Life can at times become intense, and you can feel the pressure building on you to act or react in response to challenges and demands. This pressure can come from all sorts of direction, including your business, work, colleagues, peers, family, friends and even the community as a whole. But there is a resilience that you can develop within you as an individual that will allow to meet these pressures, make the right decisions and emerge stronger each and every time.
Active Knowledge Question:
What practices and habits have you developed to strengthen yourself so that you can readily manage the pressures of your work and life?
Strength As A Leader
As a leader you want to set the example and standard of how your team, and each individual therein, will manage the pressures of work and life, so that they are always making the best decisions, not reacting but responding and always uplifting the people in your business.
Leading a business, holding any leadership position, wanting to achieve things in business, work and life and just being a member of a community – all these interactions can bring many challenges every day. Some challenges will be easy, and others will push you to the limits of your sensibility, but in all cases, your ability to ‘step-away’ from this pressure and make the right decisions is critical and will distinguish you as an achiever.
Uncontrolled pressure will impact your success, your ability to ‘get things done’, your wealth, relationships, communication and importantly, your health and well-being. But the pressure control gauge is in your hands, and you control the impact pressure will have on you and how you respond.
There are habits that you can build into your life, traits that you can develop, and anchors that you can set that will allow to you ride through the roughest of storms, emerge intact and stronger, and having made the right decisions.
Building Resilience
Such an approach to building this ‘resilience’ incorporates:
- Establishing a self-care regiment to support clarity.
- Reflecting on and establishing purpose, motive and values which serve as an anchor.
- Building the achiever traits enabling good decision-making and enduring commitment.
Through such an approach you are strengthening and sustaining yourself physically, mentally, emotionally and creating a basis upon which to make decisions and respond to events in a manner consistent with who you are as a person and the values you hold true to.
Without such ‘resilience’ you can quickly find yourself being pushed and pulled in all directions without being able to properly form your individual views and act on them. Of course, at times this will mean that you make decisions that may not be popular, but they will be well-founded decisions that are based on principles and values that are authentic to you as a leader and person. And in the best interests of the business you lead and customers you serve.
Self-Care:
As a leader, the core strength of your business rests in you as an individual, and each of the leaders throughout your business, and the energies and ideas you can all bring to your business.
If you do not have a clarity of mind and strength of body (good health), then you can be quickly overwhelmed by events that confront you. Establishing a regiment, a series of habits, is the most effective way of maintaining robust self-care.
Self-care is about rest, cleansing, restoration and strengthening. Here is an example of the types of habits that will support good outcomes:
- Clear and balanced patterns in your life, including working hours, sleeping/waking times and duration, periods of rest and time with family and friends.
- Daily exercise, meditation and stretching.
- Breathing well and strengthening your breathing capacity and practices.
- Eating well and drinking water rather than stimulants.
- Connecting with family and friends and investing in strong positive relationships.
Purpose, Motive and Values:
When the wind is blowing strongly, you need to ensure you can anchor yourself well. In life, this anchor is found in a strong sense of purpose, motive and supporting values, which allows you to stand firm when all around you seems out of control, and to remain true to who you are as a person.
Purpose can be profound and seeded in a sense of what you are seeking to achieve in your life, or it can be ‘simpler’ and expressed as how you see your current leadership role. In either case, it expresses what outcomes you are seeking to achieve and is typically around the impact on the lives of others.
Motive and purpose go hand in hand with motive, reflecting what drives you to pursue purpose. Self-interest, for example profit, is the weakest form of motive and will typically yield weaker outcomes. Motive is better formed around a giving to others, for example, ‘enabling others to bring success to their lives’.
Values may be better expressed as virtues in this context, and they define how would like to see yourself as a person – what traits reflect who you are? For example, courage, determination, humility and love are virtues that you may want to hold true to in all your activities.
Achiever Traits:
The achiever traits reflect those characteristics and practices that are typically found in persons who are able to achieve enduring success in their lives in the areas which are important to them. They actively seek to build the presence and strength of these traits within themselves as they are enablers of achievement. These traits are:
– A core of humility and gratitude.
– A triad which consists of body, beliefs and words:
- Physical, emotional and mental health and strength.
- A set of fundamental beliefs about the world and how you fit into it which empowers you to move forward.
- An understanding of the power of words – thought, spoken, read, heard – and always ensuring the language in which they surround themselves is uplifting and not defeating.
– A willingness to explore one’s dreams, passions and imagination, allowing the impossible to become possible.
Pressure to Respond
As a leader, as a person who wishes to achieve outcomes in their life, the ability to manage the various pressures that life will send your way is vital. You always want to be able to respond and not react. Response is a thoughtful and purposeful process whereas reacting is a knee-jerk, and often, led reply.
Knowing what is important to you personally and in your leadership roles, having very clear motives and a set of values (virtues) that you hold true to, building your strength to withstand the storms – all of this allows you to make decisions which you know are right.
Right by you, right for those whom you lead, right for the ones you care for and are responsible for.
In the business markets and social communities in which we presently live, we can find ourselves ‘living in interesting times’ all the time. Knowing who you are, being authentic to yourself and building a resilience to always make the right decisions is the difference between a life of success built by you and an existence of always jumping to the tune of others—your choice.
An entirely new level of performance.
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All the best in the success of your business,
Richard Shrapnel
