Keep calm and don’t panic
How to build resilience
“You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.” — Marcus Aurelius
On a bright, sunny Wednesday towards the end of 2018, I was heading home after completing a productive day at work. While on my way, I stopped at a nearby mall to get a few things for dinner that night. As a co-founder of Grocerease, a grocery delivery startup, the irony of this situation is very real to me.
After spending around 20 minutes navigating the aisles in the store, I returned to the parking lot to find that my car was surrounded by mall security.
Uh oh.
I gave them a curious look but continued as per normal. But when I opened the trunk of my car, it was empty. My laptop was gone!
Bizarre thoughts ran through my brain as I tried to rationalize what had happened.
“Oh, I probably left it at work”
“Nah, did I even take it to work? We only had meetings today…”
But I quickly snapped out of it. It was gone. My next thought was, “Damn, now what?”
Situations like these can completely derail someone especially when they happen unexpectedly. But that’s the thing, you never expect it. So to be prepared, I try to be resilient.
This is not something I picked up overnight, it’s a trait that has to be nurtured and developed. It requires continuous maintenance similar to how you need to workout consistently or risk going back to being a fatty.
Being resilient helped me bounce back after the laptop debacle within a few days. Mainly because I was aware of the negative emotions I had to put aside and because of the systems I had in place to recover.
I believe resilience is a skill that everyone should work on because bad things are inevitable. It’s part of being human.
What is resilience
According to Google, being resilient means:
“having the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties”
We go through difficulties in life, when the way we expected our life plan to go does not materialize into reality, usually due to a bad event. Resilience helps us recover from these difficulties to get our life plan back on track.
I achieve this with two important techniques:
Awareness and systems.
The first step is awareness of when things go wrong and when you start to feel unbalanced. This will help you assess how much work is ahead of you to get back to your plan. Awareness helps you recognize destructive and negative thoughts and emotions faster.
Once you understand that you are not in an optimal state, you can work on recovering. The quicker you realize this, the quicker you can change course.
Next, is to have systems in place to help you recover step by step in a controlled and consistent manner. Systems create a clear path to overcoming the obstacle you’re facing. You can also trust your rational self more than your hyper-emotional self to react in a calm and productive manner.
By having defined processes to follow it’s easier to get a few quick wins under your belt which nudge you towards your original trajectory.
Many of us tend to let the situation take over until we feel helpless and drown in the chaos and emotions. Awareness is catching yourself before you drown, it’s reminding yourself that you can swim, or call for help. Systems are your lifeboat to help carry you back to dry land and sunny skies.
Awareness
Theft is emotional.
It makes you feel everything from anger to disappointment to disbelief. Keeping a level head becomes a delicate game of balance with these emotions. However, this is easier said than done, because the more you think about a negative emotion, the stronger it gets. On the flip-side, the same applies to positive emotions.
In one of my favorite articles, Religion for the Nonreligious, Tim Urban mentions:
The battle of the Higher Being against the animals — of trying to see through the fog to clarity — is the core internal human struggle.
He refers to the constant skirmish between your rational thought represented by a Higher Being and your primitive emotions such as fear, pettiness, jealousy, greed, instant-gratification, etc. represented by the animals.
These emotions create a mental fog that drowns out your ability to think rationally and logically. I believe learning how to see through this fog is the most important part of awareness.
With this in mind, the easiest way to deal with a bad situation is to:
- See through the negative emotions
- Understand what’s causing them
- Re-frame the context of the situation to bring out positive emotions
I reflected on what happened with my laptop and I thought about how it could have been worse and that at least I was safe. I also thought about why these things happen and the root causes of crime in South Africa. It made it clear to me that we are on the right path with Grocerease and that the jobs we’re aiming to create will have a huge impact on society. By shifting my mental state I was able to re-frame a bad experience into a motivating force to help me push harder every day.
Getting to this awareness is not easy but you can work on it everyday. These practices help me become aware of the emotional fog so that I can work on moving past it.
Meditation
This is by far one of the most beneficial practices I’ve picked up. I am definitely not a hero, and I am quite inconsistent with my meditations. However, the weeks where I’ve maintained a routine of meditation (only 10 minutes per day!), I noticed a mental peace and clarity that I cannot get in my usual day to day. I regularly use the Headspace app as my go to meditation resource, but there are many others online.
Journaling
It is said the greatest geniuses journaled (or that the fact that they journaled made them geniuses). I don’t know how true this is but I do know that journaling helps me connect my past, present and future experiences. It allows you to reflect on the growth and learnings you have experienced, which opens the door to the future so you can plan ahead.
I keep a basic journal where I try to write daily (I’ve been failing miserably on this in the recent past). I keep it simple and write on:
- 3 things I’m grateful for.
- What went well the previous day?
- What could have gone better?
These questions help read deeper into your experiences and frame them in a positive manner. Also, studies have shown that taking time for gratitude is one of the biggest contributors to happiness, so get on it!.
Once you are aware of how you have drifted, you can work on the recovery. Depending on the severity it might be as easy as giving yourself a pep talk to get back on track. In more severe cases, it helps to have systems in place.
Systems
When shit hits the fan, it’s hard to know where to start.
Systems serve as a set of processes and rules that you can fall back on. The rules of the system function like checklists and routines, which is necessary when your brain has been cluttered and has no capacity to think. You can use your rational mind to develop these systems, so that when you’re in an emotional state, you can turn to your systems which have been laid out in a logical manner.
In the case of my missing laptop, I was able to get up and running in a day. I set a strict routine to help me get back into the everyday swing of things and I kicked off the process to recover all my work. By keeping all our company documents in the cloud, I was able to continue working almost immediately using my older campus laptop. The biggest delay I faced was downloading the software I needed.
Resorting to a preset routine and having redundancy built into the way we work and how we communicate let me return to creating value at the company in a short space of time.
Mental processes
A clear routine can be one of the best ways of getting back to feeling like yourself. A routine usually consists of a simple set of tasks that you can follow at set times. By completing these tasks, these small wins add up and can play a big part in helping you reach your more ambitious goals.
I try to apply routines and goals to many parts of my life. At Grocerease, we have routines outlining our daily calls, and how we handle various situations (emergencies included!). Personally, I try to apply this thinking to areas where I want to improve in life, such as working out and the way I start my mornings.
Ways of working
At Grocerease, we have all our working documents in G Suite and all our code in Bitbucket. We also have multiple forms of communication such as Slack, Telegram and WhatsApp that’s accessible from all our devices.
This type of redundancy in work and communication might seem like an overkill but in a crisis it was a godsend. I was able to recover all my documents with minimal loss and be up and ready for the morning 9am call. I was also able to communicate with the rest of the team as soon as the incident happened to keep them in the loop.
These systems can help you pull yourself back together when you need to. They are safety nets that you know are available when things go awry that can catch you and get you back on track.
Putting it together
Each time something bad happens, the important thing to remember is the feedback loop. First becoming aware of how things have drifted and second, resorting back to the systems that can make picking yourself up easier. Soon you will build your resilience muscle and reduce your recovery time. But it doesn’t end there. You can keep working on this muscle so that you can get back to moving onward and upward at a faster and faster rate.
So far I have written on resilience from the point of view of keeping it together mentally and emotionally. However, this thinking can be applied to other aspects of your life such as physically, spiritually, socially, etc.
Conclusion
At Grocerease we have introduced a section in our weekly company update called, “Wildcard of the Week”. In here we put unexpected things that came our way, curve balls out of nowhere and surprises from out of the blue. It’s mainly positive things, but in that fateful week, it had to do with my stolen laptop.
And that’s the thing, as an entrepreneur and in life, you have to be prepared for the “wildcard of the week” at all times. There will be a lot of positive things coming your way, but bad things are inevitable so being prepared can make it easier to manage. Whenever you face adversity or encounter tough times, focus on how to re-frame them as lessons that you can learn from and move forward.
In life it’s those that pick themselves up and display resilience that can ultimately stand up to anything.
Thanks for reading!
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