The Resilience Factor
Whether you’re just starting out as an entrepreneur, in the thick of your business career or reinventing yourself at midlife, change brings stress. Maybe you lost a job you had held for a long time and are starting your first independent venture, looking for ways you can quickly scale it to new heights.
Today we face what I call pivot times. The rate of change is greater than it has ever been in the history of mankind. Exponential change is everywhere, swirling around us. We must be acutely aware of ourselves and our world in order to succeed.
How we deal with stress not only determines our happiness and quality of life – it can actually be a life and death matter. One new study for instance shows a clear link between emotional stress and increased risk for heart attack and stroke.
Change is not going to slow down. So if we want to be happy, healthy and successful, we have to adjust how we deal with it. For entrepreneurs and business leaders, this requires us to build up our resilience (aka “The Resilience Muscle.”)
Gary Vaynerchuk says being resilient is like being a boxer and getting punched in the face repeatedly. You have to be willing to not only take the punches, but also have an attitude that says, “keep ‘em coming.” Here are three ways you can build your resilience muscle for entrepreneurship and life:
1. Be Self-Aware. Self-awareness requires working on yourself. If you are not self-aware, you are at a great disadvantage in every space – health, relationships and particularly in business. How do you frame the situation you’re in? What language and “story” do you tell yourself and others about the change you are facing? Whether it’s marketing change, positioning change, changing your title or the people you are serving, health or relationship changes, make sure you are defining change in positive terms.
2. Ask: “What Can I Learn?” Resilience is about how you bounce back stronger from difficulty. Richard Branson stresses using failures as learning experiences. This is the idea that every reversal/setback contains a nugget of new information we can use to propel us forward. In most cases we would have loved to have had that information weeks, months or even years ago, but that no longer matters. The important thing to ask is, “now that I know this, what can I do with it?” Think of it as loading a spring to prepare you for a vigorous move forward, whatever that new growth, opportunity or trajectory looks like.
3. “Cultivate Rituals of Recovery: In their influential article “The Making of a Corporate Athlete,” authors Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz detailed two decades of research on world-class athletes and what CEOs and other business leaders can learn from them. A key trait they found is that successful athletes have the ability and take the time to recover. While making a play, their heart rate may be very high, but it quickly drops between plays to “recovery” mode.
Think of tennis players in the short intervals between games. What are they doing? They look around, they sit down, they stand up, they pace or get a towel. During these little rituals of recovery, their heart rates quickly drop back to a near resting rate.
Entrepreneurs and business leaders face much greater and more constant stress than professional athletes, so we need to heed this lesson. If you try to face stress without allowing time for recovery, your performance will fall. But if you take time to recover, even if the intervals are short, you will come back with a new frame of mind and renewed energy to face whatever is coming.
What do you do to offset the stress you are dealing with? It could be to meditate in the morning, walk in the afternoon, or get a foot massage three times a week. Or maybe you make it a point to get up very early in the morning but also get to bed early each night so you get the right amount of sleep.
We all face fears, real or imagined, that can put us in lockdown mode. But when you practice these steps, you will prime yourself for action, like pushing down on a coiled spring. Load that spring with the weight of your awareness, your learning, and your recovery, and you’ll be better able to bounce back from any stress you face.
