Building Resilience in 2023

By now you are probably well on your way to testing your New Year’s resolutions. The realities of the new year may just about be hitting you right now. And fear not, this article is one of great positivity.

In your leadership life, you are probably aiming for more engagement, less stress and likely also more connection and meaning to your role and maybe even for more joy in your life. These are the items most listed as 2023 personal goals in surveys. If like me, these also appear in your own list, then we are in good company. But how do we get some of our wishes?

If you are aiming for a stress-free year and planning to avoid any challenges in 2023, then you are almost certainly living in an unrealistic dream. Sorry to be so blunt, but such a leadership position does not exist. A good start to meeting your personal expectations for 2023 is to have managed to get some quality downtime during the end-of-year break. One of my colleagues put it best when they said that their tired got tired towards the end of 2022.

If that describes you, then you would have found that you first had to work on the tiredness of your tiredness before you had any chance of working on being tired. If you found that your rest period contained a wild rollercoaster ride of dipping between being extremely fatigued, frenetic bouts of guilt for not being at work and getting your strategy in place while facing serious energy dips at odd times of your day. That was your tired trying to sort out its tired!

Uncertainty and a few challenges are almost certainly going to find you this year. It is in your Leadership 2023 manual on page 1. Using these challenges to grow and have a good 2023 is essential. It will take resilience. And I am sure that it is your resilience that helped you secure a leadership position in the first place. You must find the fuel for your resilience in 2023. It is resilience that will allow you to bend during the stresses and challenges of 2023, but not break.

Here are some pointers on how I believe you can build resilience:

1. Make your connections more meaningful in 2023.

This year you are going to need new skills in connecting with people. The new normal is no longer normal. Up and down your leadership chain, insist that anyone you connect with, add more meaning to your mission. Don’t accept presenteeism and mediocrity but bring and expect meaning as a journey to greater success.

2. Embrace the challenges that are going to test you in 2023.

Avoiding challenges is not a good strategy. Instead, learn from them. They are going to find you, so you might at least turn them into opportunities. And if that is too optimistic for you, it is likely that you are going to miss a few golden opportunities this year.

3. Make your 2023 actions count for more than simply your leadership role.

As a leader, you have substantial power and influence. Use your power with ever-increasing wisdom and use your influence to ease some of the grief and loss we individually and collectively experienced since 2020.

Whether you believe 2023 is going to be a good or bad year, you are correct. Let resilience be your goal and good luck for the year ahead!