Dear Eudaimons,
I keep hearing this all the time and I fundamentally disagree: resilience is not about how quickly you can bounce back from adversity or hardship. This way of defining resilience encourages us to push emotions, hurt and difficulties under the rug in order to come back to normality as soon as possible because this is the behaviour that gets rewarded, then we are worthy, if we recover quickly (and ideally hide our scars). But that doesn’t solve the circumstances that created the need for resilience.
My coaching client beautifully unpacked the concept of Sustainable Resilience for himself and here it goes:
- The first level of Sustainable Resilience is being proactive – it’s doing everything in your power as a leader to protect the team and himself from getting hurt, by a potential threat or metaphorical wave. Let’s be honest if you can AVOID it altogether, it will cost everyone less. But to do that you need to know who you are and what is worth fighting for.
- When there’s nothing you can do to protect yourself or the team, then Sustainable Resilience is about minimising the damage as much as possible and this includes creating space (taking the time) for the leader and the team to heal (lick their wounds and reflect) and recover from what has happened. I will avoid mentioning the speed (the bouncing back speed) because it is proportionate to the space we give ourselves to heal.
- The final level is about learning to remain in the heat and undergoing transformation. It takes a special type of leader to understand that the heat has the power to transform and grow us and our teams. Providing this narrative takes courage in itself, but imagine having an organisation that has cultivated their ability to rise wiser and metamorphosed from what others would consider ashes of destruction or complete failure.
Now that is the 3 dimensional Sustainable Resilience definition I will adopt going forward! From one wise Eudaimonic Leader to all of you!
Much love,
Christina Garidi of Eudaimonia xoxo
