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Resiliency: Why We Need It And How To Build It

Forbes Coaches Council

Antonia Bowring, principal ABstrategies LLC, MBA. Top Ranked Executive Coach in New York, Author and Speaker.

Resiliency is on my mind these days. On the personal side, it’s still early in 2023, and we have goals to achieve this year, and we know that resiliency is a key tool for achieving our goals. Personally, I am going to need resiliency to market and sell my upcoming book, neither of which is solidly inside my comfort zone.

On the macro front, we live and work in an intense, uncertain world and everything I read and hear says that change—both at work and in the rest of life—is going to keep accelerating and we are going to be asked to pivot even more frequently. As an executive coach, I need to stay current on changes in my industry and what it means for my client pipeline and my ability to meet my clients' changing needs.

The standard definition of resiliency is the ability to bounce back from difficult events—and that translates into how we prepare for such an event, how we behave during the event and how we reflect upon the experience afterward.

I recently read Tomorrowmind by Martin Seligman and Gabriella Rosen Kellerman, and they talk a lot about resiliency as a key trait for those who will thrive in the change-intensive and uncertain world we are in and will continue to experience. What I found most powerful was that they didn’t talk about resiliency generically. Based on their research, they have determined the five traits of resiliency that will serve us best while dealing with intense change.

Those five traits are emotional regulation, optimism, cognitive agility, self-compassion and self-efficacy. I appreciate there being a number of different traits associated with resiliency because we can look at this list and determine what we are good at already and then turn our attention to the areas where we want to build more expertise.

I am thrilled and intrigued that Seligman and Kellerman’s research shows that self-compassion is a key trait of resilience. This was new to me and many of my clients. And yet it makes total sense. We need to extend to ourselves the same kind of compassion that we extend to others when faced with our own suffering, failure or perceived shortfalls. We need to embrace that there are common challenges for humanity.

In my coaching work with women executives, we have been diving into this theme. And overwhelmingly, these powerful, successful women describe their weakest trait of resiliency as being self-compassion. I’m not surprised, but it still makes me sad. We need to do more to help each other build this muscle. Kristin Neff’s work is prolific and accessible for anyone wanting to learn more about this topic and how to develop the tools and practices to allow yourself the grace of self-compassion.

The next time you are going to beat yourself up about a perceived inadequacy or something that happened that caused you stress, here is a simple hack that you can try. Ask yourself, "How would I react toward someone who came to me with this issue?" Write it down or say it out loud. And then offer yourself the same grace.

Self-compassion isn’t a muscle built up overnight. But at this point, we all know that habits worth having take time and effort and patience. Every time you ask yourself these questions—“How would I react if someone came to me with this issue? And how can I show myself the same grace?”—you are one step further along on the powerful journey of building your resiliency.


Forbes Coaches Council is an invitation-only community for leading business and career coaches. Do I qualify?


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