Resilience

My kids find it entertaining that I am so focused on building their resilience skills. They see me reading books about ways to help your children to be more resilient. Why resilience Mum? Why not creativity or leadership or the many other skills which might be useful?

I am not sure when and where I gained my obsession with resilience.  I think I started to realise that resilience was important when I entered the workforce aged 20 or so and ‘ready to change the world’. I found that my colleagues were not interested in my many ideas to change their working world and to improve how things are done. So over time I started to see that my skills in resilience needed to be built up or I would rapidly lose motivation completely! 

I am not sure about you, but I do still wonder if we are providing enough training on resilience in our schools and universities. It is fantastic that we equip our students with the knowledge and confidence to go out and ‘change the world’ in their own way but are we also preparing them enough for the inevitable ‘knockbacks’ as they try to find their own way to improve how things are done in the work environment?

Many colleagues I have worked with comment on my ‘persistent approach’ which I guess is my ‘brand’ of resilience. I have decided to adopt the approach of keeping going and taking each challenge one step at a time and I try to encourage my teams to do the same. I wonder every person needs to find their own personal recipe for resilience in the workplace. Another debate is of course the role of the organisation if any in supporting employees and building their skills in this area…….but that is a topic for another day…