Practice Resilience To Manage Your Stress

But, what does “advancing despite adversity” mean on a more detailed level? What groups of behaviours, skills and beliefs contribute to resilience? What can we actually measure resilience against? To answer these questions, we investigated many existing models of resilience and combined them with neurological models to better explain resilience…

We are complex beings. Therefore, it makes sense that there are a great many different factors that contribute to resilience including: beliefs we hold of the world, of ourselves and others; information we have access to; biases, skills, and education; mental processes and behaviours.
To make sense of all of these, it’s useful to group related components into 6 domains.

THE 6 DOMAINS OF RESILIENCE:
(Adapted from JURIE ROSSOUW, CEO of DRIVEN)

1. VISION
   The most important of the 6 domains. Having vision is about your sense of purpose, goals & how you commit to living. All other domains are guided your vision. Having clarity around your vision allows you to be decisive when facing tough situations. Clarity keeps you focused so that when things get tough, you know what’s important. This in turn aids resilience
2. COMPOSURE
   This is about regulating your emotions. Keeping composed in both minor and stressful situations means overcoming your instinctive emotional response which increases your ability to think critically. Positive or negative interpretation of an event/ situation is important to be aware of as this can affect your resilience levels.
3. REASONING
   The ability to reason with creative and innovative problem solving is incredibly useful when facing stressful situations. This domain requires composure as well as vision. For this, it’s important to anticipate and plan proactively how things may go wrong so you can take action ahead of time to minimize or prevent impact. Be resourceful with the right people, tools and techniques available while seeing an opportunity in potential change.
4. HEALTH
   The foundational domain. Good health means looking after your body through a healthy diet, regular exercise and quality sleep. A healthy body provides a strong foundation for your own resilience. Good health is not the ultimate goal but is an enabler in achieving your vision and remaining resilient.
5. TENACITY
   Persistence is the key. We need to be willing to work hard & smart and stay with a challenge if we want to achieve our vision. It’s important to learn from mistakes and be aware of how we are reacting to mistakes. Find lessons in them and do no define yourself by them. Don’t be naïve but have realistic optimism.
6. COLLABORATION
   The brain has a fundamental need for connection with others to be able to thrive. In a complex world, few people can achieve anything alone so it’s crucial to build support networks to call upon and be able to provide support to others. Research shows it’s not the actual available support that matters, but the perception of available support. A key component of collaboration is understanding the context of your interaction, so you know what behaviour is best suited.

These 6 domains have functions on their own, but they also influence each other. Just as strengths in some domains can compensate for weaker domains, so too can weakness in one drag down others. It is worthwhile for us to pursue personal development so that we are strong in all areas and effectively well-rounded.

What’s great about these domains is we absolutely have the capacity to build and improve every domain, and therefore develop our own resilience.

Resilience is a life-long, ongoing journey for us. Our effort here improves our quality of life and directly contributes to the achievement of personal and organisational goals.

As we move along this journey, there are four phases of resilience that we can transition to, as can be seen in the below model.