Resilience in the workplace, not only focuses on the ability to bounce back after adversity, but also on the ability to regulate emotions during times of stress. We often spend our work days battling challenging scenarios; preparing for an important meeting, heavy workloads or meeting tight deadlines. This means that regularly, we have to draw on our personal strengths and resources in our environment, to ensure that potential struggles are not interfering with our capability to work and our workplace satisfaction.
Building strong resilience can help you to find more joy, both personally and professionally, by teaching your mind to better evaluate and recover from stressful situations, rather than evaluate them differently. Often, employers use resilience-building interventions to get people to ‘tough it out’ when actually stress is the underlying problem and these workshops are not helping individuals to overcome the impact stress has on their lives. This is why it is imperative to our wellbeing to introduce strong resilience into our day-to-day existence, that can be used in and outside of the workplace to promote good mental health.
Here are some top tips from our psychologists at PsycApps to assist with building well-rounded resilience:
Emotional Regulation
Strong emotions are an essential part of the human experience and are healthy despite feeling uncomfortable or painful at times. Emotional regulation is simply the ability we have to manage our emotions. Healthy emotional regulation is about not struggling with emotions we might experience and not letting ourselves be overcome or overwhelmed by them, like an outburst. For those struggling with emotional regulation, helping to get some perspective and distance from our emotions can be useful, which can come through self-reflective and introspection techniques that tools such as mindfulness, or Acceptance and Commitment therapy encourage.
Building a Support Network
As humans, we are social creatures who often crave the company of others, especially in times of weakness or stress. As Maslow himself pointed out in his hierarchy of needs*, love and belonging are crucial steps in gaining self-actualisation, thus, becoming more motivated individuals when needs such as love and belonging are met. Is there someone or a group of people in your life who you find yourself turning to for support in your happiest and most difficult times? Did you know that having a close, trusting support network can help you build well-rounded resilience? Is there a location, comfort food or music that brings you reassurance and calm?
Whether you seek aid from a person, a place, or something that makes you feel comfort, that feeling of physical or emotional support can make stressful situations easier to manage.
*Maslow's Hierarchy of needs pyramid, 1943
Goal Setting
Setting goals isn’t just for your 9-5. Introducing personal goals, no matter how big or small, will help you stay focused and give you control over situations. These goals could vary between going to the gym 3 times per week or setting emotional goals such as not letting a bad day at work affect your out-of-hours life. People get to where they want to be in life through having some kind of plan of action in place, rather than generally hoping something will somehow happen. Because of this, goal setting helps us to think about the smaller steps that will get us to where we want to be.
Resilience Training Programme
At PsycApps, we specialise in building resilience and offer a six-step training programme that is curated by psychologists for anybody in any profession looking to improve their ability to cope with challenging personal or professional situations. If you would like to learn more about implementing the Resilience Training Programme in your workplace, contact our team today.