How do resilient workers get to become resilient in the first place? What makes someone adjust and recover from job stresses? Resilient workers owe their resilience to past challenges. How a person copes with challenges builds their resilience for future ones. Every resilient employee should say thank you to their past challenges because they made the person they are today.
Each time an employee faces a challenge on-the-job, she has the opportunity to learn, grow, and change. Psychologists believe that when you successfully navigate a challenge, you build resilience to face another challenge later. Even failure can help build resilience if a lesson is learned from it.
Here are the gifts that past challenges offer to help your personnel build resistance:
- Control
- Plans
- Goals
- Commitment
- Action
- Past Success
- Support System
- Humor
- Patience
Control
Past challenges teach valuable lessons about control. To succeed, one must learn the difference between what an individual can control and what she can’t. When you understand that you control your actions and reactions, you are building the foundation of resilience. Knowing what you can control helps you focus on how to cope with challenges throughout their career and, in fact, life.
Plans
Reaching a goal requires planning. Your team may need to organize their time, workspace, or add to their certifications or education. When faced with a challenge, having a plan allows them to work toward their goals, regardless of distractions. Having a plan helps make your team resilient when new challenges appear.
Goals
People who aren’t resilient allow life to dictate their circumstances. They don’t create goals because they don’t believe they can achieve them. They let challenges overwhelm them instead of having a clear idea of what they want. Goals provide a sense of purpose and a reason to be resilient.
Commitment
Resilience is staying committed to a goal and finding ways to cope with challenges. When you learn to commit to goals, you become more resilient to other challenges they may face. People who aren’t resilient give up when presented with a challenge instead of working toward a resolution.
Action
Overcoming challenges requires action. Each challenge in life pushes you to work to overcome it. As they take action, they learn new and better ways to cope with challenges. Your experience and knowledge make you more resilient with each new challenge they face.
Past Successes
There’s nothing better than reaching a goal that they’ve worked hard to achieve. Their past successes build their self-esteem and confidence, making your staff ready and more resilient for the next challenge. Their past successes also provide a framework for how to cope with other challenges. That helps them to be more resilient, even if the new challenge is unexpected or difficult like COVID-19 has been for all of us.
Support System
To overcome a challenge, an individual team member often needs a strong support system. If the challenge is personal, she may need the support of friends and family. If the challenge is professional, she may need the help of a mentor or coworkers. Building a reliable support system provides endless ‘gifts’ for future challenges. Employees know who to trust and rely on to help them. That succeeds in making workers more resilient, and helping them cope.
Humor
Many people find that humor helps them cope. Especially with thorny problems or situations at work. Instead of struggling with a challenge, they use humor to lessen stress and accept when they fail. Having a good sense of humor provides an outlet for stress and disappointment, making workers more resilient when faced with another challenge.
Patience
Not every goal is simple to achieve. Many goals take time, hard work, and patience. Being able to accept that a reward isn’t immediate helps make workers resilient in the face of delays and disappointments and potential loss of employment. Patience helps them cope and stay committed to the company’s goals even when they face obstacles.
Past challenges, however painful at the time, truly are gifts that help your workforce build resilience. Coping with past challenges provides a wealth of skills that are needed for resilience. They owe their past challenges a thank you!
Need Assistance Hiring Resilient Workers
If you need some assistance in recruiting and hiring more resilient workers in this uncertain labor market, contact Flexicrew Today.