Learn – Lead – Lift. How to build Resilience at Work.
By Cheryl Mongelard from Word Wand and Nadja Conaghan from Great Minds United
If you’re like most people you’ve probably had the experience where the working day can wear you down. And sometimes it can stretch into weeks - even months. That uncomfortable feeling of unease or dissatisfaction. Or worse, that we are just not quite up to the job.
It can come from one negative event. Or tiny moments that accumulate and creep up on us - at first as background noise until that day where it’s become our dogged reality.
And now we’re vulnerable.
Everything starts to feel personal. The little things hit harder than they should, and we second-guess more. Making it all that much harder to bounce back.
That’s a tough place to hang out.
We know, we‘ve been there. Haven’t we all?
So how do we stay resilient when something goes wrong at work – like a project going off track that we’re responsible for? Or if we’ve been on the receiving end of unfair criticism?
How can we stay level-headed enough to:
1) objectively draw out any valuable insights, and
2) put the situation into its proper perspective,
so that we can move onward and upwards?
There is a way and that is through a daily practise called Learn – Lead – Lift. It’s a simple method that builds true inner resilience and gives you the energised confidence to thrive.
Let’s go through each part.
Learn — Forward Focussed
Learn something each day that contributes to your current role, future goals or both. 15 minutes a day is enough to get you in an elevated mindset. So read an article, listen to a podcast on your commute, do some online learning before you kick off your work. Us humans are curious beings, and learning keeps our minds fresh and engaged. As you layer your learning with applying it, you will find your voice and influence at work grows.
Lead — Present Focused
This is all about self-leadership and self-efficiency. Lead your day in a way that gets the most out of it. Start slightly early and be ready – so don’t get distracted. Review your daily to do list which naturally you created the day before (the last thing you do before you finish work). Encourage yourself throughout the day. It helps keep you in a good frame of mind to stay on task and make real progress. When you keep your eye on the prize of what you want to achieve it’s easier to ward off distractions. Ticking off your to dos give you a sense of achievement and helps to see progress when breaking down a big and long project into manageable tasks.
And most importantly - work with a sense of urgency which creates efficiency. If the workday feels like a daily grind, it might be that you’re not working efficient enough to get into flow. As the saying goes, it’s harder to resist work than simply just doing it. It’s the resistant that’s causing the drag. Embrace the day and get stuck in. You never know, you may just end up enjoying yourself.
So practise self-leadership and self-efficacy. Show up early, be organised and work like it’s the last day before holidays.
You’ll get that that inner knowing that you’re not holding back, you’re giving you all. And that creates a calm, unshakeable kind of resilience.
Lift — Outward Focussed
After learning and leading, it’s time to lift others. Mentor a colleague who wants to step up into a role like yours. Or share a helpful shortcut, tips and lessons with your team. And, there’s an added benefit for you too. Teaching solidifies your own learning because as we know, you don’t truly understand something properly until you can explain it to someone else.
The added bonus is that lifting others stops you from getting stuck in your own head and connects you with something bigger — a sense of contribution. What’s more, you’ll feel great about yourself, and a direct outcome of that is building your resilience.
A last but often overlooked benefit is that you don’t create a single point of failure and find yourself stuck in a role as no-one else can do your job. Therefore, if you want to progress in your career, ensure you lift up others, so you can move on to a new challenge.
So there you have it. An straightforward 3 step model: Learn – Lead – Lift.
When you build your day around Learn – Lead – Lift, you develop a kind of natural inner resilience that protects you and lifts you up. It changes your outlook to one of seeing the problems to one of seeing the opportunities within the problems.
Will you still have some tough days? Yes, but they’ll no longer have the momentum to derail you.
So start today:
• Learn something.
• Lead in your own role.
• Lift someone else up.
And in time you find you have changed from just getting through the day — to growing through it with resilience.
Put it into practice
We developed an easy tool to help you to practise this new habit and also helps you to reflect daily and see the effects. Click here to download the free tool.