Building resilience for those stuck in their comfort zone

Fiona Buckley of IMI outlines steps we can take to ensure fear doesn’t hold back our career progress.

Any move outside of your comfort zone involves change — breaking habits, shifting beliefs and replacing assumptions.

Building resilience is an important part of growth and change and in practice people tend to either thrive on change or resist change.

You can speculate that the people who struggle with resisting change also tend to have issues with resilience. People resist out of FEAR which I often link to the acronym “False Evidence Appearing Real”, which is what it essentially represents.

Fear is fiction.

Fiona Buckley

However, those that remain tucked away in the safety of their comfort zone never really embrace fear. Like a tidal wave at sea, fear keeps engulfing them sweeping them away back out to sea.

We can have up to 80,000 thoughts per day, so you can imagine if your mindset is more negative and you don’t want to change, this can fuel a lot of negative thinking which in turn impacts resilience.

Stress, in moderation

Resilience, stress as well as emotional intelligence are all inextricably linked.

Resilience is most often described as the ability to bounce back in the face of adversity and resilience is associated with strength.

An integral part of building resilience involves working on improving your emotional intelligence. This also requires change.

One of the key tenants of emotional intelligence is stress management and within that area is your positive outlook or optimism.

People who are able to moderate their stress and are high in optimism are naturally higher in resilience.

Low resilient people tend to view everything as permanent, whereas people who are optimistic tend to see the effects of negative events as temporary.

By way of example it could represent temporary thinking; “My Manager didn’t like the work I did on that project” rather than permanent thinking “My manager never likes my work.”

Resilience goals

Two of the key characteristics of low resilience are; over-reacting and constantly comparing yourself to others. If you don’t actively take charge in a change of behavior in this area, it is only set to further deteriorate.

In order to build resilience and nudge yourself out of that zone of comfort it is essential that you set yourself some regular resilience goals.

A sample of such goals are as follows:

• Consciously take control over your daily thoughts. Ask yourself is what you are thinking fact or fiction? When faced with an issue we have to train our brains to deal with facts rather than fiction. This involves applying logic to our worries. This will enable us to halt our mind’s projections into the future, to stop experiencing a reality that might never exist. It allows us to be present and factual.
• Nurture a positive outlook through perspective, filling your mind with positive thoughts and attributions and distancing yourselves from negative people.
• When you catch yourself comparing yourself to others be conscious of your thoughts and process them, address them and try to put a halt to comparisons. This is the one of the hallmarks of resilience.
• Take charge of your personal development and actively decide to work on your emotional intelligence. Take an Emotional Intelligence test and look at the objective measure as to where you are now and set yourself some areas for improvement. This will help in how your regulate your emotions and how you react to situations.
• Enlist the assistance of a coach that is able to coach you and support you in this area who can help set goals and milestones.
• Try to start view setbacks as temporary challenges. Keep reminding yourself that it will pass.
• Focus only on what’s in your control. Push everything outside of your control to a boundary and tell yourself that these thoughts cannot be accessed as they are out of your control and out of bounds.
• Choose your response. We always have a choice in how we respond; we can choose to react negatively or remain calm and logical. Your reaction is always up to you.

Journey to resilience

Building resilience is a journey and there is no overnight fix, especially if you are more likely to stay in the comfort of your comfort zone.

Start small and start noticing the small improvements.

This in and of itself will instil a mindset shift and propel you forward to try further improvements.

It is often the smaller changes that can have the biggest impact.

Fiona Buckley is Associate Faculty with the Irish Management Institute (IMI) facilitating on a number of public and custom programmes, including IMI’s Taking the Lead – Women in Leadership programme (next programme start date in Cork is May 11, 2020). For more, go to www.imi.ie