Creating a habit of resilience

Many people think that as long as they are able to keep going, they are resilient, but being resilient does not mean putting your head down and powering through. Being resilient means you have the skills to handle change and to recover and recharge yourself so you have the energy needed for a productive, fulfilling career and life.

There are multiple ways to boost your resilience, but it’s essential to develop habits to incorporate resilience into your life. Here are three strategies to help you create a habit of resilience:

1. Start small. Keep your goals as small as possible when developing a new habit. The smaller you make the first action step, the greater overall success you will have.

2. Harness the power of accountability to increase your odds of success. Having a person or system to make you more accountable can keep you on track and reinforce the habits you’ve formed. This could be a coach, partner, or Mastermind group. If you’re meeting with a person, make sure it’s someone who recharges you, not someone who makes you want to avoid the activity!

3. Practise the Friday 5 strategy. Consistency is important when implementing a new behaviour, but it’s easy to get distracted when, for example, a huge new project comes along. The Friday 5 strategy helps you stay on, or get back on, track.

The Friday 5 Strategy

I designed the Friday 5 when I observed a pattern among my clients. These clients had many goals they wanted to accomplish but could not figure out a way to change their behaviours, whether physical, mental, or emotional. To help them establish positive and healthy habits, I developed the Friday 5 strategy for putting my Benatti Resiliency Model® into action with a weekly cue and steps to follow:

1. Start by opening your calendar and scheduling a five-minute Friday 5 strategy session. Schedule it as a repeating meeting for a specific period of time, like six months. By the way, you can schedule this exercise for any day of the week, but many people like doing it on Fridays because the stress of the week has lifted. What’s important is the consistency.

2. In your strategy session, answer the following three questions. Consider writing down your answers for more impact.

a. What were my resilience wins this week? Write down any wins, even if small. For example, if you wanted to hydrate more, and did, write that down.

b. What is my resilience goal for next week? My clients set a goal tied to one of the five areas of the Benatti Resiliency Model - wellbeing, self-awareness, brand, connection and innovation. Make it concrete and measurable. For example, if you’ve decided to learn a new language, your goal could be to check out three language-learning options.

c. What is my plan to achieve that goal? Having a goal is fine, but increase your odds of achieving it by making a plan. From the example above, you could put an appointment with yourself in your calendar to spend an hour exploring options.

3. On a daily basis, ask yourself, “What can I do today to boost my resilience?” Even if you skip the Friday 5 weekly session, doing something small every day will boost your resilience and taking small steps on a regular basis leads to confidence to achieve bigger goals.

Click here to download a Friday 5 reminder.

With thanks to Beth for her guest article. Beth Benatti Kennedy, MS, LMFT has more than twenty-five years of experience as a leadership and team coach, resiliency-training expert, and speaker. Beth is also the author of Career ReCharge: Five Strategies to Boost Resilience and Beat Burnout and co-author of the best-selling ReThink Resilience: 99 Ways to ReCharge Your Career and Life.