10 quick strategies for enhancing your resilience

Performance Intelligence

When you’re under pressure, making the right choice is difficult. It requires what we call ‘Performance Intelligence’: the ability to identify the best course of action given your knowledge, understanding of the situation, past experience, and awareness of available resources. Given this, how can you show ‘Performance Intelligence’ when your next challenge comes along?

1. Assess the situation

As job roles grow in their complexity, our understanding of our working environment can diminish. Don’t be afraid to ask the obvious questions upfront.

2. Draw on your past experiences and strengths

Think about how you reacted to similar situations in the past, what the outcome was and how you can apply that learning to this situation.

3. Learn from others

Watch what other high performers in your field are doing, get regular feedback and seek out those with differing knowledge to help you identify the best course of action to take

Emotional Control

Emotions are an essential part of performance because they dictate your energy flow;^[1] however, it’s how you manage your emotions that determines success. So, what’s the secret to emotional control?

4. Develop an ‘inner radar’^[2]

Being aware of how you are feeling in a stressful situation allows you to better perceive those emotions ‘as they truly are’ rather than exaggerating them in your mind. Identify the feeling, name it, and then move on to analysing it.

5. Adopt the mindset of an objective scientist

Suspend judgement on your emotions, explore them, and think before acting. It’s easy to become entangled with your emotions, letting them distort your focus and influence your decisions. By detaching yourself and analysing your emotions objectively you can reduce their impact.

6. Use emotions wisely

Research suggests that being in a slightly sad mood can help people conduct careful, methodical work, while being in a happy mood can stimulate creative and innovative thinking ^[3][4]. Emotional control is about harnessing the right emotion at the right time.

7. Keep your ultimate goal in mind

Managing emotions hinges on having clear goals. If you can keep in mind what you want to achieve it’s easier to prevent your emotions from getting out of control.

Attentional Focus

What you pay attention to and chose to focus on, is a key determinant of success under pressure.^[5] But, how do you hone in on something when today’s world is ‘always on’?

8. Be mindful

Mindfulness training has been shown to enhance concentration and attentional focus.^[6] To improve focus, be fully present and engaged in the current task. It’s easy to jump from task to task, but research suggests this ‘multi-tasking’ actually decreases productivity.^[7]

9. Prioritise

Make sure your task list is clearly prioritised along two dimensions ‘importance’ and ‘urgency’. This will help you to avoid getting stuck ‘firefighting’ or spending too much time on the jobs that don’t matter as much.

10. Let go

Categorise aspects of your work in terms of ‘controllability’: what you can control, what you can influence and what you can’t control. Then, spend the most time focusing on what you can control.