Work, like life, is usually two steps forward and one step back. Your ability to handle the one step back periods is what will define a lot of your success. To get through the setbacks, you’ll need resilience.
Resilience, or the ability to bounce back from setbacks, can be comprised of the following 8 qualities identified by Frederic Flach, MD in his book, “Resilience: How to Bounce Back When the Going Gets Tough” :
- A sense of hope .
- The ability to tolerate painful emotions.
- Seeing other perspectives.
- Having a support system.
- Belief that you control your own destiny.
- A good self-image and self-respect.
- Self-reflection and insight.
- A sense of humour and lots of interests.
Of these eight qualities, seven of them take a long time to develop but there is one that is easy to put in practice right away. That is perspective. Being able to see things from multiple perspectives will make you see that what you are going through isn’t all that bad.
Try this at work:
The next time you have a setback at work and find that you are feeling sorry for yourself then try seeing your situation from another perspective.
- First, take your bosses perspective. Chances are that your setback is not all that material to your boss and perhaps it shouldn’t be material to you either.
- Instead of looking at what went wrong, look at what might have also gone right in that situation, however small.
- Look at all the other things that are going right in other situations.
- Look at what you can learn from the setback.
- Finally look at what happened in relation to your whole life. Is the setback all that important?