Outlining practical steps for building agility and resilience in the face of change. It emphasizes mindset shifts, proactive planning, and reflective practices to help individuals adapt more effectively to uncertainty and setbacks.
Key Insights
- Strengthening agility involves shifting your mindset, anticipating change, and testing small improvements to remain flexible and responsive.
- Building resilience requires reframing failures as learning opportunities, using techniques to regulate stress, and seeking support from others.
- Maintaining perspective and balancing optimism with realism are critical strategies for managing adversity and sustaining long-term growth.
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Strengthening agility and resilience. All right, let's talk about some steps for strengthening your agility. The first step is to really shift your mindset.
So instead of viewing an unexpected change as some big interruption, view it as information for you to take in and figure out what to do with. Step two is to reframe so that you're really building in flexibility and innovation. Instead of asking what's wrong, what's going to happen, and how bad is this going to be, reframe it to ask what's possible now with this unexpected change.
Step three is to stay curious—to really ask questions before reacting. Oftentimes, when a change occurs, people just automatically resist it. But if you can stop yourself from doing that and begin to ask questions to gather more information, you're on your road to being more agile.
Step four in strengthening your agility is to scan early and try to anticipate changes that can happen. I have known leaders and non-leaders who, every quarter, take a few minutes to jot down what changes they see that could be coming for the next quarter. It's a way to anticipate what might be coming, and it helps you have stronger agility when you've had the opportunity to proactively think about what might happen.
Step five is to prototype small. Instead of waiting for all the perfect information in the world, test out small improvements and prototype in small steps. It might help you strengthen your agility if you're making those changes in smaller steps.
Step six is to practice scenario thinking. Okay, this change has occurred—let's think about different paths to success and what each one of them might look like, and even what each one of them might feel like for me.
For strengthening your resilience, we have some steps that we can talk through. The first step is to reframe setbacks. Instead of really getting focused on and continuing to say, I failed, I failed, I failed, reframe that to, I learned—because it's rare that something goes wrong and you don't learn something from it.
So, really reframe setbacks as learning opportunities. Step two is to pause and regulate. What are the techniques that help you reset during stressful moments? It's different for everybody, but find what really helps you reset during a stressful moment.
Step three is to seek support. Instead of internalizing what happened or the challenges you're having, talk through it with other people. A peer, a mentor, or a coach can be really helpful to seek support from.
Step four is to maintain your perspective, and I love this question to ask yourself: Will this matter in six months? Something that has just happened may feel like the biggest, most important thing in the world, but it can help your perspective to think about whether this will be as critical or important—or even matter—in six months' time. Step five is to reflect and extract lessons. In the military, they have after-action reports; you can do the same thing for yourself. What worked? What didn't work? What would I repeat next time? Take the time to really reflect and get those lessons out of it, because we want to learn from adversity.
And then step six is to try to balance optimism with realism. You can recognize that you're in a challenging time, but you always want to continue believing in your ability to handle that challenge.
