In recent years I’ve thought a lot about resilience.
Resilience means a lot of different things to different people. And it’s true to say it has become overused in management literature.
To me resilience means ‘being in a state of resourcefulness to manage situations and complexities in an efficient, appropriate and emotionally resourceful manner’. The American Psychological Association defines resilience as “the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats or significant sources of stress”.
When we have high resilience, we feel as though we can manage situations, even if they’re very complex and demanding. When we have low resilience, even small things can push us out of emotional balance.
From my own experience, when I have been in periods of high resilience, I’ve been amazed by what’s possible. In these states I’ve turned around work that would usually require weeks of effort in a single day.
But when I’ve been in periods of low resilience, even the smallest things (eg. searching for keys at the bottom of a bag) can seem like a struggle.
Thinking About Resilience on Two Dimensions
Resilience is one of the most important qualities we can develop as leaders, but unfortunately it is not often discussed.
I think about resilience along two dimensions:
- Response: What is the level of our response to an event or situation. Is it a ‘resourceful’ response or is it a ‘reactive’ response? What I mean by ‘resourceful’ is whether we can respond in a way that takes advantage of all of our capabilities – balance, reason, logic, emotion – as opposed to pure reflex.
- Emotional Reserve: how does responding to the event or situation affect the ’emotional reserves’ that we have available to us. When someone says “I have nothing left in the tank to deal with this situation” we could say they have low emotional reserves, compared with when someone says “sure thing, I’m up for this and can deal with it, no problem”.
4 Levels of Resilience – A Tool for Self Assessment and Goals
Based on this, I think about four differing states of resilience:
- Reactive (Low Resilience): in response to an event or situation, we are immediately pushed over the edge, and react quickly and in the ‘heat of the moment’. We also find the situation very draining to deal with when we are in this state.
- Temporary Reactivity: in this instance, we may react quickly, but very soon after we ‘return to our senses’ and have more emotional resources available to us. In these situations, moments after we react, we might say something like ‘I’m sorry, that was a knee jerk reaction, let’s take another look at that’. Equally, if we have reacted passively (by being quiet), we may respond and say ‘I was not quite myself yesterday. Now that I’ve had some rest, could we speak more about that one more time’.
- Temporary Resilience: in this instance, we have a good level of resilience. The event or situation depletes our emotional reserve, but we are well equipped to manage the event or situation from a well-resourced state. In these situations, dealing with the situation may have an emotional tax, but we quickly recover and can be confident we dealt with the situation as well as possible.
- Active Resilience (Complete Resilience): in this final stage, our resilience is strong and the event or situation can be readily managed in a highly resourceful state. There is little depletion of our emotional reserves. We might say the ‘event is like water off a ducks back’ or it ‘hardly made a dint’. In these situations, we are confident we gave our best and still have more to give for the next challenge
These four states are shown in the model below. The white arrows show how we may shift between states. The states on the left of the model are in the ‘reactive zone’ and those on the right are in the ‘resourceful zone’.
Some of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs operate from a place of ‘active resilience’. Despite setbacks and challenges, their conviction to the end goal (whether that’s creating a successful business or launching a new product) is immovable.
In Guy Raz’s interview of Herb Kelleher, the founder of Southwest Airlines, Mr Kelleher discusses himself as never being stressed or in doubt of his company’s success. This is despite that fact that sometimes he was not sure whether the airline’s next flight would go ahead!
Ideally, we would spend as much time as possible in the ‘resourceful’ quadrants of this picture. From here, we are best resourced to deal with change and can be the best possible leaders for people around us.
If this is the goal, it’s important to pursue activities that keep us ‘well resourced’. Whether that’s doing regular exercise, going for a walk, spending time with our family, reading a book or eating well…..whatever it might be, this model is both an aspiration as well as a tool for personal assessment.
The activities that preserve our resourcefulness will vary for each and every one of us. So it’s inportant to observe what gives you energy and what takes it away.
When we think about the week that’s just gone, if we’ve spent more time than we would like in a ‘reactive’ state, that’s an indicator we should change our patterns to make us more resourceful. Likewise, if we spent a good deal of time in a resourceful state, then we can consider what made the difference so we could do more of those activities in the future.
Finally, it’s important to have patience with ourselves. While some people may spend 100% of their time in a highly resilient state, that’s likely not realistic for all of us. Our resilience will ebb and flow as we go through new circumstances. This is particularly the case as we take on new challenges and opportunities which require differing skills.
I hope you’ve found this post useful in thinking about your level of resilience. It would be great to know your thoughts by leaving a comment below.
