Welcome to the Stop Sabotaging Your Success Podcast, episode forty-two. I’m your host, Cindy Esliger. This is the podcast focusing on what we can do today to take control of our careers and overcome the inevitable barriers to success that we encounter along the way. 

Resilience gives us the power to overcome setbacks so we can live the life we’ve always imagined. Resilient people don’t dwell on their failures, but rather they acknowledge the situation, learn from their mistakes, and then move forward. This is a learned behavior. 

In this episode, we’ll cover four ways you can build your workplace resilience. It starts with noticing, learning from, and managing your own behaviors more effectively. Everything is easier to handle when we’re consistently getting enough sleep and exercising regularly. This can help us see our inevitable challenges as learning opportunities. It also requires that we learn to manage stress because this isn’t going away anytime soon. It also requires that we maintain perspective in how we tend to rationalize our setbacks to ourselves. 

We can develop a resilient mindset where we don’t let negative thoughts derail our efforts. It’s easy to get caught up in the busyness of life. Sometimes, it takes all you’ve got just to put one foot in front of the other to get through the day, the week, the month, even the year. We find ourselves living for the weekend, for the summer, and for the next vacation. Wouldn’t it be amazing to be living a life that you don’t need to take a vacation from? 

Stop, take a moment to look around you. Notice where you are and what else is out there that might be worth pursuing. Look at your life as a whole. Then look at the different aspects of your work life in particular. We’re looking for opportunities, for areas of possibility. 

It’s time to prioritize your own mental health and take the steps necessary to enhance and maintain it as a daily practice. This could have extraordinary impact on our lives and on society at large. Start treating it like brushing your teeth, just something that you do every single day. 

Take steps to becoming emotionally resilient. When you’re able to confront life’s hardships with strength and resolve, and recover rapidly and completely, then you just might enjoy greater happiness and life satisfaction. 

Commit to doing something that matters to you, not just the idea of it, but really doing it. Be realistic that things will not always be rosy. It’s important to acknowledge the difficulties that may arise. If it were easy, you’d already be doing it, and lots more people would too. There are things that you’re going to have to face. 

There’s a reason you haven’t been doing it already. Identify those things that are keeping you from actually doing this thing that you want to do. What’s keeping you from showing up and staying committed? Identify the difficulty. You may feel like you’re lacking the willpower necessary because doing something feels harder than making a choice to do something. It tends to be hardest right before you start. So getting started is half the battle. 

The act of doing something can be very intimidating, so take a step back, and make the choice to do something, and then actually do it. It’s three simple steps. Think about doing it. Make a choice to do it. And then actually do it. Don’t overthink. You’ll rationalize yourself out of doing it. Knowing that the anticipated difficulties won’t blindside you and derail your actions because you’ll already know what’s bound to happen and you’ll be prepared to experience it, so it doesn’t keep you from continuing to move forward.

Resilience is actually a term taken from engineering. In material science, resilience is the ability of a material to absorb energy when it is deformed elastically and release that energy upon unloading. Pressure or stress is put on a material and it actually goes back to its original form, once that stress is lifted. That’s why we talk about resilient individuals as ones who bounce back. If it’s resilient, it goes back to its original form. 

With anti-fragility, a system can increase its capacity to thrive as a result of stressors. If it’s anti-fragile, it actually grows bigger, stronger, and better as a result of that stress. It’s similar to our muscles when we lift weights. As a result of the stress of working out, we actually grow stronger and healthier. 

Life is not about avoiding the falls, it’s about picking yourself up faster and moving on. We need to build the resilience to overcome challenges or we risk letting our failures derail our ambitions and our dreams. What could we accomplish if we had the strength not to give up? It’s time to build our resiliency, to focus on developing our ability to adapt and bounce back when things don’t go as planned.

There are four ways that you can build your workplace resilience: 

1. strengthen your foundation
2. seeing challenges as opportunities
3. mastering stress
4. maintaining perspective

So the first way is to strengthen your foundation. Resilience is the ability to bounce back when things don’t go as planned. The stronger you feel physically and emotionally, the easier it will be for you to overcome challenges, and possibly even see those challenges as opportunities. It’s about managing your emotional reactivity. 

Our health supporting habits, how we eat, sleep, and move our bodies, fall by the wayside when things get stressful. So it’s about starting where you are, with what you have, and focusing on these health boosting habits. Big life stressors can completely deplete our capacity for even the smallest of challenges. Then we layer onto that our own thoughts, habits, and beliefs. These include all the unique ways we have to beat ourselves up. 

Generally, we are not our own best allies. We tend to give up our time and energy to everyone else and forgo our own needs for sleep, nourishment, and regeneration. We can be very unkind to ourselves and then we’re less able to handle the challenges that happen in the work environment, finding ourselves more irritable and reactive, and feeling less connected. 

We need to make building resilience a priority and commit to energy renewal, which requires a shift in how we think about energy. It’s time to prioritize energy management and explore how we currently enhance and deplete our own energy. 

The second way to build workplace resilience is seeing challenges as opportunities. When things aren’t going smoothly or when something is broken, there’s an opportunity for improvement. And when things are going along just fine and nothing is dramatically wrong, we can head down a slippery slope from comfort, to routine, to getting stuck in a rut where we’re not working to our full potential. And this may require a change in outlook to face challenges intentionally. 

Sometimes, we can begin feeling adrift because our sense of purpose has been derailed in uncertain times. This loss of direction can have a profound impact. Our priorities may have shifted or they may no longer be valid. You’ll be better able to adapt if you can find solutions to these short term or daily challenges that we can’t get away from, in order to create meaning amidst the uncertainty. 

Having a sense of purpose provides an internal compass, which can be a powerful motivator to sustain you, especially during uncertain times when it’s common to be facing an excess of challenges. Your typical day has always included putting out fires is my guess. And while this can be satisfying, it’s also draining. Reframe these as opportunities for learning, improving, and optimizing processes. 

The third way to build workplace resilience is mastering stress. We are all juggling an ever increasing amount of complex, high priorities at work, while some of us are also managing the demands of family life. Stressors can start to add up, while the sense of fulfillment can easily diminish, along with the energy for the usual challenges and responsibilities of life. It can knock us off balance, especially when we’re already running on empty. 

The extreme work environments we face have eroded any sense of work-life balance. And our usual stress management tools may not be available to us. So sometimes, we need to get creative and focus on new strategies. As stress increases, the markers of health decrease. 

Connection is also a key factor in building resilience at work. But only focusing on our management of time and stressors is misguided. We’ll be better able to sustain optimal performance if we focus on how we manage our energy as well.

Some people seem to thrive, regardless of the pressures, while others burn out. When our energy output exceeds our energy input, we can become chronically exhausted, which commonly leads to impatience and reactivity at work. While many of us require the energy for the second shift of home and family life, often we’re too exhausted to enjoy our downtime when we have it. And then we’re choosing non-restorative activities like binge-watching entire seasons of our favorite shows.

While it may seem counterintuitive, we can sometimes rejuvenate by adding activities we enjoy to an already full schedule. Try it. You might see immediate results, if you can muster the energy to do it. 

And finally, the fourth way to build workplace resilience is maintaining perspective. Stop taking any failure, however insignificant, as a sign that we aren’t as smart or talented as we originally thought. Perfectionism holds us back from trying anything outside of our comfort zone. 

Take a step back and try to see the bigger picture. This may help avoiding getting bogged down in the minutiae of daily stressors, and it can be critical in a crisis. I invite you to give yourself permission to be human. Have compassion for yourself. Painful emotions are part of the human experience. When you suppress, avoid, or push away painful emotions, they intensify, growing stronger, more dominant, and more pervasive. Try embracing and actively accepting painful emotions by talking about them or writing about what you’re feeling in a journal. Sometimes we just need a place where we can let go and be ourselves. 

The way we explain setbacks to ourselves is also important. It’s helpful when we can see the effects of bad events as temporary rather than permanent. When we don’t let setbacks or bad events affect other unrelated areas of our lives. And when we don’t blame ourselves when bad events occur, because we can see how other people or circumstances may also have contributed to what happened. 

Resilient people share four common attributes: 

• having a positive outlook
• setting goals with a desire to achieve them
• being empathetic and compassionate (not wasting time worrying what other people think and also not bowing to peer pressure)
• never thinking of themselves as victims (by focusing their time and energy on changing the things that they do have control over)

How we view adversity and stress strongly affects our ability to succeed. Having a resilient mindset is so important. We are going to fail from time to time. It’s an inevitable part of living. We make mistakes and occasionally fall on our faces. The only way to avoid this is to live a meager existence, never trying anything new, or taking any risks. 

It takes courage to go after our dreams. There’s a very real risk that we’ll fail in some way or another. Being resilient is important so that when we do fail, we can bounce back, and have the strength to learn the lessons that we need to learn, so that we can move on to the bigger and better things that await us.

Resilience can be learned. It’s about being adaptable and being able to roll with it, getting back up when we’re knocked down, over and over again. Do the people you surround yourself with show resilience? When something doesn’t go their way, do they adapt? 

For me, giving up isn’t an option, so sometimes I need to find a way to make it work. I recognize that sometimes quitting is the easier route, but from what I’ve seen, the ones who keep on going are the ones who ultimately succeed. 

Sometimes things will fall to pieces, but that doesn’t mean everything has fallen apart. 

And that’s it for this episode of Stop Sabotaging Your Success. Remember to download your Guide to Building Your Resilience at cindyesliger.com/podcast, episode forty-two.

Thank you to our producer, Alex Hochhausen and everyone at Astronomic Audio. Get in touch, I’m on Instagram @cindyesliger and my email address is info@cindyesliger.com. And if you liked the show, please tell a friend. Subscribe, rate, and review. 

Until next week, I’m Cindy Esliger. Thanks for joining me.