Workplace Resilience: Can you hack it?

In today’s fast-paced workplace, emotional resilience is essential for navigating challenges and fostering personal growth. Let’s explore key strategies to cultivate emotional resilience and thrive in any professional setting.

1. Don’t measure your success by comparison.

Learn from others but avoid comparisons. Measure growth by how much you have grown. Compete with yourself. Performance benchmarks are fine, but personal landmarks are proof of growth and development.

2. When upset, don’t let your emotions show.

In the heat of the moment, don’t expose your emotions. There exists an inverse relationship between high emotions and rationality.

3. Practice mini solitude breaks to emotionally re-center.

Create space to be alone. Mini breaks of 5 minutes help to switch off from the external noise and silence the internal cacophony. These breaks help to identify the trigger, to call out the emotion, and importantly, to decipher the right response.

4. Have someone with whom you can have honest conversations.

Too often, individuals take extreme positions when it comes to workplace relationships. They either have no relationships and choose to be to themselves or have a large group. There is a problem with both positions. In the former, they tend to bottle up emotions, and in the latter, the large group nature facilitates superficial, not deep relationships. This again is restrictive when it comes to sharing one’s emotions and feelings. Hence having one or two mutually trustworthy relationships matters.

5. Seek feedback neither from cheerleaders nor critics but from coaches.

Seek feedback for self-improvement and not for self-approval. Adam Grant hits the nail on the head when he says seek feedback neither from ‘critics’ whose intent is to break you down nor ‘cheerleaders’ whose intent is only to be nice to you but from ‘coaches’ whose intent is to advise you to get better. Who are the ‘coaches’ in your workplace? Seek them out and use their feedback to get better.

Seek feedback neither from ‘critics’ whose intent is to break you down nor ‘cheerleaders’ whose intent is only to be nice to you but from ‘coaches’ whose intent is to advise you to get better. – Adam Grant

6. Hard times don’t last forever; learn the lessons but don’t drop anchor.

Emotional resilience requires recognizing the reality that “hard times” are part of life. Secondly, “hard times” won’t last forever. Embrace the lessons that the difficult season teaches but don’t drop anchor. You cannot move forward if you are stuck with hurt, complaints, and a victim’s mindset.

Incorporating these strategies into your daily routine will not only enhance your emotional resilience but also empower you to thrive amidst the ever-changing dynamics of the workplace.

Remember, resilience is not about avoiding challenges, but about facing them head-on and emerging stronger than before.