There’s a proven and practical set of Resilience abilities that the most elite people on the planet have been trained in for coping with extreme adversity, and for thriving through uncertain or threatening situations. COVID-19 is one very recent uncertain and threatening situation where elite Resilience training comes in handy.

Everyone’s Resilience has been tested at some time or another, and the threats of 2020 and 2021 showed how important building Personal Resilience is for thriving in today’s world. But going through hardships does not guarantee optimal Resilience. How equipped are you or your team to thrive through 2022, and beyond…

Throughout the pandemic of 2020 and 21 we learned to live in constant fear for our own health and that of our loved ones. For essential workers, showing up to work became a matter of life and death – a stress typically reserved for soldiers.

None of us had previously lived through a Pandemic like Covid-19, so we had no prior knowledge how to cope. The human brain tries to resolve uncertainty and ambiguity with routine, so maybe to deal with all of this you picked up a new hobby, or set an exercise schedule, or arranged a weekly call with friends or family. Or maybe having a few drinks and scrolling endlessly through negative news or social media became your coping strategy.

We learned to hunker down to avoid a virus, and emotionally hunker down to cope with stress. But stress persists neurochemically in our brains. The experience of heightened arousal, difficulty sleeping, irritability, wanting to drink or smoke or binge on Netflix to cope—all of those manifestations of stress take a while to subside when our nervous system is chronically dialled up for extended periods of time. Just because a war is over, doesn’t mean that what happened during the war doesn’t still activate you, doesn’t still haunt you in some ways. There’s a healing that needs to take place.

Beyond the immediate (and ongoing) threats and challenges of COVID-19, we are also at a time in human history when the rate of technological change is accelerating faster than the human capacity to adapt. Eric ‘Astro’ Teller (head of Google X laboratories) demonstrated the significant difference in these two change curves in a simple graph…

The two fundamental causes of this accelerating technology change?

Computing power and Globalisation…

• Since 1965 Computer processing power has roughly doubled every 2 years! To put this into context, all of the computing power that controlled the Apollo mission to the moon can now fit inside the chip on your smart phone. According to Moore’s Law, this acceleration is set to continue and in a few decades computers will be thousands of times faster than they are today.
• In hospitals for example, hundreds of thousands of jobs are on the line, as computers learn to analyse CAT scans, biopsies, deliver low level anaesthesia, and even do surgical procedures.
• An Oxford university study predicts that within 20 years, 47% of all US jobs are at risk of being replaced by technology – that’s over 70 million people! And at the same time, globalisation is affecting high skilled jobs in ways that it never has before.

But it’s not all doom and gloom…just as technology and globalisation destroy jobs, they also create jobs! By generating new industries and new markets.

But how do we all keep up, while maintaining an optimal level of wellbeing for ourselves, AND while supporting others we are responsible for!? That’s where Resilience Training comes in…

We don’t know exactly what the future is going to look like, or what the new ‘normal’ in 2022 and beyond is going to be. The only certainty in today’s world is uncertainty, and the only security for ourselves is getting used to insecurity. We’re going to need to continuously overcome obstacles, embrace uncertainty and change, and manage ourselves through adversity and setbacks. The word used to describe someone’s capacity to do all this effectively is ‘Resilience’, which comes from the latin word ‘resilire’ meaning to recoil or rebound, later translated into the noun ‘Resilience’ meaning ‘the act of rebounding’. But true Resilience is not about rebounding or bouncing back, life’s reality is we cannot go back. What happens to us becomes part of us. Resilience is about moving forward. By having healthy ways to face hardships, get the ‘job’ done, and still become a better version of ourselves in the process. That’s what true Resilience is.

With ripen’s Resilience training you and your team will be more equipped than you otherwise would have been for whatever the future holds.

Book a call about our Resilience training courses and arm your team with the skills, tools and strategies to reach high resilience, fast!

Credits

Content transcribed and adapted from ‘Slope of the Curve’, WorkingNation.

Friedman, T. (2016). Thank you for being late – an optimists guide to thriving in the age of acceleration. Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Image credits: Graph – ‘Thank you for being late’, Thomas Friedman, 2016, p.32