Hi everyone, this is Leticia Roinesdal and I’m a senior manager at Deloitte Consulting in our human capital practice. And today I’m going to talk a little bit about resilience. And I think resilience is at the top of our minds for many of us, given everything that we’re living through in 2020. But also, I’d like to think that there are small lessons that we can learn on our daily basis that will help improve our quality of life, quality of work, and then quality time with our family.

So what is resilience? Resilience is having the ability to bounce back, and it’s typically associated with toughness and recovering quickly. Folks talk about psychological resilience, which is your ability to mentally and emotionally cope with crisis and return to a pre-crisis status fairly quickly.

What’s interesting about resilience is that it is a muscle. You can strengthen it, which takes focus, creating a toolkit for yourself. So when you’re in the time of crisis, or you’re put into a reactive position, you have muscle memory to help you respond.

One of the interesting things is that resilient people don’t typically wallow or dwell on failures. They acknowledge the situation. They learn from mistakes, and they move forward. So some of the things that I’ve been focused on in the last year is as somebody who struggles with chronic anxiety, I acknowledge my emotions. So I take time during my day if I start to feel stressed or if I start to feel worry bubbling up, I have a worry-sheet and then an overcoming negative thoughts worksheet that both help me. They help me acknowledge my feelings, they help me control what’s going on, they help me understand why it’s starting to bubble and I’m able to overturn those thoughts before, you know, bubbles into something larger that I have no control over.

I also do this by creating a daily to-do-list that helps me. You know, I have two small kids, I have a pretty big job with several teams, and I have a spouse that’s working as much as I am. So our household tends to be, you know, very, very high burn. Exciting, but also high burn. So how is it that I stay focused and make sure that I haven’t forgotten something that’s critical? It helps me just to ground myself in the mornings. And then at the end of the day, I go through a mindfulness exercise. And I think about how did I do? Where was my focus? How much time did I think and give energy to my family, myself, and then work? And this helps me recalibrate for the next day. If I’ve got one bucket that I way over-indexed on, that’s not living a balanced and centered life. That’s not keeping well-being and resilience in mind. So one of the things that I think this helps highlight is personal control. Resilient people spend time and energy focusing on situations that they have control over. That’s where they can have the most impact. They have empowerment, and they have confidence in these pieces. So if I can help manage my anxiety, help control my emotions, help control my workload for the day and understand where I’ve spent most of my emotional, mental and physical energy, that helps me control my environment and feel like I’m able to respond when something unexpected comes up. The other piece is getting enough sleep and exercise, and how to that really has a huge impact on how we manage stress. When we take care of mind and we take care of our bodies, we can cope effectively with the challenges that come to us.

The last piece I do want to talk through is that I have the great joy of being able to work a lot with leaders. This is a tough time for a lot of companies. But leaders have to stay focused.  They’ve got to keep pushing the mission.  They’ve got to keep pushing the vision, but they have to acknowledge what’s happening and pave a path forward. So leaders have to design from the heart and from the head. This is something our Deloitte CEO talks a lot about, which I agree with. So how do you balance empathy and decisiveness to provide a supportive and trusting environment for teams, but then you’re also helping them focus in on where their energy is needed. So while this has been a really hard year, I think for all of us on many different levels, the ability to trust and build trust, and build dialogue, and look at this as an opportunity to rethink how we are prepared on a daily basis to manage our stress and to manage our well being. And to have those honest conversations and dialogues with our friends, our families, our spouses, our co-workers is going to be key. So I’m at least trying to use a lot of this time at home in quarantine to keep strengthening my resilience muscle, and I hope you do too. 

As a student, I’ve encountered many moments where my resilience was tested. Whenever I would perform poorly on a test or stumble during a presentation, I would resort to wishing I could turn back time and fix my mistakes instead of trying to figure out how I could do better in the future. What has motivated me throughout the majority of my academic career was a fear of failure rather than a genuine desire to learn and improve. 

Letting go of our mistakes is much easier said than done. When we mess up, we tend to feel the urge to give a hard look at our mistakes, and ourselves, and ponder for hours, days, sometimes even years. While it’s important to reflect on our mistakes, it’s just as important, if not even more important, to be able to recover from them quickly. Leticia mentioned that she keeps track of her daily tasks and acknowledges her worries through writing. Doing so helps prevent an immense amount of stress from overwhelming her completely as she is reminded of the aspects of her life and well-being that she has control over. Focusing on these aspects, in turn, helps her to face the obstacles in her life more confidently and effectively.

Overall, try to find what keeps you grounded. It may be meditation, cooking, creative writing—  anything. Whenever you encounter a seemingly unbeatable issue, just dust yourself off and keep going. As much as some of us would like to turn back time, we really can’t do so, and that’s okay. Growing from our mistakes is a crucial skill that will take us far beyond the obstacles we encounter along the way.