Resilience, the ‘marmite’ of health and wellbeing
Since opening the doors at Welfy, our workplace wellbeing training consultancy three years ago, we have had a tumultuous relationship with the word ‘resilience’. Initially, the rhetoric around resilience made it seem as though businesses felt it was their right to ‘test’ the resilience of employees. Resilience is a resource owned by employees that employers can deplete over time. Some would pass the test, others would fail. Rarely was there talk of resilience training or the role a culture could play in building and protecting the resilience of their people.
Language around resilience seemed quite combative. Almost weaponised. Who has resilience, who doesn’t? Who has the most? And if you don’t have enough you are found lacking, inadequate, ill equipped for the workplace.
More recently, the narrative is shifting. Resilience training is emerging with a more constructive focus on what individuals can do to strengthen their resilience. Businesses are actively seeking workplace wellbeing and leadership training providers who include resilience training within their repertoire of toolkits for employees.
And it’s about time. The concept that there are people who just ARE more resilient and others who are less so, is fundamentally flawed.
Some clients we speak to frame all of their workplace wellbeing conversations around resilience. Others never mention it, preferring to use words like engaged, productive or just ‘well’. But love it or hate it, it’s here to stay. Perhaps it has just been misunderstood?
Reframing resilience
If we accept the definition of resilience as ‘the ability to manage adversity’, then what is there to misunderstand?
We believe resilience is earned not owned. There are no ‘haves’ or ‘have nots’. This unlocks a powerful reframe of resilience.
Everybody’s resilience capacity is different and importantly, it fluctuates over time. There are many variables influencing your resilience at any given time. Your overall health, your age, your lifestage, your exposure to external stressors and for women, we now know that even the phases within your 28 day cycle can significantly impact your resilience capacity.
Imagine a piggy bank. Or any bank for that matter. You pay in, you build your bank balance. You make a withdrawal, you deplete your balance. This is exactly how our resilience works. You can make deposits into your resilience bank via healthy habits and positive choices. Then a life event or a particularly stressful deadline, relationship, restructure etc comes along at work and you have to make a withdrawal to allow you to manage and overcome that situation.
If there’s nothing in the bank, you don’t have the resilience reserves you need, you will be vulnerable to overwhelm, burnout and potentially ill mental and physical health as a result of that period of stress and adversity.
There is not ‘work resilience’ and ‘life resilience’, there is just one bank account. It’s important to consider this when balancing those two areas of your life. If you have something stressful going on at work and you don’t have healthy resilience reserves, it will impact your life outside of work and vice versa.
The most positive feature of this reframe of resilience is that it empowers you. If you are struggling, you are not someone with naturally weak resilience. You have just used up your reserves and you can take agency over rebuilding them. It moves the locus of control to become internal. We know from the world of psychology that this can be an immensely important tool to insulate us from feeling powerless and to enable us to take action to protect ourselves.
Making deposits into your resilience bank
Sold? Then, how do we build our resilience bank balance? In our resilience training and leadership training, we teach the art of making deposits into your resilience bank with daily healthy habits.
The secret is to ensure that your healthy habits are tiny, they are regular and they are consistent. In our workplace wellbeing training series we teach the Welfy habit formula which is a unique way to codify behaviour design and create sustainable healthy habits. The first and arguably most important part of the formula, is to keep your healthy habits tiny. Tiny habits remove the barriers and risks from starting something new, they are safe and practical, they are easy and rewarding. This cocktail enables you to keep the habits alive, even on tough days.
Think about which area of your health and wellbeing you want to address first. What impacts your resilience the most? What causes the most pain and friction in your life. Is it diet and nutrition related? Is it movement and exercise related? Is it related to rest, breaks and sleep? Or maybe you struggle to recharge and find space for mindfulness.
Now consider the tiniest iteration of a new habit that you could introduce. Perhaps it’s eating one healthy snack per day. Perhaps you want to move your body for 5 minutes, or stand up for one meeting per day. Perhaps you want to spend 5 minutes you would have spent scrolling on your phone taking a break outside instead. Maybe you could bring forward your sleep by 5 minutes. Whatever you want to prioritise, keep it bitesize. Your tiny habit has the scope to evolve and grow to become transformative in your life.
5 ways to ‘earn’ your resilience
1. Internalise the locus of control
No longer do we have to be the victim of our capacity for resilience or lack thereof. We can take control. We have agency over our ability to earn and build our resilience. To protect ourselves from the slings and arrows of life. Because challenge is inevitable. Our reaction to those challenges and how we prepare ourselves for them, is something we can influence. Think of your resilience as a resource that constantly ebbs and flows. It is a bank we can pay into and out of. The key is to make sure we are paying in when we feel good because we don’t know when we may next need to pay out. Life has a habit of surprising us with bereavement, ill health, relationship troubles, work stress, redundancy etc when we least expect it. Unless we have been in control and topping up our bank balance, we may find there is not enough in the tank to overcome the adversity that’s thrown our way and that is when we experience overwhelm, burnout and often mental or physical ill health as a result.
2. Make daily deposits
Pay into your resilience bank with health and wellbeing habits every day. This is the key to keeping your resilience topped up for those times when you need to draw down on it to manage challenging periods in your home or work life. The definition of healthy habits can be broad. It may be having a healthy breakfast every day. It may be taking a lunch break away from your desk. It may be a 5 minute walk each day. It may be turning the TV off 15 minutes early and prioritising good sleep. Take time to reflect on what has the most impact on your life. For you, it may be quality sleep, or movement or good nutrition. Whatever it is, start there and build your daily habits around this goal. Remember our mantra is to keep it Tiny. The evidence behind this secret from the world of behavioural psychology is really powerful. Keeping your daily habits tiny removes the barriers, keeps them simple and easy even on a hard day and it drives reward. Every time we are able to celebrate successfully upholding our healthy habit, we are actually rewiring our brain and making it easier and easier to be consistent.
3. Make time to recharge
Just as we use the metaphor of a piggy bank for our resilience training, many use a battery. Our energy is finite and we need to top it up just as we would charge a battery on a phone. We use a unique 4Ps model at Welfy to support people to practise what recharges their health and wellbeing. They are; People, Passions, Places, Pausing. Consider what, within these four categories, could you be doing more of to re energise and restore yourself. Which are the relationships in your life that nourish you most and how could you prioritise them? Which hobbies give you most joy, or opportunity for ‘mastery’ – identified by best selling author Dan Pink to be one of our key motivators. If you don’t have any, what could you introduce? Where are the places in your life that are special? Perhaps they are nostalgic, perhaps when you leave them, you always feel restored. Or maybe your home needs some work in order to become your haven in a busy life. Finally, remember the importance of pausing. For some this is a daily meditation or mindfulness practise, but for you, it may just be a few moments of deep breathing while the kettle boils. Or pausing to take in the beauty of a blue sky next time you step outside for a walk. Whatever pausing looks like for you, be conscious to weave it into your days.
4. Set healthy boundaries
A big part of our workplace wellbeing training at Welfy is to teach people where and how to set healthy boundaries and how to uphold them in a consistent and constructive way. A lack of boundaries or an inability or reluctance to uphold boundaries, is a quick way to erode resilience. I love the quote, “If you don’t look after your time, someone else well.” Protect your time fiercely and use it wisely. If you want to be consistent in making daily deposits into your resilience bank so that it is topped up when you need to make a withdrawal to deal with the challenges of life, you need to allow time to keep up your daily healthy habits. This is only possible if you set healthy boundaries around your time, availability and energy. To learn more, check out our recent article ‘How to create and uphold boundaries at work’.
5. Identify your ‘Big Rocks’
What you may need to focus on to protect and build your resilience won’t be the same as it is for anyone else. Stephen Covey’s ‘Big Rocks’ theory helps us to reflect on what’s truly important to us and to prioritise that. Is it family time? Exercise? Sleep? What about Dan Pink’s model of the three most important motivators or psychological needs? Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose. Consider whether you need purpose at work? Increasingly we are seeing differences in how the different generations find purpose through their work and what their psychological needs and motivators are. Your purpose may relate to sustainability. Or equality. But whatever it is that motivates you or is a non negotiable for you, if you don’t find a way to incorporate it into your daily life at work and at home, it will impact your resilience.
“Resilience: the art of caring for the right things.” Maxime Lagacé
