Resilience – or about how people and enterprises stand back up again

(The stand-up-guy as a promo article by sense2)

Resilience. What does that mean? If you look it up online you’ll find things like: “Resilience (from Latin resilire, “to jump back” or “to bounce”) or mental resilience is the ability to cope with crises and to use them as an opportunity for development by falling back on personal and social resources. Related to resilience are the development of health (salutogenesis), hardiness, coping and self-preservation (autopoiesis). The opposite of resilience is vulnerability.”

Setbacks

So resilience is about dealing with setbacks and continuing in a different way. That is what the reference to “further development” stands for. But, does anything that doesn’t knock us down actually make us stronger, as the well-known saying will have us believe?

Often resilience is seen in the context of health management. In fact, setbacks or strokes of fate can have a strong effect on the psyche and even lead to physical suffering. People who are not greatly affected in such cases are often referred to as resilient. But resilience is much more than that.

Positive Resilience

I would like to take a positive view of resilience. It’s a little like the half empty and half full glass. Either resilience is described as the ability to deal with the negative, or to see the positive in everything. However, this does not mean that you should always walk around with a smile on your face when you have a setback and pretend that everything is hunky dory. Rather, it means that in the event of unexpected and perhaps also unpleasant events, you ask yourself whether and what might be good about them. Coaches like to use such a questioning technique and are thus often able to open up a whole new world to their clients, which is often referred to as an “extreme perspective”.

What are the effects of such an approach? In private live such an experience usually brings new insights into one’s own personality and values. It crystallizes out what’s really important. And that in turn helps to determine one’s further direction.

This also works in professional life – for example in companies that were close to the abyss, but then managed to prevail despite adverse circumstances. These companies benefit from such an existential experience: values are more consciously recognized and lived, friend and foe are better recognized, and experience flows into entrepreneurial decisions. And it is also true for companies that the knowledge gained remains internalized over the long term.

Company Resilience

The resilience of a company is thus reflected in its ability to see the best in every situation and to deal with it positively. You can also try this for your own company:

• You’ve lost a market? Why don’t you focus on the existing, well-functioning markets? In this way you can recognize what made them so stable and transfer the knowledge gained to new, similarly functioning markets.
• Can’t find new employees? Then analyse the skills of existing employees to find out which untapped skills they might have. Many companies already find competences they are desperately looking for in their own ranks through such an approach. And when you then check which competences are actually missing and which are to be acquired from the outside, the search is more precise and often not as difficult as you might have thought.

Are you looking for a positive sparring partner to strengthen your resilience? I am there for you!