Those on the Babcock Graduate Scheme have been given the task of asking managers and mentors for opinions on the topic of personal resilience.

The brief is to ask the following questions:

1. What does ‘personal resilience at work’ mean to you?
2. Why is it so important at work?
3. What do you feel are the most important characteristics/skills you needs to deal with setbacks etc.?
4. How have you continued to focus on your own resilience during lockdown and what challenges has this presented?
5. What advice and/or tips can you offer?

For me this is a really interesting topic, and as such I had a long and detailed answer that I wanted to share more widely.

Here’s how I answered those questions:

6. Personal resilience at work means to me to always strive to be aware of the objective facts in any situation, and not be led by emotion. Striving to see things as they are, and to make decisions from a position of calm.
7. It’s important at work (and in life) because we have to deal with people at work, and people are individual, emotional, fickle and what they say and do is not within our control. If we don’t have resilience at work it will make dealing with people a mental challenge, and can be a source of personal stress and anguish. I like the Marcus Aurelius quote that we can expect to meet rude everyday:

When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly.

After that tone anything else is a positive! We cannot control other people or external events but we can control completely how we react or respond.

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom

8. I think it’s important to stay calm even under pressure or in emotional situations (equanimity). It’s also important to have personal techniques to deal with challenging or stressful situations. See my answer to question 5 for the techniques I use. The other thing that comes to mind is having a growth mindset; that is, seeing all challenges as opportunities, and seeing failure as necessary to learn and improve. I also hold that having a positive mental attitude is key.

I am an optimist. It does not seem too much use being anything else.

9. During lockdown specifically I have kept up my daily practices for calmness. I have also sought to maintain a separation between work time and home time. I’ve also found that doing telephone calls while walking (mostly with my one year old on my back!) has been helpful - a dose of light exercise and fresh air. I’ve also maintained a list of all the positives from COVID, things like no more commuting, no more alarm clocks, more family time, and so on. Being intentional in making a list of pros has been really good for me to remain positive. In terms of challenges, I’ve been looking after my one year old daughter three days a week on the day’s my wife works (she’s a doctor so can’t work from home) which has meant being open with my line manager and team about these constraints and being flexible in still supporting project delivery. This has meant working in the evenings and weekends but has been achievable.
10. For tips and advice, I can just explain what it is that I do and why it’s helped then let you make your own mind up on it. The principle being one of self-experimentation - try it, if you notice an improvement great, if not move on to the next thing. The actionable things that I do to promote resilience are:
    • Breathing exercises: if I’m about to make a difficult phone call, or stand up in front of people to present or anything else that I find uncomfortable, then I do a set of deep breathing exercises beforehand. There’s a few different techniques I use like Box Breathing, 4-7-8 breathing, and the Wim Hof Method by a bonkers Dutchman who holds several world records for things like submersion in ice that he attributes to his breathing techniques.
    • Meditation: this is a well-documented way to unwind, be more present, and practice not thinking (emptying your mind of all the millions of thoughts that pop in to existence every second of the day). It’s a practice, and it’s as simple as sitting or lying and simply focusing on breathing. If you find yourself thinking other thoughts (which you will), you acknowledge the thought, then let it go and return your awareness and focus back to your breathing. It’s surprisingly hard, and 5 minutes is a great little exercise. In terms of resilience, the reason why meditating is beneficial is because you come to realise that thoughts and feelings just pop into existence unconsciously, and by meditating and observing this you can be more aware and detach your true consciousness from your unconscious thoughts and feelings. That’s to say that when you next get stressed, or worried, or angry, actually there’s now a more rational part of you that understands those emotions to just be fleeting and unconscious, and if you watch them and wait, those emotions will pass. Using the mindset of being an observer or scientist where the observer part of your brain watches the emotional part of your brain is a useful trick (”I will acknowledge my feelings arising” is a common mantra to repeat).
    • Cold therapy (I didn’t say it would be easy 😃): cold is a stressor, and being able to stay calm, relaxed, and present under stress is exactly what resilience is to me. By having a cold shower every morning and ice baths every weekend I train myself to accept discomfort. I’m forced to focus on breathing, and frankly a cold shower won’t kill you so if you can cope with a 10 minute cold shower then a challenging work situation will be a stroll in the sunshine 😃. Also, the cold is like a quick trip to being present - what may take a while with meditation takes seconds in the cold to just be present, deep breathing and focused. Cold therapy is also excellent for the immune and cardiovascular systems.
    • Reading: I find it beneficial to read productivity, leadership and personal development books. I read to be a better person (engineer, father, husband) rather than reading for the sake of it. Four of my recent favourite books are:
      • Atomic Habits
      • Essentialism
      • Extreme Ownership ( Extreme Ownership book review )
      • The Obstacle is the Way
    • Stoicism: linked to reading, but more of a practice, is reading about Stoicism. Stoicism is an ancient school of philosophy, which sounds woolly and useless but it is actually more specifically the practical application of being a good (virtuous) human. Philosophy in fact means “love of wisdom” so that Stoicism could be paraphrased as practical wisdom. The neat thing for me is that the struggles and reflections in the ancient writings of the Stoics, for example the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, are so applicable now it’s incredible - timeless wisdom if ever there was. A lot of the Stoic writings are in short letters, so easy to digest and read when you can. The practical tips across the ages are embodied in quotes like those below, and reading them gives me strength and makes me grateful for what I have:

You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.

Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.

Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.

When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive - to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.

Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.

It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.

What is defeat? Nothing but education; nothing but the first steps to something better. - Exercise: exercise, for me running and walking, is a great way to stay grounded, burn off frustration, and keep sane.

I also just wanted to reflect on a recent book I read called Antifragile. In the book the author defines fragility as something that is sensitive to shocks, and explains that people typically think of resilience (or robustness) as the opposite of being fragile. However he says that whilst resilience is about being insensitive or indifferent to shocks, there is an even better way, and that is being antifragile. Antifragility goes beyond simply being robust, and instead is being something that gets better with shocks. The book is mainly talking about systems (like banking, natural systems), not people, but I like the sentiment that we should go beyond being simply resilient. It’s the difference between being an unemotional rock, which is resilient, to being an antifragile plant that grows, adapts, and gets stronger with shocks (to a point). I like to think that I can take challenges and stresses to get better and improve (antifragile), as opposed to simply bearing the burden (resilience). Another way to put it is that the passing of time harms things that are fragile, yet antifragile things improve with time. Resilient things are not affected by time. In closing, depriving a system of stressors doesn’t always lead to good - small amounts of stress are better than no stress at all. In this way look to welcome challenges and stresses at work and in life, but with the mindset to use these experiences for the better. Amor Fati (a love of fate) is a similar concept to this.