I work as an associate for a number of organisations and I’ve been running a few virtual workshops recently on resilience. This is an area which interests me as over the last few years my levels of resilience have been well and truly tested. I have come to the conclusion that we all have our cross to bare-sometimes it’s pocket sized and sometimes requires a fork lift truck. Being human is about being able to pick ourselves up and brush ourselves down after facing the knocks of life…the- bounce- back -ability.
There’s lots of information out there about resilience- we’ve all experienced how we can lose ourselves for hours on the world wide web searching for that perfect list of how we can improve resilience, how we can manage work life balance, how we can be the best version of ourselves. In the work I’ve been doing one of the key things which jumps out for me is that resilient people have high levels of self-esteem (the Google search brings up pages and pages on this!). Have you ever considered how our self-esteem is developed? This was certainly not a taught skill when I was at school.
We all have different experiences from our upbringing and during our early experiences in the world of work. Did you have lots of praise and positive reinforcement which are crucial in developing self-esteem? Did you have positive role models who displayed high levels of self-esteem? Was your education one which was full of praise and recognition for hard work or was it much more stick than carrot?
Quite often when I am facilitating sessions I ask “what are the things which you did well?” as part of a debrief after an exercise. The vast majority of people start with the things which they felt they didn’t do so well. Or when asking people to think about their strengths, many people start with what they believe are their weaknesses. It appears that many of us feel uncomfortable blowing our own trumpet. Is this also a cultural trait -that good old British reserve?
So if we haven’t had regular deposits made in our self-esteem bank account and we feel uncomfortable in recognising the things which we’re great at, it’s a bit of a conundrum knowing that a characteristic of resilience is high levels of self-esteem. I was inspired the other day talking to an amazing friend who works as a coach. The last year has been quite a rollercoaster for many people in the world of Learning and Development and my friend had been at a low and had lost her mojo. When she’d actively caught herself telling others how she wasn’t great in managing change she decided to practice what she preaches. She’d gone away and had reflected on and listed some of the amazing changes she’d been through such as leaving the security of full-time employment to work for herself, add new strings to her bow to compliment her coaching work and becoming proficient in the virtual learning environment post March 2020. Once she’d done that she’d got a list of evidence to show that actually she manages change exceptionally well.
At home we use positive affirmations to build self-esteem in our daughter. She has a list of the skills and qualities she possesses and I regularly ask her which of those she’s demonstrated each day. It’s about ensuring she catches herself using her superpowers. I am hoping that she will be a self-aware young lady who recognises that her human traits such as being kind, caring and having empathy are hugely important and ones she should embrace and acknowledge.
So what’s on your list of superpowers?