Now I know that there are many of you out there that have perfect lives and have never had anything bad happen to you or faced any type of adversity. For those of you that this applies to you can stop reading right here and go on enjoying your perfect, easy lives. But since I know that is not true for anyone I’ll keep writing. We all know that nobody has a perfect life and that everyone has dealt with some form of adversity. It can be small events that throw a wrench in our plans for the day or it could be a major life altering event. Either way we have to deal with it.Some people deal with it better than others. For some, that small event that doesn’t go right can completely crush them. For others, major things can happen to them but they still stay positive and keep moving forward. Why is that? One word. Resilience! What is resilience? In a nutshell, it’s the ability to push through the adversity that we experience every day and come out on the other side still smiling.
So why is it that some appear to have more resilience then others? This has been a question for a long time that psychologists have investigated. They often look to traumatic events that people have survived and asked the question why? Those events included survival situations of a lost or stranded person or prisoners of war or even survivors of the Holocaust.These are the types of events that no human being should have to endure, yet it happens and people have made it through it. When asked how they survived these horrific ordeals there was a common reoccurring theme and that was faith and hope. The people had faith or hope in something. It didn’t necessarily have to be religious. Prisoners of war had faith or hope that they would escape or be released. Lost or stranded persons had faith and hope that their family was looking for them or that they would be rescued. I recently heard a story about the Holocaust that at one concentration camp many prisoners had faith and hope that they would be rescued on Christmas day in 1944. They ended up not be rescued that day and many lost hope and laid down and died a short while later. That just shows that faith and hope are a very powerful thing.
Hopefully none of us have to be in an extreme survival situation but we still face adversity and need to be resilient in our everyday life. As you can see we need to develop faith and hope in something or someone and that will carry us through that event. That can be a very personal thing so I would encourage you to take some time and discover the thing that can carry you through the trials of life and help you to increase your resiliency.
Now as leaders we also need to be resilient because leadership can be a hard thing and sometimes you might need to carry your team through a tough situation. Your team can also be looking to you as part of their faith and hope so you need to be there for them and show that resiliency and hope. I feel that this is where emotional intelligence comes into resiliency and leadership. If you have used your emotional intelligence you will have built those good relationships with your team and also have developed that set of emotional and social skills that will help you and your team make positive decisions, cope with challenges and improve productivity and therefore be able to come out on the other side still smiling. So the challenge is, find what makes you resilient and then find what makes your team resilient and you will be able to overcome whatever life’s challenges may throw at you.