Resilience is a hot topic in business these days!

More than education, more than experience, more than training, a person’s level of resilience will determine who succeeds and who fails.

Many early theories of resilience stressed the role of genetics – some people are just born resilient. There is some truth to that, but an increasing body of contemporary research shows that resilience – whether in children; survivor of concentration camps or business back from the brink – can be learned!

While there are many different resilience theories, almost all of them overlaps in three ways.

Resilient people possess three characteristics in common -

• A staunch acceptance of their Reality. Yes, optimism is necessary, but their optimism is well tested with an understanding of their reality.
• They have a deep belief system that lends to a deep and meaningful pursuit of life.
• They have an uncanny ability to improvise i.e. the ability to make do with whatever is at hand; which the famous anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss called - Bricolage

Individual career development is no longer linear and hierarchical, but multifaceted, unstable, cyclical, and transitional, over the life course.

The need to self-negotiate such terrain has become more pronounced with global economic recessions, cost of living in ‘risk societies’ and the recent experience of the global pandemic.

Executive Coaching and Career Advise can be pivotal in turning points of individuals, as it needs to support and promote both resiliency and career adaptability.

These are not issues confined to a few individuals and countries in the current economic environment, with an ever increasing need to operate with extreme targets, in under-resourced organizations, serving overdemanding and complex customers. Under these circumstances safeguarding against professional burnout requires emotional regulation, in the form of adaptive coping to enhance productive functioning, over a long-term basis, which is often a neglected organization perspective.

Career development experiences of individuals demonstrate varying levels of career adaptability over time. The process of being resilient emerged as a significant factor when faced with a range of barriers such as age, confidence, stressful environmental situations, family demands, organizational inflexibility and financial considerations. Resilience manifested itself in the form of personal attributes such as - tenacious, determined, single-minded, flexible and adaptable.

Most research studies on this topic have showed that for many, poor health, low self-efficacy, lack of employment opportunities in labor markets, changes of personal priorities, and the lack of institutional support, contributed to them ‘giving-up’ on their career aspirations. In contrast, for many others, these barriers were not an issue; suggesting that a strong commitment to an ‘ultimate career goal’, can be strongly resiliency building, if an individual also develops career adaptability over time. Executive Coaching and thoughtful career advice can go a long way in this direction.

“He who looks outside, dreams; he who looks inside, awakes” C.G. Jung

Dictionary definition for self-awareness reads, “Conscious knowledge of one’s own character and feelings.” Succinctly put and if you ask them, most people will assure you that yes, they are self-aware; thank you very much. But if this is the case why do so many people tell you they are dissatisfied and frustrated with aspects of their daily life, and would really love to do or be x, y or z?

The answer probably lies in the fact that self-awareness is an often-used term but perhaps not one that is fully understood.

To be truly self-aware you need to really understand your thoughts, emotions and behaviors and how they affect both you and those around you. This includes understanding what upsets you, what your strengths and weaknesses are and, importantly, how others see you – which can be quite different from what you think they see. Knowing yourself better, allows you to consciously decide what you think, feel and how you act and it is a journey which can last a lifetime.

So how can you build your self-awareness and how does it build Resilience?

• You can become more aware of your deep strengths by introspecting on your belief system and find purpose or cause that you would like to stand for and would like to develop yourself in.
• You could write down a list of your roles, both within your personal and working life, that you have ever taken (and why) and the associated feelings you have had for each one.
• Is to think about different scenarios you have experienced or are likely to experience in life and work and write down your predicted feelings as you would enter into each one.

Another helpful Self-Awareness building effort is to be aware of the deep assumptions you have about yourself, whether they are positive or negative, as our beliefs play a fundamental role in our behavior and predetermines our resiliency for success and failure in situation and tasks.

Building our self-awareness not only helps us to become aware of our emotions and improve our experience of life but, importantly in today’s workplace, it helps us to respond to Change and Career Transitions, successfully!

Relational Awareness draws on both internal and external self-awareness.

It includes a few different things –

• 1. Personal Awareness
• 2. Awareness of the Other
• 3. Awareness of the Impact of Oneself on the Other
• 4. The Effect of the Other on Oneself
• 5. The Quality of Energy and Flow in the Relationship itself

People who have Relational Self-Awareness can name their internal feelings; listen to feedback from their partners, colleagues and bosses and own their part in a relationship problem, to name a few among other relationship skills.

Our capacity to notice, observe, and learn from our own ways of relating to others- not only in hindsight but as we are actually relating to them -dramatically increases our ability to repair disconnections with others and to move into growth-enhancing relationships.

Another important form of Self-Awareness is the awareness of the Systems around us, which helps with Individual Wholeness building. This is all about deepening our awareness of the System that we are a part of and trying to phantom and understand it with the broadest possible perspective and a Whole Human Orientation.

Three tangible benefits from maintaining a Whole-Self, Systems Perspective are –

• People get clearer about what matters most to them. In naming matters, they may uncover internal “saboteurs” that push them to compromise their values in the name of expedience or pragmatism. Maintaining a whole-self perspective helps them keep their vision and values alive in the choices they make and the actions they take.
• Systems-based inquiry help individuals explore whether short-term fixes are diverting them from more sustainable solutions, by asking, “What pattern can you see at work here?” Maintaining a whole-self perspective helps people look for root causes, instead of trying to solve problems at the symptom level.
• Seeing the leverage points i.e. a small change in one area that triggers improvements across other aspects of the system. Maintaining a whole-self perspective helps people discover leverage points for intervening, when they’re stuck or off track in life and professional career.

Self-Awareness of our Relationship and our Systems thus deepens our Self-Reflective ability to inquire about our surroundings and helps us understand better what impact we are making, and in turn, what ways we are being impacted by our Relationships and Systems, thus improving our ability to build a better and wholistic Map of Our Self!