Resilience – the ability to recover from setbacks – isn’t an enigma. In fact, one simple tactic can help you cultivate a level of resilience that achieves advanced results writes Neil O’Brien.
Our mental fitness is supported by three main pillars – self-motivation and confidence; self-discipline and habits; and self-resilience and recovery. Motivation and confidence is the most important, but can be the trickiest to assess. Discipline and habit, on the other hand, is the quickest to assess and the hardest to fake. Resilience and recovery, meanwhile, is the most misunderstood yet most discussed of the three.
What is resilience?
Resilience is the ability to recover quickly from setback and disappointment. At least, this is the common interpretation. While this is true, resilience is like any other fitness and must therefore be practiced regularly so it’s there when you need it.
The real truth behind resilience and how to achieve it isn’t groundbreaking, however. There comes a magic moment in business, sport and life where simply committing to brilliant basics produces advanced results. This is resilience. If you’ve had a setback, you may have taken a hit to your confidence and motivation. Your good habits may have turned bad and your discipline may well have disintegrated. You know you need to do something, and you’re under pressure to show results, yet you’re very unsure about where to invest your time and effort.
In such moments, world-class performers return to the basics. And if you perform your basics brilliantly and consistently, after a period of time it will look like you’re doing something advanced. A commitment to brilliant basics is not a dumbing down, nor is it a lesser strategy. In actual fact, winners win because their basics are better than anyone else.
Success is basic
The irony of the setback is that, very often, it is caused by individuals neglecting the basics and getting distracted by other things. We should therefore be working the basics all the time. Why wait for a setback to happen?
You will identify resilience by walking around and seeing who is doing the basics of your business better than anyone else. The basics of good health, good business and good accounting have never changed – the question is: who is the best at them?
The success of your business in 2016 and beyond will be based on the strength of your basics. There is no rocket science and there is no magic fairy dust. Your knowledge may be similar to that of your peers but the differences show in the basics of good leadership, good management, good staff engagement, good teamwork and good customer relations.
You don’t need an advanced course in any of these. The differentiating factor is consistently brilliant basics.
Basic questions for advanced results
Rather than give you the top five tips or the seven steps, I’ll leave you with some questions to ponder instead. And please note that, although we may share a few universal basics, there can be vastly different answers to the following questions.
What are the basics of good health for you, and are you doing them? What are the basics of peace of mind for you, and are you doing them? What are the basic habits that help you consistently hit peak performance, and are you doing them? What are the basics of your business that are being neglected right now, and how do you improve these basics?
In business, challenges can be considered an occupational hazard. So rather than approach them reactively, work on your basics now so that when the next challenge does arise, it becomes an opportunity as opposed to another setback.
Neil O’Brien is Founder and Managing Director at Time to Fly, a boutique mental fitness consultancy.