How to Cultivate Resilience in Your Work Life
We live in a world where change is constant, crisis is familiar, and stress is at an all-time high. Building resilience is often cited as key to navigating this time successfully, but what does this idea mean for leaders?
Resilience is “the ability of people or things to recover quickly from something unpleasant.” Entrepreneurs and leaders need to build resilience within themselves, their teams, and organizations to manage change and achieve their mission. “Entrepreneurs are like elite athletes,” says Bonnie Coberly, Senior Advisor at JumpScale. “They need recovery practices to perform at their best. If they don’t see rest as critical to their job, they will burn out.”
Fortunately, Bonnie and the JumpScale team have collected a few simple tips to help cultivate resilience in yourself and your workplace:
Take Breaks to Detach from the Workday
Rest is a critical ingredient of resilience, and to be most effective, individuals should build moments of rest into their daily lives. Rest is essential at work–the Harvard Business Review even published an article that stating “balancing work activity with even a brief time for detaching from those activities can promote greater energy, mental clarity, creativity and focus, ultimately growing our capacity for resilience throughout the course of the workday.” To take full advantage of these breaks, we recommend you spend them away from your physical workspace. Take a walk around your block or simply spend a few minutes in a different room to clear your mind most effectively.
Bring Mindfulness Practices into Team Meetings
At JumpScale, we start each of our team meetings with a short breathing exercise or moment of shared gratitude. This practice sets a positive tone for the gathering, invites participants to ground themselves so they can contribute openly, and enables the meeting facilitator to get a sense of people’s available energy and time so they can manage the meeting effectively. To learn more about how you can integrate mindfulness into your workplace, read about our favorite 4 Mindfulness Practices to Transform Team Meetings.
Encourage Learning in a Mission-Driven Environment
People are happier at work and better at their jobs when they can be curious, learn, and contribute to something greater than themselves. To achieve this, Fast Company recommends that leaders ensure employees know how their job contributes to the organization’s mission. Mission alignment leads to individuals who deeply understand their roles, impact on the business, and opportunities for improvement. In addition, managers enable employees to define additional tools or skills they might need to become more effective and support them in pursuing educational and training opportunities.
Building resilience is challenging but essential, and JumpScale excels at building workplace resilience practices for our clients. Schedule time with Daniel to help create and foster resilience plans for your organization.
We hope these tips make beginning resiliency practices more straightforward and approachable. Make sure to check our blog regularly for more guidance around resilience, organizational wellbeing, and more.