Build Your Resilience

Thanks to our do-more-be-more-have-more culture, resilience is having its moment in the limelight. It makes sense — we need a large dose of it to keep up with the world’s fast-paced demands.

And whilst there’s a lot of noise about what great resilience looks like, there’s not enough attention devoted to how we can build it within ourselves.

This noise has cultivated many distracting myths around resilience:

Myth #1

Some people are “born resilient”.

Sure, some people’s personalities might lend themselves to greater mental resilience than others, but we all have the capacity to increase our mental resilience, whatever our starting point. Some people are born physically stronger than others, but that doesn’t mean they can jump straight into a weight lifting competition with no training. And the strongest in early life will not always be the strongest in later life.

Myth #2

Resilience is increased only by going through hardship.

If this was true, the only way to train for a marathon would be to run one. In fact, there’s plenty of training you can do beforehand to prepare your body and run a better race.

Myth #3

The more hardship you go through, the more resilient you become.

Quite the opposite — without adequate training and preparation, too much hardship simply leads to burnout. Any athlete knows it’s not as simple as “the more hours you put in, the more gold medals you get out”.

Physical strength is earned as a result of repeated training and testing, so why should mental strength be any different?

The difference, perhaps, is that whilst most of us could write ourselves a programme for a weight training bootcamp after a quick google or a consultation with a personal trainer, there’s no such easy equivalent for a “resilience bootcamp.”

Inspired by the tried-and-tested strategies of coaches, psychologists and navy SEALs, here’s a spread of strategies to help you build your own resilience.

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Train The Muscle

Before you encounter situations where you need to put your resilience to the test, train it in everyday moments using the following 3 strategies.

Small Victories

Build strong foundations for resilience by learning to recognise the little wins each day. In Onyedikachukwu Czar’s account of Navy SEAL success strategies he warns that failure to recognise the small steps towards victory “steals confidence”, which eventually stands in the way of our success and our ability to keep going in tougher situations.

Perhaps you’re reading this article on an average and not-so-memorable weekday. When you search for the wins, what sticks in your mind? Maybe you had an enjoyable coffee chat with a colleague or finally cleared your inbox.

Lose the belief that taking a moment to acknowledge those little wins is indulgent or a waste of time and start celebrating them, knowing that this celebration lays the foundations for a more resilient mindset.

Support Network

We often believe being resilient means facing challenges alone. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Athletes are all familiar with the “home advantage”.

A study by Chicago Booth School of Business found that in the National Hockey League, 59% of games are won by home teams. In rugby, it’s 58% and in American Football, it’s 57.6%.

Whilst familiarity with the pitch and a shorter journey are significant advantages, support from the “home crowd” is unbeatable.

Cyclist Chris Hoy said of the London Olympics: “My main hope for 2012 is that I’ll experience what it’s like to win an Olympic gold in front of a home crowd”. It’s no surprise that it was here he set a new world record and became the most decorated British Olympian of all time.

Most of us don’t have the support of the nation behind us. What matters most is the support network we build for ourselves. Taking the time to build it day-to-day before the going gets tough is crucial to building the resilience to see us through tough times.

On the flip-side, resilience is not just a result of feeling well supported, but also of supporting others: “The lives of my teammates…depends on me,” goes the SEAL ethos. If we know people are counting on us, we are more likely to deliver.

Discomfort Immersion

Let’s face it, life today is pretty comfortable for most of us. Yet the smoother our day-to-day lives, the tougher it will be to feel friction when it comes. Injecting any discomfort or friction on a regular basis improves our ability to deal with challenges when they arise, much like increasing our pain threshold.

Whilst most of us need resilience in response to mental challenges rather than physical environment, training does not have to follow the same pattern.

Sitting in an ice bath, for example, stimulates our fight-or-flight response, exposing us to extremes we otherwise don’t experience day-to-day.

XPT Performance Director, PJ, explains that “although the ice-bath is an example of a physical stressor, the effects of training the vagus nerve extend to all fight-or-flight situations.”

Whether it’s an ice bath, a tough workout or a trip to the dentist, exposing ourselves to uncomfortable situations in small doses at regular intervals does wonders for our resilience.

The less stress we expose ourselves to, however, the more stressful the smaller situations become.

Test the Muscle

When moments of adversity come along, put your training to the test and use these three techniques to support you

Full Benefit

Paul Marobella studied the Navy SEALs’ concept of “full benefit”. In a nutshell, this survival strategy helps them “navigate perilous situations and emerge stronger”. It’s the acknowledgement that “every situation holds valuable lessons, no matter how dire” and that “every minor enhancement can make the difference between success and failure.”

In practice, “full benefit” means you’re always looking for what you can learn from a situation and your mindset shifts from victimhood to seeking maximum value. It’s the less fatalistic cousin of “everything happens for a reason”.

Instead of letting fate define the outcome, you’re encouraged to leverage your newfound knowledge to unlock “full benefit” and find your own way out, however tough the circumstances.

Segmenting

Big picture thinking is often hailed as a favourable trait. A team member who helps the others get out of the weeds and clearly sees the direction of travel brings valuable contributions to the table.

But when faced with a daunting task, focusing only the big picture can be overwhelming. People with high levels of resilience are able to break down a task and concentrate only on individual parts, ignoring the whole.

This is a tried-and-tested strategy for marathon runners, who use methods like the 10/10/10, breaking up a race into the first 10 miles, the second 10 miles and the last 10 kilometres. Experts argue that these pacing strategies are the **most important part of the race. Focusing on running the full 26 miles or 42 kilometres is much tougher than focusing on the first 10 miles.

Reset Button

Ever played a sports game where you made a mistake and felt so down about it that the mistakes kept coming?

When things don’t go to plan, there’s a tendency (sometimes conscious, sometimes unconscious) to allow things to slip further.

On a conscious level, if you’re on a strict diet and you have chocolate ice cream for breakfast, you might say “well, I’ve messed up now, what do I have to lose?”

On a subconscious level, you might find yourself so focused on the initial mistake “I can’t believe I sent that email to the wrong person!” that other minor errors slip past you more easily than usual.

This is where all humans need a reset button. It might be a simple tap on the arm or a more elaborate routine, but whatever it is, it signals your mind and body to refocus and make a fresh start.

Like training a dog, repeating this behaviour after every mistake begins to wire your body to do so on autopilot.

The Operator’s Association for Special Forces recommends accompanying the reset with three internal questions:

• What went wrong?

• How can I fix it?

• What’s important now?

This brings your mind back to the present, ready to take on fresh challenges.

Building resilience is hard work in itself. There’s still only a small subset of the population who take a deliberate approach to training and testing in order to improve it. What if we flipped the script of resilience from admiring it as a badge of honour to training it like a muscle and reaping the benefits every day?

For more on resilience, read my article on the two types of resilience in the workplace — the squeeze ball and the bowling ball.

Love to live life on the edge? Take a chance on one of the buttons below.