Resilience Beats Stress

One thing every businessman understands is that building a business is an emotional roller coaster ride. Sometimes you encounter great things like you just landed a new deal, one day you may think your business is going bankrupt. In this highly competitive world, you need to develop resilience skills to survive. You need be mentally tough to accept certain difficulties and focus on solution. With Corona Virus, disturbing supply chains, the need of resilience has become more than ever. It’s so important to find solutions in this epidemic. To further understand the importance of resilience at workplace, this work looks at the benefits of resilience and how it can be achieved.

Stress level seems to be increasing around the world. “A survey of over 100,000 employees across Asia, Europe, Africa, North America, and South America found that employee depression, stress and anxiety accounted for 82.6% of all emotional health cases in Employee Assistance Programs in 2014, up from 55.2% in 2012.”(Fernandez, 3). In this world where you have to meet deadlines, its imperative that you develop mindfulness and self-efficacy. While it is important to understand where your stress is coming from, it is also important to understand whether its healthy stress or crippling stress. Healthy stress, which leads us to work even harder, motivates us to reach our highest potential Whereas the bad stress could lead to chronic diseases. Bad stress, also known as distress affects our personal and professional lives.

We should start managing our stress in workplaces at the earliest and shouldn’t wait for worse situations. The good news is that resilience can be developed. Resilience could be developed through social support, behaviors etc. If you weren’t born with resilience, you can train yourself to bounce back stronger. Here’s how:

1. Exercise Mindfulness – it is a powerful tool to support resilience. In a day-to-day pressure, it is important to take time to reflect and act accordingly. Practicing mindfulness leads to less stress and more employee productivity. There are many books and apps, which helps in developing positivity. Nowadays Companies are trying to instill mindfulness practices as much as they can. Mindfulness programs can lead to better productivity, less stress, and also helps in raising awareness.
2. Compartmentalize your cognitive load – Compartmentalizing is allotting different slots to different things. Separating your professional life from personal life is integral to success. You need to work smarter in high-pressure situations. If we don’t separate our lives, they will keep imposing on each other.
3. Take detachment breaks – to be more creative, you need to step away from whatever you are doing. You need to take a break even if it is for 20 minutes. “Evidence for this approach can be seen in the work of Anders Ericsson, who found that virtuoso violin players had clearly demarked practice times lasting no more than 90 minutes, followed by breaks in between.”(Fernandez, 5). Taking a break from your current work would give you more mental clarity, and will boost your resilience.
4. Develop mental agility – Developing mental agility means stepping away from work and thinking neutrally. This would lead to better decisions and would improve our resilience.
5. Cultivate Compassion – through being empathetic. Putting myself in their shoes would help you make better judgments. Compassionate people have so many inter personal and psychological benefits. By developing compassion towards others, crisis situations can he handled together and then they are easier to resolve.
6. Developing a growth mindset – it’s very important that we develop a growth mindset. People with fixed mindset are not ready for change. They are adamant on believing that they have fixed qualities and that they cannot be changed.

People with growth mindset believe that they change through experiences and practice. We keep switching from one to another. They are keen on making themselves better.in every step of the way. This is a quality that is linked to our ability of developing resilience. If you ever have a setback at workplace, don’t consider it as a permanent failure but get back and learn from the setback.

1. Developing Emotional Intelligence- Developing empathy makes you realize what the other person is going through and thus helps you makes decisions. There are countless studies that have proven that empathy increases productivity, happiness at work. Lack of empathy could damage your team productivity.
2. Remote employees should not work in isolation. It’s important to get them in team so that they don’t feel cut off and thus keep them involved. We should start creating more opportunities for them to interact with the team.

One of the biggest problems in situations like corona virus is the risk of workforce loneliness. Geographical lockdown, like in large parts of china, Korea can have a significant impact. This is where mental toughness comes in. People who learn to work under pressure adapt and overcome certain difficulties. To be a successful entrepreneur, you need to understand your difficulties and where they are coming from and find a solution. You have to think about problems rationally and act upon them.

With growth mindset and resilience, one will look at mistakes as learning opportunities and will understand how we can make it better whereas fixed mindset considers failure as devastating. So if somebody fails to deliver a project, they will take it heart and give up. Growth mindset helps you develop curiosity. It’s important to have confidence in your abilities, which makes you more resilient In nature. Having the confidence and the skills is important to achieve new heights.

We should create a stress management plan to counter high pressure situations. In high stress environment, people tend to react in a particular way. It is important to work smarter. One way to do more is by actually doing less. Thus having resilience skills and growth mindset are very important to survive in this world. It makes you stronger and also leads in higher productivity. Don’t assume your managers are going to magically be able to handle these situations in the way you want, and it’s important to come out of these situations. Without resilience, you wouldn’t be able to come out of situations, which will create a bad work environment and thus will lead to lesser productivity of employees.