2 Essentials For Building Resilience

While you’ve been whipping up lunch at your home, did you catch yourself wondering how long the lockdown will last and what will come out at the other end? While you’ve been investing time in learning new skills, has there been a nagging thought at the back of your mind that you might lose your job or your clients? If yes, you are not alone.

This isn’t the first time the humanity has survived something, and this sure won’t be the last. While the Spanish Flu and the world wars seem something from a different lifetime, think about the recent disasters we survived: The Great Recession, the wildfires, and the tsunamis. There’s a reason we aren’t extinct yet, and that reason is resilience. Human beings are by nature resilient. If you are alive, you are resilient. Period.

What then is resilience? Resilience is the ability to bounce back from an adverse experience. The current pandemic has left us unanchored and thrown us amidst confusion and uncertainty. We don’t know how long it’ll take us to find a cure, how long the lockdown will last, or how big and lasting an impact it will leave on our economy. This is a universal adversity we are experiencing. 

If there ever was a time when resilience was a key leadership trait, it’s now. A leadership trait not just at work but also in other aspects of our lives like family and community. For individuals, communities, and organizations across the world this one factor would play a key role in determining how well they survive. 

Lately, there has been some research on what goes into building resilience in teams and individuals. Some of the prominent thinkers and writers in this field are Martin Seligman, Daniel Goleman, Adam Grant, and Diane Cuoto. One of the key insights I understand from their work, is that resilience can be built in children, adults, teams, organisations, and communities, thankfully! As Adam Grant says, it is not something that we have in finite amounts but is more like a muscle that can be built over time with practice, again thankfully! 

Here are the two characteristics that set resilient individuals and teams apart:

1)     THEY FIND MEANING

Research says, one of the building blocks of resilience is the ability to find meaning in adversity. If your response to adversity is to throw your hands up in the air saying “Hey! I cannot do anything about it,” you could benefit from a little soul searching and finding meaning to keep you going.

Viktor Frankl, a holocaust survivor, in his book Man’s Search for Meaning writes that his life in Auschwitz concentration camp turned around the moment he asked himself the question, what is my purpose in life other than perhaps trading cigarettes with soup every day? His experiences and answers not just helped him survive the holocaust but share them with the world in the form of a book. He founded logotherapy which postulates that “human beings are motivated by something called a will to meaning.” 

Thus, the most resilient people and teams are the ones that can find meaning during a crisis. In my work as a coach, I have found that one way to find meaning is go back to your values. When adversity hits, individuals and organisations must ask themselves

“What does honouring my values during this time look like?”

I have been coaching Reena (name changed) for over a year now. Reena works as a teacher trainer. Our first few conversations centred around unearthing what she values the most in her work. We discovered that some of the things she valued are enabling people, taking on challenges, and continuous learning. When Covid hit, schools were shut down, and Reena could not spend any time in classroom. She somehow got through the first week, but then slowly started getting restless and desperate. She started doubting herself and her energy levels dropped because she did not think this would end anytime soon. Everything she valued and enjoyed about her work looked like a distant dream. In our recent coaching conversation, the question I asked her was

 “In this moment, what is the challenge you are being called to take on?”

Since Reena loves enabling people, was there a way to do that other than being physically present in a classroom? It hit her like a bolt! She came up with the idea of creating an e-mmersive learning series and turned things around. Like Reena, deep down, all of us know what we value. We simply need to reconnect with them. While Reena’s solution looks pretty simple and obvious at face value, it takes time and courage (a lot of it!) to accept and make changes and move ahead. In my experience as a coach, I have observed that connecting with your values never fails to act as a catalyst.

Here are two questions you could answer to find what you value:

1. Imagine you have a billboard to yourself for a week, and you could put any message out there. What would you put? Why?
2. What makes you angry about this world? Why?

 2) BEING RESOURCEFUL

The second characteristic of resilient teams and individuals is that they improvise and make do with whatever is at hand. Building resourcefulness in a team is a process. You start before the adversity strikes to build this muscle. The culture of a resilient team is such that the members are encouraged to take risks and be inventive. Resilient teams push each other to focus on what’s available and what’s possible instead of dwelling on what’s not.

At Co.labx we practise the +1 mindset. Simply put, the +1 mindset entails putting out the first version or a prototype swiftly into the world, followed by doing rapid iteration to only one element in every subsequent version. It means bettering just one thing that will maximize impact in the next iteration. The +1 mindset ensures that you don’t get overwhelmed and stuck; it ensures you keep moving.

Here’s an example of how we used the +1 mindset. At Co.labx, the first thing we asked ourselves was “what are we being called to do during this pandemic?” We understood that what we do really well is hold spaces to facilitate meaningful conversations. Once we realised our strength, we put out the idea of ‘The Open Field’ into the world in week 2. The Open Field is a weekly virtual space for people to understand the Covid situation and how they can respond to it. From week 3 onwards, we made a +1 change every week; some of the things we have tweaked so far are how we choose our speakers, the format of the space, and how we share the learnings from this space.

We are proud to have organized 6 Open Fields so far and have hosted about 500 participants from 6 countries. Thus, Finding Meaning and the +1 mindset at Co.labx is our expression of resilience during this crisis.  What is yours? 

Saahil is an executive & leadership coach. He is deeply passionate about maximising human potential. Through his work at Co.labx and TheSangha, he works with individuals who want to grow and with teams that want to create powerful learning spaces. Saahil uses mindfulness and different coaching practices in his work. He is also a long-distance running enthusiast! He can be reached at [email protected]

Special Thanks to Visalam for editing this article. Visalam is a freelance writer and editor who loves playing with words and elevating written content. She can be reached at [email protected].