Resilience Is Your Adaptability To Change

What Does Resilience Mean To You?

It may mean something like this:

• Surviving and dragging yourself through something in order to get out the other end. 
• Coping and keeping it all together, somehow.
• Bouncing back, with grit and determination. You won’t let this thing beat you! 

What Resilience Is (According To Our Research)

Is resilience about digging yourself in when you feel stuck so you can free yourself or is it about something else? In fact, adaptability to change is the core of resilience. 

The Resilience Dynamic’s 15+ years of research shows that resilience is your capacity and adaptability to change.  

It also takes in surviving and coping, as Coping is a great place to be if you are coming from a place where you weren’t coping. 

Resilience includes Bounceback. Getting through the challenges of life, and coming out of the other side intact. Often people want to return to ‘normal’ but change has happened as a result of the Bounceback, and that return is to something altered. There is often a tail-effect of tiredness too in Bounceback. Getting through those challenges takes it out of you, and therefore you are exhausted afterwards.

So Coping and Bounceback are great. But what if there was a way of achieving higher adaptability to change without that level of effort?

There is another level. Those with the highest level of resilience are highly adaptable. They expect change, they like change, they respond well to change, and they can say no to too much change in order to create capacity for the change that is important to them.  

Highly resilient people react resiliently to any kind of situation – normal, boring, difficult, shocking. That means they remain resourceful, adaptable and energised, no matter the context. They stay in the moment. They account for themselves and their needs, and the needs of others. And being able to do that anywhere, anytime, is the real joy of resilience: once you learn to be resilient, you carry that learning with you, in all of your life. Work challenges, home life, relationships. Whatever life throws at you.  

And that resilience means that you can bring any part of yourself, your resources and skills, your care, love, emotions, power, to a situation at any time. The key is that your response is not one of being hijacked by the situation, but one of ease and of choice.  

And that is the ticket for creativity, and therefore for getting unstuck. Resilience, and therefore adaptability to change, is the key to changing your mindset and becoming unstuck.  

The outcomes of resilience are both wellbeing and success.  

Who wouldn’t want that cake and to eat it at the same time? That is the new resilient way. 

Building Adaptability to Change: How We Can Help

The Resilience Dynamic helps leaders and organisations by building healthy, high performance. We know the steps involved in this and can offer leadership coaching together with data-led, scalable solutions that enable this across the entire workforce.  

Dashboard Solo is our solution for personal resilience and adaptability to change. Evaluate your resilience level using the Resilience Dynamic® Questionnaire, then understand the implications of your resilience drivers and how you might start to make shifts for the better in a debrief with a Resilience Dynamic accredited coach. The Resilience Dynamic® Questionnaire gives insight into your dynamic personal resilience range, plus your Secure/Neutral/Watch areas that highlight your opportunities for change. Click here to learn more about Dashboard Solo.  

Dashboard Solo – the Resilience Dynamic® Questionnaire & debrief – is priced at £1,250 (+ VAT) per person for private sector, and £900 (+ VAT) per person for public and 3^rd sector. 

• If you are a leader or manager and want to explore more, then use Dashboard Solo for yourself. Click here to learn more. 
• If you support others in the organisation, either as a manager or HR/OD support, consider commissioning Dashboard Solo for individual leaders and managers who need support in handling change. Click here to learn more. 
• If you have a team who are facing complexity and are finding it difficult to adapt quickly, consider Dashboard Team. Click here to learn more.

Do get in touch if this article has prompted a query: [email protected]. We’d be delighted to help.

Author: Jenny Campbell Founder and CEO of the Resilience Dynamic

Follow Jenny on LinkedIn for more of her thoughts, resilience research, and ideas.