Resilience Strategies

The strategies are categorized into four quadrants to make them easier to remember. Moving clockwise from left to right, the first quadrant is labeled Discipline Your Thoughts. This is because, you guessed it, these strategies require discipline. I have to work on “pressing pause and changing the tape” almost daily and just when I think I have mastered it, some ugly tape recording starts playing in my head again. “Know when to quit” is a strategy to be used judiciously. I don’t use it often, and I’m always scared when I do, but sometimes quitting is the smartest road to resilience and bouncing back.

To the right of Discipline lies Reframing Past Regrets. These are two of my personal favorite strategies and are among the ones that I use the most. When we reframe a situation, we think about it from a different perspective and that’s exactly what these strategies do. “Failure is an event, not a person” places the emphasis where it belongs—on the event, not your identity. And “seeing failure as courage” requires you to be proud that you took a risk, regardless of the outcome.

Time Perspective sits below Reframing. “Think positive in the process,” as the name suggests, involves not succumbing to downward spiraling thoughts when in the midst of the situation. And “be patient,” one of the strategies I dislike the most, but have learned to employ, suggests that sometimes the failure had nothing to do with you. Patience is required to wait for the next opportunity. Yuck.

Finally, the Find Your Allies category are strategies relating to others. A personal favorite as a mother, and a teacher, and a favorite of my students is “set a timer on the pity party.” Before being crowned the Queen of Failure, I was the Princess of Pity Parties. No one threw a better pity party than me. Working with allies helped me minimize the time spent wallowing in my self-pity. “Confide in a friend” involves sharing your fears and becoming vulnerable with someone you trust. An effective strategy but easier said than done.

As we peruse these different strategies, think of this as a shopping trip. Full disclosure. Like my attitude toward cooking, I really don’t like shopping either. Yes. I know. I’ve spent untold hours studying and teaching consumer behavior. I appreciate the steps in the consumer decision process. But I hate to shop. Regardless, like my attitude toward cooking, I can do it when necessary. The point is, if we were shopping, we’d all like different outfits. What looks good on me may not look good on you. What looks great on the hanger may look horrible when I try it on. What I would choose for a wedding would be different from what I would choose for a workout. The point is, you need to try these strategies and determine how they work for you. I have my favorite go-to strategies and my students have theirs. I encourage you to try them all and see which ones you like.

When I first started experimenting with teaching my Women in Sales students to become resilient, I wasn’t sure how many times they needed to practice failing so they could practice resilience. The first semester I taught this assignment, I required eight resilience papers: students practiced failing, applying a resilience strategy, and then reflecting if the strategy helped them get over the failure quickly. Turns out, we learn resilience much quicker than I expected. It became clear in subsequent semesters that five resilience papers (i.e., repeat this practice five times) were all that were needed for students to make a resilience strategy their default for handling failure. When asked about the most important take-away from the class, many students cite this resilience assignment.