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You’re bound to face crises, confront adversity and run into obstacles. But rather than let trouble destroy your confidence, learn to be resilient in the face of crisis and you’ll come out stronger.
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Adversity is a given, says Doug Holladay, professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business and Washington, D.C.-based founder of PathNorth, which helps business owners and leaders reach goals.
“I tell our students, ‘You’re the best and the brightest, but you’re either in trouble, coming out of trouble or going into trouble.’ It’s the reality of life,” Holladay said.
That makes the ability to bounce back a key to success. “The reason resilience is important is because it’s the antidote to trouble,” Holladay said. He compared resilience to a buoy in the water as seas get rough. Waves might wash over the buoy but it always pops up.
“With resilience, you know those storms are going to come, but (that’s) what’s going to enable you to rise.”
Prepare To Be Resilient
To handle crises, leaders have to be ready before they happen, says Lynn Wooten, president of Simmons University in Boston and co-author of “The Prepared Leader.”
The pandemic is a good example. It hadn’t happened in a hundred years. But that doesn’t mean leaders couldn’t be ready.
Wooten and her co-author, Erika James, dean of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, describe five phases of a crisis. Early warning signals are the start. Preparation and prevention, damage control, and recovery come next. The last one is key: learn and reflect.
“Investing time in a post-crisis review can often lead to a future state that is even better than the precrisis status quo,” they wrote.
Wooten figures she and James improved by being resilient through the pandemic. “We had to learn skill sets we never had,” she said, such as leading students and faculty online rather than in person, keeping facilities safe and planning the return to campus.
“I feel much more prepared for how to handle the next health crisis,” she said. “It might have a different flavor, but at least now I have the foundation.”
Be Resilient To Improve
Look at resilience as a springboard, Wooten says. “It’s not only bouncing back but using it to get better,” she said.
The grocery industry got through the pandemic that way, she says. It improved its delivery capabilities because that’s how people suddenly wanted their groceries. Post-crisis improvement was vital for supermarkets because demand for those services remained high as things returned to normal.
If you can be resilient through a crisis, it’ll make you stronger, Wooten says.
“You develop a leadership muscle, a mental muscle,” she said. “You handle one crisis well, and you’re intentional about what you learned from it. That makes you resilient. And for the next crisis, developing those competencies is so important.”
Stay Positive
To be resilient, you have to believe you can get out of any situation. “When hope dies, game over,” Holladay said.
Perspective helps. Someone might be suffering but they can think of how bad things are in Ukraine. If everyone packed their troubles and problems in a suitcase, most people might not trade theirs. “We’d probably pick ours up and take it home,” he said.
Realize you’ll eventually move beyond the setback, and the problems you feared might not even occur.
“This too will pass,” Holladay said. “President Reagan once said, ‘All of the things I worried about, usually none of them ever happened.’ “
Appreciate the value of struggles. Focus on how you’ll improve when you work your way through it.
“Instead of resisting pain or setbacks, embrace them,” Holladay said. “It will make you deeper and better. Things that hurt us make us battle-tested because we’re not living in fear.”
Remember with most hurdles you face, others have faced similar problems. “We are as a human race a community of strugglers,” Holladay said.
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