Resilience Is Your Force Multiplier For Maximizing Development and Performance

If you are not working on your residence (to stress, negativity and adversity), you are likely not maximizing your development, decision making and performance.

Being more resilient enables us to have mental strength when the storms of life, work, sports, policing, hit us hard. Brain scans show that the more resilient individuals have 100’s of times greater brain activity in their pre-frontal cortex (PFC-the front of our brain), where we maintain focus and make sound decisions.

Resiliency is a skill that can be taught, trained for and developed. The impacts of stress and adversity can be undone. We are not stuck with pre-existing emotional states (high trauma situations aside). The basic act of believing that we have greater control over the stressors and adverse conditions diminishes their power.

The reason resiliency is so critical is that most other skills ultimately rely on it, combined with our emotional IQ levels (self-awareness, emotional management, social awareness).

For example, if you are seeking to convince someone to look at situation differently, your communication skill must adapt, relying on your social awareness. That enables a degree of trust to be built. But really, what occurs before that is your ability to manage your emotions through this interaction and even before that, your self-awareness of how you are managing the situation. All the skills I just referred to will not be used to their most effective degrees unless we are able to keep objective, level-headed focus and clear thinking. That draws on our resiliency. But when we are less resilient, our brain will not readily (thinking conditioning) enable us to keep that conscious focus through our PFC. Rather, we will operate more subconsciously and tapping into our emotional control center (amygdala)-which will create more emotional impulsive behaviors from us.

There are upwards of 100 resiliency methods by some counts. The army uses many of them, as does professional sports. So do a select set of k-12 schools and universities.

Don’t rely just on gutting out stress and adversity. That is NOT a recognized strategy. Neither is emotional suppression. Reframing challenging situations is a strategy, as is managing our self-talk and not ruminating on past events.

Be committed to investing in building your resiliency. It will very likely be the single best decision you make in your personal development. Reach out to me if you need more: slavinskijack@gmail.com. I’d welcome that discussion with you.