Especially in the pre-Christmas period, well-intentioned advice to rest again serves as the solution for all physical and mental stress: After all, while some can’t get out of putting out fires of individual small tasks before the end of the year, for some others it’s dealing with geopolitical events that put a particular strain on mental health and trigger stress. In this article, we’ll talk about “resilience” and why we actually only ever think of changing something about our inner balance when we’re already out of balance.
Resilience means something like “bounce back” and originally comes from physics. The term thus describes the nature of certain elements that bounce back to their original form even after extreme external influences. From the 1970s onward, this concept was applied to humans as a psychological property. Thus, resilience does not mean the selective search for relaxation, but rather the competence to meaningfully enter into tension and to activate oneself in it. Resilience is thus a lifelong, dynamic learning and development process that can be positively influenced.
This is because whenever we experience stress in any form, the limbic system in the brain is activated and, at the same time, the control system for emotions and appropriate action is shut down. In short, when we experience stress, we usually suffer from competence amnesia. With a strengthened resilience we can better regulate stress and thus regain access to our abilities more quickly. This helps to remain able to act in difficult situations, overcome challenges and cope with crises faster and healthier.
“Resilience is a problem-handling and problem-solving skill – moving away from dysfunctional stress and toxic stress consequences such as burnout, trauma, and crises, and toward functional, enabling stress for learning, growth, and an expansion of the comfort zone.”-Sebastian Mauritz, 2021
This state is more important than ever, as certain challenges cannot be regulated in real-time due to the situation and thus require handling. The 7 pillars of resilience (according to Dr Karen Reivich and Dr Andrew) is one of the best-known models, which shows this theory in an understandable way:
Explanation: The basic attitude describes which thoughts and attitudes a person chooses towards his outer world and his feelings (also called inner attitude). In contrast, practices describe actual reactions and actions and how to respond to certain events.
Not only individuals but also entire teams have this inner resilience to stress and adaptability to change. A key element of team resilience is psychological safety, which states that feedback and ideas can be freely expressed in teams without incurring negative consequences. Thus, for healthy and successful teams, it is not crucial how powerful individuals are, but that each team member feels heard and seen. True to the motto: “We come together based on our similarities and grow based on our differences”, resilient teams consist of diverse members who communicate with each other in a mindful and appreciative way.
Over the next few weeks, Hospitality Booster will be dedicated to the topic of “resilience”, looking at the basic building blocks and using examples and best practices from the industry to show how to increase your own resilience.
Follow us on our social media channels to learn more.
“It is not the strongest species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one that responds best to change” – Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species.