How to Be More Resilient and Reach Your Goals
We all have to endure stressful moments throughout our lives. At times, stress can feel debilitating and keep us from achieving our goals.
However, there isn’t a more satisfying feeling than overcoming a difficult situation obtaining personal and/or professional success. Resilience is the most important trait for those who reach their goals.
I recently spoke to Dr. Sven Hansen, Founder of The Resilience Institute, which caused me to reflect on the moments where I needed to show resilience in order reach a goal. After our conversation, I had an even better understanding of what it means to be resilient. The takeaways are especially beneficial to those who are new to entrepreneurship.
Understanding Resilience
Being able to preserve and adapt are important qualities of accomplished entrepreneurs, along with being key components of resilient individuals.
“We define resilience as the learned ability to demonstrate bounce, courage, connection, and creativity,” Dr. Hansen conveyed. “Resilient people are calm, energized, engaged, focused, and creative,” he continued. With the world currently undergoing a number of paradigm shifts, technological advances, economic instability, and with the emerging of cryptocurrency, it is vital for business professionals to prepare for operating in a fluctuating environment.
Dr. Hansen said, “The current reality is turbulence or VUCA. Our data shows high levels of distress in 45%, hyper-vigilance in 50%, and worry in 55% of our clients. Stress is reported to be the highest in 10 years,” meaning entrepreneurs and goal seekers are not being as productive, due to building stress levels. Resilience and stress management are strategic tools for those who want to achieve their goals.
There is a belief that states one can develop and grow their resilience by training at the edge of their comfort zone. Dr. Hansen conveyed that practicing learnable skills such as personal insight, emotional literacy and attention control will help us become more aware of ourselves and those around us.
Entrepreneurs who become in tune with their emotions, facial movements, and how their biology influences the mind will be able to effectively build resilience. This level of self-awareness will help business professionals manage stress, remain productive in their work, and increase their efficiency.
Resilience & Success
Productivity
According to Dr. Hansen, it is the key to success. “Productivity is a leading concern of governments, organizations, and economists. It is how we utilize our resources to create value.”
He expounded by making the following points on how we can be more productive by using resilience skills. He feels that we can all learn:
- How to bounce back from adversity.
- How to prevent resilience failure.
- How to build the sources of resilience into life.
- How to join the heroic and radical.
When speaking to him about the points, Dr. Hansen was able to give great insight to how this could help entrepreneurs achieve their goals. Bouncing back from adversity and staying cognizant of our resilience training allows us to remain productive and produce more value.
Successful and productive individuals will use the foundations of resilience in their everyday personal and professional lives. Whether one is challenged with something as simple as choosing a breakfast destination or is challenged with meeting a crucial deadline, using resilience skills will minimize our negative response to stress.
Inside Stress
Awareness
According to Hansen, stress is not a useful way of describing a range of conditions that impact our performance. It is far more productive to define what kind of stress one is experiencing so that we can address it skillfully.
For example, instead of immediately diagnosing a condition as stress, look deeper into the situation. Individuals can feel overwhelmed, disengaged, and even disinterested with a task they must complete. These feelings could be the result of physical distress or depression, being able to apply true insight into a situation is half of the resilience challenge.
On the upper end of the resilience spiral are what Hansen describes as resilience assets. These skills enable individuals to fulfill their potential and be heroic.
“Heroism is built into our DNA. We are prepared to die for those we love and sometimes those we don’t. Radical refers to the cultural mutations we are able to provoke: populating the world, farming wilderness, language, war, transport, globalization, and so on. Today we sit at a frothy edge where many of these radical mutations are finding ways to co-exist simultaneously,” Hansen detailed when asked to explain what he meant by being heroic and radical.
Resilience Leads To Motivation
A lot to take in, right?
That’s precisely the point, building resilience and being cognizant of stress levels is not an easy task. However, it will become second nature over time. Individuals new to the business world will be able to utilize mental training in order to boost their productivity, limit stress, and make their goals easier to obtain.
Human beings are resilient by nature. Those who are able to harness learnable skills and become further resilient will give themselves an advantage over the competition.
Influencive- Walter Yeates