In my book What Color Is Your Sky?, I introduce the concept of living on the green curve, a resilient, focused, proactive way of living your life. Learning and perfecting specific life skills and attitudes can be a game-changer. In particular, I encourage you to act and feel purposeful on a daily basis.
This implies that, over time, you learn from hardship and persist. How can you suffer real setbacks and not falter? During these times of anxiety and deep change, what helps people ultimately bounce back? Find out how resilience at work can literally save lives.
“More than education, more than experience, more than training, a person’s level of resilience will determine who succeeds and who fails. That’s true in the cancer ward, it’s true in the Olympics, and it’s true in the boardroom.” — Dean Becker, president, and CEO of Adaptive Learning Systems.
Resilience can be learned. I recently read an excellent article from Harvard Business Review: “How Resilience Works,” by Diane Coutu, director of client communications at Banyan Family Business Advisors, headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which introduces 3 characteristics that may reinforce this:
• Face and accept reality: Resilient people have down-to-earth views that matter for survival. Pushing for a sense of possibility is powerful, but for longer or bigger challenges, a grounded sense of reality is far more important. Ask yourself: “Do I truly understand—and accept—the reality of my situation? Does my organization?”
• Search for meaning: Reframing your situation and seeking a deeper meaning to what is happening can mean the difference between giving up and hanging in there, believing in a better-constructed future. The reference book on this matter is Viktor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning. I encourage you to spend time clarifying your personal purpose and that of your company’s.
• Become a bricoleur: Keep bouncing back by doing the most with what you have. You may need to improvise solutions from thin air. This calls for agility, positivity, and enthusiasm.