How resilience can become your enemy
Resilience is a topic which I hold close to my heart. It has served me well in many ways, and yet has also had destructive impacts on my physical, emotional and mental well-being.
In this article, I’d like to share both the light and dark side of resilience when leading teams and dealing with high pressure. A lot comes down to having the self-awareness to determine what thoughts, feelings and behaviours are adjusted and what is extreme.
Being able to live with uncertainty and adversity is a real strength, equally, we are not meant to cope with continuous extreme difficult situations. Having awareness of what is extreme and what is ‘normal’ to cope with, helps give us visibility to adjust our coping strategies.
To introduce this, here is a bit of science.
The research behind resilience
Michael Rutter defined resilience being when “Some individuals have a relatively good outcome despite having experienced serious stresses or adversities — their outcome being better than that of other individuals who suffered the same experiences” (Rutter, 2013).
Suniya Luthar et al. (2000) defined resilience as “a dynamic process encompassing positive adaptation with the context of significant adversity”.
Both definitions refer to two critical conditions to be resilient:
-Exposure to significant threat or severe adversity
-The achievement of positive adaptation
Some children will develop a positive outcome when exposed to risk while others will have a negative impact. Many studies delve into this in a lot of detail to describe the variables behind this. They range from being exposed to small risks in a protected environment, to having the right mental resources to cope, such as planning, self-control, self-reflection, sense of urgency, self-confidence, determination. Rutter says that exposure to low-level risk rather than completely avoid it will help individuals develop resistance and coping skills.
When Resilience is your friend
Daniel Goleman has educated millions of people on the importance of Emotional Intelligence (EQ). EQ impacts a person’s resilience during crises. When we are comfortable handling unexpected hard or uncertain situations, we are usually drawing on our self-awareness, relational skills and our empathy to survive a crisis. Being familiar with ‘survival mode’ means we know how to position ourselves, to problem solve, and to seek support when they need it the most.
As a leader, this will mean you are better prepared to work under pressure and cope with uncertainty and failure. I won’t go into detail here as there is already a lot of literature on the positive impact of resilience in leadership. So where does the dark side of resilience come from?
When Resilience can become your enemy
The reason we are resilient in the first place is that we learnt to cope with adversity in our childhood or youth and still produced positive outcomes for ourselves. High five us! :-)
Emotional Triggers
The thing many of us don’t know is that this also means that if we didn’t process the negative emotions associated in these difficult moments, these unprocessed negative emotions are likely to be stuck in our bodies taking to the form of emotional triggers.
We all have them. They can lead us to lose a balanced state when triggered. What triggers us is different for everyone but can result in common reactions. This can lead to defensive behaviour, poor decisions making, irrational thought and over-reactions to name a few. This topic is one for another article in itself.
High pain thresholds: a silence assassin
The fact we can cope with adversity is one thing. The degree of adversity that we can cope with is another. That is what I’d like to draw attention to.
Like all traits, if we experience it in a continues extreme level, it will result in dysfunction. One of the downsides of being highly resilient is that our threshold to pain (physical and/or emotional) is too high. This can lead to missing alarm bells our body or emotions are sending us to reduce the intensity of the adversity it is having to cope with because it is too much. Ignoring these signs is when resilience can become gradually destructive.
Our body’s developed coping mechanisms to protect us mainly from a short burst of danger from predators, so we can survive such threats. I am referring to our fight or flight mechanism for example. This releases hormones like cortisol to impact our behaviour. These hormones are not meant to be released day in and day out. They can impact our health in invisible ways when in excess.
The point I am trying to make is that when we have stressful lives and stressful jobs, being resilient doesn’t mean, we should just get on with it and ignore the impact the stress is having on us. Most of us aren’t even aware of the effects, as many of us will be disconnected to our body’s sensations.
Instead, we can find ways to organise ourselves, focus and prioritise to find our own way to function in a calm state, and only leverage our resilience, for the high-pressure moments when they arise.
Call to Action
Reading this article, you are likely to identify yourself as:
1.Not being resilient enough — wanting to develop more effective coping strategies with stress
2.Being too resilient — realising that you are used to feeling under pressure all the time. A state of calm and relaxation is more of an exception. You may be aware of continuous body tensions and aches which you may be hadn’t related to being indicators of your emotional state.
3.Feeling a healthy balance — a state where you are self-aware. You have identified your internal signals which tell you when you are in your red/danger zone. You listen to them and know what activities to leverage to adjust yourself to going back into your green or orange state of wellbeing.
Creating your own internal dashboard of KPIs, to identify when you are working from a place of calm and flow when you are under more pressure than usual, and when you are in your danger zone is key in having the tools to adjust. You can’t change, what you don’t measure.
We can work in the red on and off when needed. Life situations force us to do this and high-pressure jobs expect it. The message here is that our body cannot sustain that state 100% of the time without destructive consequences on the physical, emotional, mental and energetic body. Finding your own rhythm, and way of working in an optimal way is key for your wellbeing.
How does this relate to coaching?
While there has been a lot of research on resilience, I chose to share Rutter’s work because he highlights that people who showed resilience in adulthood despite having non-resilient outcomes throughout childhood and youth, were open to constructive change by what he calls ‘turning point experiences. Turning points can be introduced into adulthood through coaching, mentoring or the development of new relationships.
By creating a safe space for coachees to develop a relationship with their coach, they can plan or take risks and go out of our comfort zone to developed resilience without further pain. People who are too resilient can also use such a space to explore how they can reconnect with their bodies and emotions, identify their own indicators and to reduce their threshold to stress which could be preventing them taking care of their physical, emotional and energetic bodies to experience life and relationships more fully.
I am keen to hear from you. Does this speak to you? If so how?
As a Conscious Leadership coach, Lauren takes an internal approach to leadership development on how we manage what makes us human to access our power and performance from a state of flow. She works with founders and leaders to access new insights and awareness by improving how they relate to their sense of Self, Others and their Organisation to drive business results and wellbeing.
Lauren is also a keynote speaker on the Success Paradox. The concept of success coming at a cost. The cost of your physical, emotional or mental health. Success can also impact your relationships with loved ones. She shares how you can reduce these risks.
