Resilience is a hot topic these days as people try to figure out how to bend with the winds of economic change without breaking.  What can you do when your resilience is getting low?  Here are a couple of suggestions that seem to work well throughout business relationships.

The first and most fundamental thing to do is to keep your body healthy.  For decades we have been hearing about basic stress management techniques:  get enough sleep, exercise, eat well.  Guess what?  It's all still true.  The latest research tells us that normal adults need 7 - 9 hours of sleep a night, as in EVERY night.  No macho points for surviving on 4 - 5 hours.  Sooner or later, it will catch up with you as reduced immune strength, difficulty concentrating, anxiety...the list goes on.  Exercise is pretty basic.  If you get 45 minutes of heart-pumping exercise, which could be something as simple as fast walking, walking up and down steps, or playing volleyball, four times a week, you're there.  Eating well means keeping caffeine to 1-2 cups/cans a day (you won't need it if you are getting enough sleep), cutting out trans-fats and high-fructose corn syrup and eating some fresh fruit and vegetables every day.

The next step in developing resilience is to pay attention to how you talk to yourself.  If you flood your mind with negative talk all the time, you significantly reduce your ability to deal with change and adversity.  Often we keep ourselves stuck by ruminating over things in the past or worrying about worst-case scenarios in the future.  Our scope may be too narrow, like improving sales revenue at all costs, or too broad, like trying to solve the global economic conditions instead of thinking creatively about how to update your products.  For one day, try telling yourself that the challenges your are experiencing are normal and healthy, and the current problem is a doorway to an innovative solution.  Don't roll your eyes, just make a genuine effort and see what happens.

Finally, to improve resilience, improve your communication.  Learn to say things as simply, clearly, and honestly as you can.  Listen attentively to others.  Make it safe for others to ask you questions by avoiding routine answers.  When in doubt, share information.  Except for a few explosive outbursts, most business communication suffers from too little, too late.  You don't have time? Well, to quote an old advertisement, "Pay now, or pay later."  Investing time in good communication pays off in the long run.

The best thing is to choose only one thing to do differently and actually make the change consistently every day for at least three weeks.  I'd love to hear from you to find out how it works.