As leaders, it’s important that we’re able to nurture resilience into the fabric of our organization so we can withstand whatever challenges that come our way.
According to Dr. Taryn Marie Stejskal, the Chief Resilience Officer at Resilience Leadership Institute, resilience is not something you find. Instead, resilience finds you.
Resilience is the essence of what it means to be human. It isn’t something you find or get. It is already ingrained in the fabric of humanity made up of our shared human experiences defined by challenge, change, and complexity.
The Essence of Resilience
- Resilience is not binary, where either you have it or not. It’s also not something outside of you that you need to find.
- Hard and difficult things happen to good people. And even though you didn’t choose the circumstance, try to see the good in it. See how it has changed you and shone the light on something in your life that has now been enhanced.
- Figure out how to take that experience and transmute it into something positive and share a positive message with the world.
The Five Practices of Highly Resilient People
- Vulnerability – allowing our inside cells, our thoughts or feelings, and our experience to as closely as possible match the outside self.
- Productive perseverance – knowing when to maintain a mission or a goal in the face of a challenge.
- Connection – It’s the connection to ourselves and how we navigate that connection, as well as the inflection of that connection with others.
- Grati-osity – being able to find gratitude in the challenge that we face and the audacity to share those resilient stories generously with others.
- Possibility – focusing on progress over perfection and navigating the relationship between risk and opportunity in the context of that practice
From a leadership standpoint, resilient leadership is all about how we bring those five practices of resilience.
If you want to learn more about resilient leadership, check out https://alexatwood.co/podcast/episode033