Written by: Sara Mueller, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
As you know, challenges are a regular part of work (and life). Challenges are especially prevalent in high-performance leadership and in demanding industries like healthcare and service. Resilience is your ability to recover quickly from challenges. Implement these four resilience-building exercises to make sure you – and your team – are thriving.
1. Shift Your Relationship To Failure.
See failure for what it is: a necessary step on your path to success. Failure cannot be avoided and the quicker you embrace failure in your life, the faster you will experience success and resilience.
Of course, move forward making the best decision you can with the information you have and an intention for excellence. Then quickly get into execution and implementation while detaching from the outcome. Only when you take action will you gain feedback, which is data you can then use to determine whether you stay the course or pivot slightly to generate the best results.
Nothing is a failure as long as we don’t give up or quit moving forward.
2. Identify What You Learned From Past Mistakes.
We all make mistakes and we all fail, especially if we are playing big in work and life (which I hope you are!). Mistakes and failures are valuable to us if we embrace the lesson from the experience. Yet so many of us get stuck in our heads, beating ourselves up over and over again about the mistake, which blocks our ability to move on and clouds our judgment.
Instead, do this exercise to process through your mistakes: Draw a line down the center of a piece of paper to make two columns. In the first column, list every single failure and mistake you have not yet forgiven yourself for. In the second column, write the wisdom you gained from each experience.
Let’s say you allowed other seemingly urgent tasks to take priority over a presentation you had to prepare for. As a result, you had to stay at work late one night to finish it on time which made you miss your daughter’s dance recital. What did you learn from this?
You likely learned that presentation development takes longer than you anticipated and needs to be broken down and slotted into your schedule, then protected, in order to avoid the stress and guilt you experienced and the disappointment your daughter felt. Next time, since you know better, you’ll do better, meaning this failure was not wasted.
The well-earned wisdom you identify during this exercise is great gear for your leadership toolbox to relate with and inspire your team when they approach similar challenges.
3. Quiet The Negative Chatter In Your Mind.
We all have conditioned beliefs that keep us stuck. Even if you do excellent work, it will never be good enough if the lie you believe about yourself is, “I’m not good enough.” Deconstruct the programmed limiting beliefs you have so you can adopt new empowering ones that serve your highest self.
4. Practice Regular Recovery.
Self-care is not selfish or a luxury. It doesn’t require a lot of time or money. Self-care is necessary because it’s mutually beneficial to you and everyone who counts on you to continue at high performance and make the best decisions for your work and life. For simple low-cost and low-time commitment self-care ideas, download my free guide HERE.
Once you reframe your experiences, shift your internal beliefs, and make regular time for rest and recovery, no challenge will ever hold you or your team back. Go get ‘em with resilience!
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Sara Mueller, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine Sara Mueller believes we CAN have it all. She helps leaders develop emotional intelligence, resilience, and high performance so they can balance an impactful career AND a meaningful family life. After being burnt out in her career and hitting rock bottom in her marriage, Sara realized that her limiting beliefs and unproductive patterns were blocking joy and success in all areas of her life. So, she underwent an intense journey of self-discovery learning how to own her authentic power, presence, and purpose. She now teaches the key learnings of her transformation in her Self-Mastery Method coaching and leadership programs. Prior to becoming a Success Mentor, Sara spent nearly two decades developing optimization training programs for Fortune Global 500 executives while also teaching mindfulness and yoga to people from all walks of life. She’s a certified Conscious Parenting Coach and is regularly regarded as “life-changing,” “eye-opening,” and “one of the most engaging facilitators I’ve ever seen” by her beloved clients.
