Boosting your resilience and adaptability

Lockdown is easing, but that doesn’t mean we are going back to normal. We need to think instead of ourselves as moving forward in to a new normal. This new normal involves living with the reality of coronavirus: a winter surge is predicted by many experts. Navigating this new normal will take resilience and adaptability.

What helps us be more resilient and adaptable?

Resilience can be defined as having the resources, mental, physical or experience-based, to cope with unexpected, difficult or adverse situations. 

Being adaptable means being able to flex our expectations and behaviour when circumstances change.

For both resilience and adaptability, being resourceful is key.

How can we discover and expand our resourcefulness to boost our resilience and adaptability?

Our resourcefulness is boosted by both personal and contextual factors.

Personal resources

Our Strengths

One of our biggest sources of personal resources is our own unique strengths. Strengths are the attributes that are at the heart of our best self. They are the things that are natural for us to do and that seem easy to us. We each have our own set of strengths.

It’s important to know our own strengths as using them boosts our confidence and gives us energy, allowing us to recover more quickly from setbacks. We are likely to solve a problem better if the solution uses our strengths.

Our workshop Understanding our strengths and how they help  with resilience will help you identify your strengths and how to use them to boost your resilience

Our previous experiences

Sometimes, when we are stressed or anxious it is hard to believe that we can cope, we feel so helpless right now. In this situation, it can be really helpful to remember other times when we did cope, when we got through a tricky situation or when we turned a situation around. Being in the grip of the present can prevent us from accessing resources from the past: our knowledge, our skills, our experience. Appreciative Inquiry is a change process that is built on the understanding that resources from the past can help us in the present and in the future.

Our workshop Enhance your adaptability to increase your resilience will introduce you to Appreciative Inquiry as a way of increasing our adaptability.

Boosting our resilience by building our HERO abilities

Our HERO ability made up of our states of hopefulness, optimism, resilience and confidence (efficacy). Add these four things together and the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. In other words, although resilience is part of our HERO abilities, it is also boosted if we can boost our sense of hope, optimism and confidence.

Our workshop Extending our resilience by boosting our HERO abilities will help you identify your own HERO abilities and how to use them to boost your resilience.

Social resources

Our social networks extend our resourcefulness. Our network contains people who find easy what we find hard. They can be a source of inspiration, uplift, practical advice, useful contacts and many other resources that help us cope. Exchange your strengths across your network.

And at work?

Organisational resilience is about all of the above, and, about social capital. The social capital of an organization reflects its connectedness. It’s about how easily information flows around the organization and how much trust there is. Both these factors make it much easier for organizations to be resilient and to adapt quickly. These positive organizational development cards have lots of information about the features of the best organizations

Our  workshop Boosting our organizational resilience will help you identify ways to boost organisational resilience

A few quick tips for boosting your resilience and adaptability in the new normal

• Follow safety instructions, but more importantly, understand the principles and apply them in different situations so you can be active in keeping yourself safe

• Manage your energy and look after yourself. Having to suddenly adapt our behaviour means we can’t run on habitual lines, so it takes more energy even if you seem to be achieving less. Go easy on yourself, adjust your expectations and standards

• Re-prioritise, and then do it again when things change again. It’s very easy to assume the priorities stay the same even as the situation changes. They don’t. So take the time to think about what the highest priorities are now, in this situation within these constraints, with these resources.

• Redefine your goals so you can succeed in the new situation. This is very important.

• Create and recreate structure for yourself. Structure really helps because it reduces decision-making, which is taxing. So keep evolving new structures to your day or your life as things change.

If you are interested in learning more about resilience and adaptability, we are running 4 three-hour live virtual development workshops on the subject. You can also access a video interview of two psychologists talking about resilience both generally and at work.

Other Resources

Sarah Lewis is the owner and principal psychologist of Appreciating Change. She is author of ‘Positive Psychology in Business’ ‘Positive Psychology at Work’ and ‘Positive Psychology and Change’ both published by Wiley. She is also the lead author of 'Appreciative Inquiry for Change Management'.

APPRECIATING CHANGE CAN HELP

Appreciating Change is skilled and experienced at supporting leaders in working in this challenging, exciting and productive way with their organisations. Find out more by looking at how we help with Leadership, Culture change and with employee Engagement.

For further information on these alternative approaches to change, please contact us or phone 07973 782 715. A selection of strength card packs are available from our online store.

If you want to know more about implementing approaches and processes that positively affect people’s happiness, engagement, motivation, morale, productivity and work relationships, see Sarah’s positive psychology books.

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