Resilience: 3 ways to refill your tank

How full is your resilience tank these days? Has summer vacation or a slower pace put some much-needed fuel into your tank? ?If not, it’s not too late to do some re-fuelling and to lock in some new habits before the Fall season lurches into high gear again.

?Habit #1: Recognize that self-care isn’t narcissistic. The neuroscience aligns with what flight attendants tell us at the beginning of every flight: you have to put on your own oxygen mask before you help someone else. Even micro-moments each day doing something that feeds us – walking, reading, exercise, time in nature, a hobby – replenish our stores of resilience. When crisis comes, we have reserves in our tank.

?Habit #2: Stay connected. Covid brought about unnatural isolation, and the trauma of that is still fresh in our minds. The late psychologist John Cacioppo did research into what he called “the lethality of loneliness.” His findings? Living with loneliness increases a person’s odds of an early death by 45% -- higher even than living with air pollution, obesity, or excessive alcohol consumption. By pursuing meaningful connections with life-giving people, we can increase our stores of resilience.

?Habit #3: Stay curious even in tough times. Edith Eger, a 96-year-old practicing psychologist, spent a year in concentration camps during the Second World War. In her best-selling memoir, The Choice, she writes powerfully about curiosity as a tool to maintain Resilience: “Life in a concentration camp was an endless selection line where you never knew whether you’d live or die. The only thing that kept a person alive was the acceptance of the reality of one’s existence, and the attempt to respond as best one could.” She talks about the important shift from an attitude of asking “why me?” to an attitude of curiosity, asking: “what’s next?” That curiosity kept her tattered resilience alive and was often all she had to pull herself forward to her next breath, even when, during the final days of the war, she was left for dead in a pile of bodies. When “why me?” comes calling in your mind, what would it look like to practice shifting to “what’s next?”

?Interested in learning more about how to build Resilience into your leadership and life? Join me for the upcoming 6-session Foundations of Leadership Learning Circles where we’ll talk about 6 core leadership topics:

• Building Resilience
• Self-Leadership
• Building Trust
• Managing Conflict
• Adaptive Leadership
• Bold Conversations & Challenging Employees

Early Bird rates are available until Sept. 15. Visit https://www.marlakonrad.com/foundationsofleadership to learn more.

?Marla Konrad is an executive coach, trainer and facilitator based in Ontario, Canada. Her passion is seeing leaders and teams grow in ways that unleash and accelerate their leadership. She is the co-founder of Learning Circles, and trains on key leadership issues such as resilience, communications, emotional intelligence and adaptability in complex times. She is certified to coach and train with EQ-i2.0 (Emotional Intelligence) and the Integrative Enneagram. Visit her at marlakonrad.com.