“You (they) just need to be more resilient.”
This is a criticism that I’ve heard re-emerging over the last few years when someone isn’t coping with circumstances. I have to say that to me, it really shows the character of the person uttering the words and I’m not being complimentary here.
I remember when I first heard those words. It was a period where work efforts had surged over an extended time and the workforce was being told, “This is the new normal” and “You’re just going to have to be more resilient”. I called BS then and I call it now.
Resilience is an ability to ‘bounce’ back and recover from setbacks.
When you invoke a surge state, time and again, in the face of changing circumstances and work tempo with no opportunity for reprieve and then call it the ‘new normal’, you push your workforce into burnout. It’s that easy and that complex, all in one.
There are obviously different levels of resilience. I’ll add, resilience differs at different times for different people. Not everyone experiencing the same challenge will respond the same way. As an analogy, I’ll use exercise and flexibility to illustrate my point.
To gain flexibility, you must challenge your existing condition. Think of trying to bend over and touch your toes. To increase your flexibility, you:
- Bend over as far as you can (stresses the hamstrings all the way through to your back),
- hold,
- as you take a breath in, you relax the pressure on the hold,
- on the out breath, you try to go further for a moment and hold,
- then relax / rest.
- Repeat.
Now someone who is practising that type of exercise all the time will become really flexible in that direction as they gradually stretch the body structures involved. The body has become resilient to that movement.
But just imagine for a moment someone who hasn’t touched their toes for many years, and they must touch their toes in the next 10 minutes or something terrible will happen (stay with my analogy here). They use all sorts of methods to get their fingers down to touch their toes, but their backs and hamstrings just won’t let them. A helper steps in to physically push and pull at them.
What is the most likely outcome?
The person trying to touch their toes are highly likely to injure themselves and snap something. Right?
When it comes to mental or emotional resilience, building resilience is a similar process to physical resilience:
- A challenge occurs that stresses the mental or emotional capacity of an individual.
- They work through the challenge, trying out different coping mechanisms (some healthier than others…)
- The stress or the challenge finishes and the individual needs rest. The bonus is though that the experience can build a suite of coping mechanisms, allowing the individual to go further / deal with more stress/challenges next time.
It seems quite logical to me that if you push something/someone to almost breaking point, time for rest and re-evaluation is a must. It’s when you push to almost breaking point and hold it there, whatever you are pushing begins to wear, cracks appear and eventually it breaks.
I’m thinking of a rubber band here.
When it is pulled to breaking point and not released, there comes a point where the force pulling its “being” apart exceeds the force holding it together and bam! It snaps.
People are just like that. The key to all the scenarios you can think of, is time away from the challenge or the stress to rest before going further being put under pressure again.
And that is how you build resilience – not telling someone to be more resilient.
A good leader knows that their people need rest after challenging times and allows for that.
A great leader also knows that every person will respond differently and recover at different rates and builds the environment to support that.
