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This week Katie and I continue with our discussion on resilience at work and specifically, we discuss how you can build your resilience at work in 7 steps. If you listened to last week’s show, you know now that resilience is something that is naturally occurring for us but there are things that can disrupt our resilience. So this week, we talk about the seven steps to harnessing it fully. Resilience is not only to support us in the face of monumental challenges but also to allow us to deal with the basic challenges of day-to-day life and especially those little annoyances that can come up in our work lives as well. One of the the foundational components of these seven skills is understanding that our emotions and behavior are triggered not necessarily by the events themselves but also, how we interpret those events. This is so common that psychologists have even been able to identify seven common thought patterns. Also, our ability to do this is a skill and it is something that we can learn to do.

The seven skills of building our resilience are practicing the ABC’s: noticing the adverse event, identifying our beliefs and then noticing the consequences of our beliefs. A second skill is noticing our thinking traps and there are eight of those which include traps such as jumping to conclusions and personalizing. Another skill is also detecting beliefs that we may hold that we may not be aware of which can be called iceberg beliefs. Another skill is known as putting the event into perspective and stopping the “what if” thinking. Next, calming and focusing is can help us during the moment when we feel overwhelmed by stress or emotion. Lastly, we can use real-time resilience by allowing ourselves to change our counterproductive thoughts into more resilient ones. How will you build your resilience at work? We would love to hear about your discoveries so feel free to post your comments below.