It’s easy to talk about building resilience when we have time to recover from adversity and difficulty. We can process what happened, build a plan for recovery and look for opportunities to do better the next time.
What do you do, however when things don’t go so well in the middle of the day. No one expects their day to be perfect and finding that you lose an important contract, forget to submit a report to your boss, or hear that one of your key employees is taking a job with a competitor can send even the most resilient person into a tail spin.
Here are 5 strategies you can use to win over these kinds of daily events.
- Give yourself 15 minutes to pout, complain, whine, blame others, or cry. It is okay to grieve your loss, but you don’t want to live there. Not need to linger in that negative place.
- Talk it over with someone else who is a strong supporter. Your perspective may be distorted and getting a second opinion from someone else who is not as close to the event can provide an invaluable point of view.
- Use something to help yourself make an emotional shift. It may be listening to and singing along with your favorite song, looking at pictures of your kids playing on the beach during your last holiday or doing a 5-minute meditation.
- Reframe the situation to see the silver lining. That employee who left…hey if they don’t want to work for you, you probably do not want them around.
- Speed to action or urgency is essential when dealing with stressful situations in real time. Tailspins are dangerous and you want to bank out of them as gracefully and quickly as you can.
© Richard Citrin, All rights reserved, 2016
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