Burnout Prevention: Resilience

Covid19 hit us all abruptly. When faced with sudden changes or difficult situations, everyone reacts in an individual way depending on their resilience. But what is #Resilience? Resilience is the capacity to recover quickly or bounce back into shape as soon as possible from such a situation.

Nanna Rüster, senior executive coach for ‚leadership in transformation‘ and partner at Upgrade an organizational development consultant team, guided us through the topic of resilience by taking a different #Perspective and encouraging participants to share feelings as well as experiences on the subject interactively. Attendees state ranged from “energized”, “relaxed” over “roller coaster”, “unbalanced” and “stress”.

Several practical tips have been shared on how to navigate through the next coming weeks after the seven essential dimensions of resilience have been introduced.

1. be optimistic
2. accept the crisis
3. Orientate towards the solution
4. Leave the role of victim
5. Take responsibility for your own life
6. Build new networks
7. Plan and shape the future

The key for everything is to create your own #Strategy. A short excurse to the four personality types and the Maslow’s pyramid showed how people are triggered differently and hence behave differently in a crisis. #Personality, your own experiences, and needs should be considered to find your own way.

To define their own new strategy participants were then asked to elaborate on questions like

• “In what kind of condition, you want to reach the end of the year?”,
• “What will your friends and colleagues say about you when they look back?”
• “What do you have to do to have a particularly good celebration at the end of the year?”.

Simple tricks can be implemented to build up energy while working on four major fields for resilience – Mind – Body – Soul – Heart. Some of them will be shared here as well.

#Mind

Start with your mind. Step back and look at yourself, observe how you are thinking and talking about the situation as well as yourself. Identify where you need more energy.

• Start journaling
• Write about your current feelings and the situation
• Change your attitude while moving it away in your language
• Reframe your language and your thinking
• Create a new reality for yourself
• Focus on positive aspects

#Heart

Heart stands for what is feeding you and when do you feel emotional alive.

• Make an altar and collect symbols for losses, failures, and unrealizable plans for this year
• Grieve passionately
• Build another altar with symbols to look forward to
• Analyze your contacts and give them an energy index
• Give and take with empathy

#Body

Allow sleep, food, sun, love, and exercise for your body and trust your body. Exercise for instance like:

• Sit up right with feet on the ground
• Feel your breathing
• Feel your gravity
• Use your space
• Knock or drum your body

#Soul

Soul can be everything and is very special as well as personal. Look for things that make you feel alive. Find your own way. Everything is part of being resilient or alive like:

• Feel your senses
• Cook a dish
• Watch movies
• Get on a swing
• Read a book

Key take away

• Shape your own strategy in sync with your personality along mind, heart, body, and soul
• MIND – observe yourself from a distance and create a new reality
• HEART – check for energy sources and collect items to grieve and look forward to  
• BODY – balance food, sun, movement, love and sleep carefully
• SOUL – find fulfilling events and activities and enjoy

 

Christine Koch net4tec
Munich Support