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Top Ten Tips for Building Resilience - Keep Calm and Carry On

by Frances King, Executive Coach, the Executive Coaching Consultancy Want to improve your resilience levels? Read our top 10 practical tips for staying calm and carrying on

Resilience is the ability - either innate or learned - to bounce back from, or adapt to, stress. Stress runs the gamut from simply being busy and leading full lives, to experiencing agitation or anger, through to trauma or loss. It is an integral part of life. It can also be a powerful force for good in certain doses, driving imagination, creativity and productivity. However, we can all look back at times in our lives when our ability to cope with stress was diminished for one reason or another. When that sudden extra critical deadline tipped the situation from one of being in control and coping, to being out of control and desperate for help. When a piece of bad news throws us completely.

Resilience manifests itself in many different ways. It is an ability to recover quickly, to retake the initiative, to look for positives in difficult situations, to remain calm, to find solutions to problems, to put right what you can and to stop worrying about what you can’t influence.

Want to improve your resilience levels? Read our top 10 practical tips for staying calm and carrying on:

  1. Build your own support network – beyond your family and friends, being part of a tightly-knit group of colleagues, for example, where you feel valued is an important source of mutual advice and support.
  2. Know when to seek help – resilient people know when to reach out to others- and we often find that they may have experienced similar situations.
  3. Stay positive -– you can’t always stop stressful situations occurring, but you can change your attitude towards them. Concentrate on the things you can influence and not on the things you can’t. Visualise success and focus on what you do want to happen instead.
  4. Boost your self-esteem – remind yourself of your successes, and your strengths, and what your colleagues and friends value about you.
  5. Deal with conflict early on – spotting potential problems or conflicts at an early stage and actively and effectively addressing them helps to prevent even more stressful situations arising at a later date.
  6. Reframe the situation – this is a very useful technique to assist in stepping back from a situation and look at it in a more positive way to help you regain a sense of control. Ask yourself what would be a more positive way of looking at this situation? How would someone you really admire deal with this? What’s working well? What learning points from other situations could be applied here?
  7. Reprioritise – how has the current situation altered your immediate and longer term goals? Be clear about what needs to happen now. What can be delegated? What can left to be dealt with later on?
  8. Take action – feeling powerless increases stress. Retaking the initiative and acting, even if initially in small ways, is a potent way of regaining momentum and helping us to move forward.
  9. Learn, adapt and improvise – learning both from mistakes and successes is fundamental to building resilience. Review, and if necessary, revise and adapt the approaches that you take. Would additional training or skill-development help in future? Taking an objective look at how you have approached a stressful situation is not always an easy or comfortable thing to do, but it is here that working with a mentor or coach can be a great assistance.

    10. And finally, don’t forget to

  10. Look after yourself – take the time to nurture yourself, to sleep well, to exercise and to eat well. This can be all too easily overlooked in the course of busy lives. Yet failing to pay attention to these basic needs can quickly undermine all other resilience techniques.

November 2011 Newsletter Articles - quicklinks

Posted on: 26.10.2011