Do you have resilience to go the distance?
We may not think we need to be proactive and strategic about building our resilience, but we do. It’s especially true for those of us who want to live with Sustainable Ambition.
I talked about building resilience with my recent podcast guest, Dr. Marie-Hélène (MH) Pelletier, author of The Resilience Plan: A Strategic Approach to Optimize Your Work Performance and Mental Health.
In her book, MH advocates doing an honest accounting of all our demands across life and work and including outside stressors and then taking small, consistent action to build our supply to meet those demands. We need to actively manage these to have resilience and keep things sustainable. If we’re not intentional about this, many of us can too easily get caught in an over-extension, over-exhaustion loop.
I champion a similar approach and suggest we create a personal sustaining plan to restore, protect, and support our energy. To me, this is about being able to manage our effort and energy so we don’t deplete our resources and instead can sustain the pursuit of our ambitions over time and not sacrifice our well-being.
To share just a few ideas...
One strategy is to help with this is to be clear about those factors that give us energy and fuel our quality of life (restore with these!) and those that drain our energy (protect from these!).
Another is to pace ourselves, as Cal Newport wrote about in a recent New York Times article, reminding us to think about seasons, like the hibernation time of winter (support with this). I think about this both in the long term (plan in arcs, pace ambitions out) and also pacing ourselves day-to-day.
Or add activities that offer enjoyment and distract your mind or help turn it off. I've been delighted to see how many people are taking advantage of these types of activities that are popping up in my neighborhood: a game parlor, a pottery studio, and places to take sewing or art classes.
It pays to be strategic about our resilience. How can we manage our demands and build up our supply to create more sustainability?
Let’s enjoy going the distance.
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