5 Signs You Need to Improve Your Resilience During Covid-19

Hello, I got up early this morning again to write an article for a managementsite in The Netherlands and to review a number of businessplans of students from the minor entrepreneurship here in The Hague in The Netherlands. Boys and girls including milennials that want to start their own company, even now during this Covid-19 crisis. So I help them as much as I can.

Yesterday evening, my wife and I had a long conversation an myself about how we both coped with adversity in our lives and how many of our colleagues and friends are coping during this Covid-19 crisis. It's just not easy..... It throws us at back as individual to our 'why', our mission in life, don't you think?

Anyway, resilience plays an important role in all those things I guesss. All personally and professionally successful people are resilient in some shape or form or else they would have never overcome failure or adversity in their lives otherwise. Perhaps you think of yourself as resilient, and in many ways, you could be correct. But are you, really?

5 Signs On The Wall

If you find that the following ‘signs on the wall’ fit you, then maybe your resilience can be or even should be improved upon to survive and thrive during this covid-19 crisis. Here are the top five signs that mean you need to improve your resilience and change.

1. You are afraid of failure. Failure is a natural part of success. You may fail several times before you succeed in something, it may even be necessary before succeeding, both in your personal as in your professional life.

Being able to face your failures, to face adversity, is a part of being resilient. If you let all your unsuccessful attempts keep you down, then you may never try again. Being afraid of failure may be a sign that your resilience is not as strong as you think.

2. You let negative thoughts keep you down. Resilience is a sign of mental fortitude; that you can get through any challenge without pervasive thoughts discouraging you from trying.

Negative thoughts also impact your mental health and can lower your perception of self-worth.

If you find that negativity is a constant theme within your head, then maybe you need to improve your ability to think positively. Positive thinking is a tenet of resilience and can help you find success. Or get professional help. I have had a personal coach for many years and she really helped me to fight negative thoughts and stay positive.

More: ‘7 Tips To Achieve A Positive Mindset During This Crisis’ & ‘3 Signs You Need To Pivot Your Life Now’

3. You don’t learn from your mistakes. Personal growth, personal development, is an important factor in resilience. Improving our skills and abilities for learning will eventually lead us to success. How can you ever grow as a person if you keep making the same mistakes over and over and do not learn from them?

By looking at your mistakes through an objective lens without placing blame, you can improve yourself and grow. Don’t pretend your mistakes never happened, because then you cannot avoid them the next time.

I also receommend you to learn from the mistakes other people make that you feel related to by the way....that saves a lot of time, energy and pain.....

4. You lack confidence. Resilient people are confident in their abilities, even if they aren’t successful on the first try. Confidence gives you the willpower to try new and intimidating things. If you’re too afraid to try and keep on trying, you will never succeed.

5. You don’t take responsibility for your failure. Its easy to place blame on outside factors and other people that you have no control over. You won’t always have power over everything, especially not in a crisis like this one, so you have to take every situation for what it is and try to make the best of it.

By acknowledging what you can control and change personally and what is out of your control, you take agency in your life. Acknowledge if something didn’t go right because of something you did, don’t always blame others for your mistakes. I speak with a lot of entrepreneurs that are complaining about the fact that the Government does not give them enough financial support. Whereas many other entrepreneurs take action and pivot their businessmodel, their revenue model and actually.....their whole life!

So resilience is really important because it gives us the power to overcome challenges and adversity working at home during a lockdown for instance, when somebody we love dearly gets seriously ill or even passes away or when we have to flee our own homecountry for one reason or another.

Without it, we will never learn how to cope with adversity in a better way again, which means we will never succeed in our private lives and in our professional lives, including during a pandemic like this one with Covid-19.

We will keep on expecting other people including our Governments to solve our problems. If you find that some of these signs describe you, then you may need to take steps to improve your resilience.

But as the 25 people I interviewed for my latest book in Dutch (here) and who shared their personal background stories, their challenges and their sometimes dramatic personal lifevents show, demonstrated time and time again: we as human beings can do a lot of things……if we act and don't feel sorry for ourselves too long, that is.

Well that was it for this for today. I hope that helps? If you have any question or request, please do not hesitate to connect with me on LinkedIn.

Kind regards,

Tony de Bree

Dr. Tony de Bree EEP MBA is a born survivor. He has extensive experience as management consultant, program manager and strategy and change advisor. In 2011 he left the corporate world and now lives a happy life personally and professionally as independent on demand hybrid entrepreneur.

Since the beginning of the Covid-19 crisis Tony went into 'survival mode' himself and now focuses on his personal 'why' and that is helping executives, young people, corporates, startups, scale-ups & SMEs to survive and thrive by using a simple 5-step model to change their current business model and their current evenue model into new sustainable hybrid one with a 'Lean & Mean' virtual organisation. With practical on demand hybrid advice, training & coaching and with 'how-to- books' in Dutch like these and in English like this one.