Too often, we frame resilience as a way to bounce back from a circumstance, such as an event, hardship, or adversity. But we don’t need bad things to happen to us to need resilience. In fact, most of the time, bad things don’t happen. But something changes, and we notice. That’s when we need to create options so we can experiment.
Resilience is much more than a way to bounce back. Instead, real and effective resilience requires that we bounce forward, to free us to make new decisions.
(For those of you who write nonfiction, I didn’t realize my thinking about resilience had changed that much until I sent out my most recent Pragmatic Manager newsletter, Three Tips to Be More Effective: Resilience, Slack, and Faster Feedback Loops. Yes, I often surprise myself with what I learn when I write. Hehe. But I digress.)
If we can reframe resilience as a way to bounce forward, we can rethink how we work and live.
Thinking in “Back” or “Return” Restricts Options
I’ve ranted before about how managers seem to want to “return” to office life before the pandemic. I won’t add those arguments here. The problem is this: “back” or “return” thinking often removes the idea of new options for how to back or return. People tend to restrict their options:
- My senior manager clients want to see people “back” in the office, regardless of the fact the people don’t have enough of the right kinds of meeting rooms to have (dreaded) hybrid meetings. While management thinks things will be the “same,” the teams know nothing will be the same. The teams have different needs when some people are in the office and others are not.
- Some team members want to go “back” to working solo, not collaborating. Since I teach that effective teams use collaboration, not solo work, these folks don’t know how to work except for working alone.
- And we all know people who want to go “back” to their old relationships, or memories.
Even if we want to bounce “back,” we need new options.
Instead, when we bounce forward, we must create new options.
Thinking “Forward” Expands Options and Allows for New Decisions
The more we consider the interplay between adaptability and resilience, as in the attached image, the easier it is for each of us to expand our options. In general, and up to a point, the more options available to us, the better our decisions can be. And especially if we consider each decision as an experiment, the faster we can evaluate that experiment and continue or choose again. (See Three Secrets to Exercise Your Resilience for how I use the Rule of Three to create options.)
In addition, when we experiment, we might have much more flexibility about the outcomes we see. If one decision isn’t working, we can consider the next, and so on.
We might be less stuck in our thinking, which improves our resilience.
That’s the question this week: How can you reframe resilience as bouncing forward to the next decision?