and which one do I avoid?

The skills highly resilient people practise

When you look at what genuinely resilient people do, a handful of competencies show up again and again and every one of them can be learned. Self Awareness, Empathy, Emotional Management, Self-Discipline and Authenticity.

Two practical habits I love. The first is benefit hunting, deliberately looking for what a hard situation might be gifting you. The second is watching your explanatory style, the story you tell yourself when things go wrong. When I need to do that in the moment, a HeartMath breathing technique to bring my body back into coherence is what restores my access to clearer thinking.

Optimism isn't a constant and capacity is the reason

How I perceive a situation, and how much hope I hold for what's ahead, shapes how I approach it before I've done a single thing. But I've learned to be honest about something: my optimism isn't fixed. It rises and falls with my capacity - with whatever else is going on.

I'm optimistic by nature. I'll back myself to find a way through challenges.  But when a hard situation drags on like the extended economic squeeze many of us have been leading through for a few years now, trying to get ahead can feel like chasing your tail - even a natural optimist can feel the pessimism creep in. And when there are personal challenges piling on, I can feel a little hopeless about the future.

That isn't a failure of resilience. It's the reminder that resilience is a dynamic process, and that our reserves are finite. Knowing this lets me protect my capacity on purpose, rather than assume it will always be there.  Because burnout doesn't knock. It creeps in quietly, one skipped boundary at a time, and if we don't notice the small trade-offs we're making, eventually the body starts making the choices for us.

Then the team: resilience doesn't simply add up

Here's a finding: individual resilience does not simply aggregate up. You can fill a team with resilient people and still have a fragile team. Team resilience has its own nuances as does organisational resilience.

Melina Lipkiewicz is co-CEO of PeopleQ. If building personal, team and organisational resilience is on your leadership agenda, we'd love to talk about how our programs can help.

email melina@peopleq.com.au