In my previous blog I spoke about how important it is to believe that you can change things, at least to to a degree by your individual thoughts and actions. This is the essence of optimism, providing solutions not asking further questions.
I now wish to turn to the issues of pessimism and disappointment.
Firstly pessimism, no -one wishes to work with someone who does not believe that they cannot achieve any level of success in any project!
There must always be a belief, in resilience terms, that something can be achieved, although it may not be what was originally thought of!
It can be done,things can be better we don't need to be helpless we can do things and achieve something positive.
A pessimistic person can devalue the resilience of the whole team or even an organisation,and that is a bad thing for all of us.
Being optimistic does not mean being unrealistic but it does translate into offering realisable solutions to challenges.
In terms of individual resilience that is what we should be aiming for!
In terms of disappointment, it happens to everyone, even the most successful people have had disappointments in their lives which they have had to overcome, on a personal and organisational level.
There is a danger of not moving on from disappointment and drifting into depression. This is especially true if you have suffered several disappointments.
An old Chinese proverb states that it is not how ogyen you fall down but how and whether you get up that matters. If you fall down 6 times but get up 7 times then you are a success!
Disappointments should be learnt from and hopefully not repeated.
Why are you disappointed?
Were your initial aims and objectives too perfect or even inappropriate with what you should have been going for?
Should they be re-assessed and changed?
Should you be be aiming for other different objectives where you are more likely to succeed?
Can you overcome disappointments and move on to the next challenge. It is important to do so because dwelling on disappointments can cause greater problems for yourself and your team and even your whole organisation.
Disappointments will always happen but it is your strategy for dealing with them and moving on from them which is critical.
In Resilience terms, for disappointment, read risk.
How we cope with our own disappointments is a great predictor of our personal Resilience and how that may cross over into organisational resilience.
A supposed resilient organisation cannot be resilient if the people who compose it are not in themselves resilient!
There is an inextricable link here between coping with disappointment and being resilient!
Coping with one challenge will help you cope with the other.
If someone has trouble coping with multiple disappointments they often need to seek professional help.
The principles are the same. We must face disappointment and cope with it. This can be difficult but is not impossible. This is a skill, like optimism, which can be practised,developed and ultimately learnt.
Finally, just to emphasise the point, although in these blogs we have spoken much about organisational resilience, the resilienceof the individual should be cultivated just as much as the resilience to which the organisation he/she belongs to!
We will return to rhe question of personal Resilience in future blogs.
Please remember that organisational and personal resilience cannot be separated and are equal components of our resilience journey!
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