How resilient are you?

- Hollywood does a great job in showing us protagonists who overcome tough situations, face challenges and always make it though. Think of a movie that was a feel good one for you. "Forest Gump," "Slumdog Millionaire," "Remember the Titans" or better a movie like "Invictus," a sports drama describing the events around the 1995 Rugby World Cup and part of Nelson Mandela's amazing story as an anti-apartheid activist. All of them take you through an emotional rollercoaster but the end is usually a positive outcome. Stressful situations can be emotionally draining and when you are resilient, you learn to weather them and become stronger as a result. You need to build your resilience skills so that you are prepared to face tough situations at work and in your personal life. You may have started this course because your job requires you to be more resilient or maybe you know that you will be facing more adversity in the future and you want to be prepared. Regardless of your motivation, the first step to any type of process improvement is assessing your situation. Let's talk about where your resilience skills stand today. To help you identify your own resilience level, let's look at two components, one is stress and the other is coping skills. Think about it this way. You're bound to have days at work that range from a low to a high level of stress and throughout your life, you've had to develop coping skills to help you deal with the stress, be it low or high. When stress is low and coping skills are also low, not much us happening. You just might not experience much or may not even be engaged enough to notice that you're not using your coping skills to deal with a minor event. But if the level of stress increases, and your coping skills are poor, you will likely experience a rise in anxiety and lose confidence, a combination of unpleasant thoughts and feelings you definitely will be aware of. On the other hand, when your level of stress is low and your coping skills are also honed, you're in a situation where you have a sort of behavioral reserve, a safe place where you're feeling strong and ready to face even greater adversity. The ultimate level of resilience we want to achieve in this course is developing coping skills that are effective even in situations where stress and uncertainty are also high. In the meantime, we can just be in the holding zone. The strategies we develop in this course will aim to raise your resilience threshold from where you were to a higher level of coping under stress. In the exercise files, I've listed a few questions for you to identify where you are right now in terms of resilience and the experience of stress at work or outside the workplace. Use them to place your current state on this graph and then together we will create an action plan to help you raise your resilience threshold.