Why is resilience important?  Is it really the key to success?

“It seems that we have been sold the idea that being great and having an amazing talent is due to winning the genetic lottery or just dumb luck. But, in reality, amazing people are those that are willing to fall flat on their face, wipe off the dust and keep on keeping on. To them, failures are an opportunity to learn and grow.” Dc Michelle Nielsen Seven Key Factors to Creating Resilience – Propelling Entrepreneurs to Massive Success, Huffington Post.

As Dean Becker, the president and CEO of Adaptiv Learning Systems, a four-year-old company in Pennsylvania, that develops and delivers programs about resilience training, puts it: “More than education, more than experience, more than training, a person’s level of resilience will determine who succeeds and who fails. That’s true in the cancer ward, it’s true in the Olympics, and it’s true in the boardroom.” (Quoted in Diana Coutu’s article in the Harvard Business Review How resilience works).

One of the key attributes of successful people and entrepreneurs is that of resilience, that they keep going, overcome obstacles and when there are set backs they learn and carry on.  Intelligence in itself is not enough and in some respects there is less that you can do to influence this.

In our day and age, business is becoming more complicated and competitive.  It is not enough to be intelligent, employees need to be good at learning fast, overcoming obstacles and changing rapidly.  This demands higher levels of resilience.

We are also now more aware that emotional states such as anxiety, stress, anger, irritation, frustration, boredom and resentment can decrease productivity.  Without being able to understand and so better manage these emotions, they can impact significantly on our relationships, well-being and performance.

Resilience can help us deal with the many highs and lows of our working life, increase our emotional intelligence and our chances of being successful and more fullfilled in our careers.

Insights Article written by Leanne Hoffman – Developing People Trainer/Consultant and practising Psychotherapist

We have a number of in house training courses to develop resilience and emotional intelligence which can support you and your organisation as you strive to succeed, including half day in house courses on Developing Personal Resilience for Change ManagementBuilding Our Emotional IntelligenceUnderstanding our Emotional World at Work.  We also offer the following 1 day in house courses:  Building Resilience for Career Success – 1 day in house training course, Developing Personal Resilience – 1 day in house training course, Emotional Intelligence – half or 1 day in house training course.

Developing Resilience and Emotional Intelligence may be keys to success, but as we all know too well Success won’t just find you, you have to go out and get it.