Tuesday, May 19, 2015

Emotional Resilience by Michelle Holt

In a recent survey that I came across, emotional resilience was defined as is the ability to positively adjust to an adverse, stressful, or difficult situations and maintain one’s good mental health.  The goal of this survey was to understand emotional resilience of athletic trainers and the factors that may contribute to emotional resiliency in different workplace settings. This is really important for each individual to question, and I believe handling confrontation is a one of those factors.
One of my personal strengths (Gallup’s Strengths Finder 2.0 by Tom Rath) is harmony. I LOVE when people put aside differences to harmonize or at least cooperate in life and work, making the positive results that much greater. I used to steer clear of confrontation thinking that it hurts harmony, and I confused it as creating conflict rather than finding a solution to the problem. Before I was mature enough to learn, I struggled in a work environment that was full of it, crumbling emotionally instead of rising to my potential. I also experienced a work environment that was the other side of the spectrum where confrontation was avoided so much in the culture that there was a huge lack of accountability. In this situation, accountability would be necessary for making progress. So, it was ton of effort to make the wheels spin but we were still going nowhere. After different stages of learning the hard way, I see and accept confrontation as an opportunity to build harmony and as a leadership skill that is vital to hold your team together through accountability.

I bring this topic up because I think that in any job the right fit for someone has a lot more to do with this aspect of emotional resilience. Think about emotional resilience as it relates to how you interact with others, but also how the environment (mainly the people) allow you to maintain a healthy mental state. People around you have different skill levels and methods keeping the emotional balance. What do you need and what do you need to do to positively impact your work and life environment?

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