Resilience, Agility, and Emotional Agility Help Us “Bounce Back,” Stay Competitive, and Live Intentionally.

Welcome to the Mindset for Life podcast. Let’s talk a little about adaptive abilities in life. There are two terms I’d like to introduce to you today. One is resilience; the other is agility.

Resilience and Agility are Beneficial, Learned SkillsThere’s a business called Mequilibrium that conducted a study in 2019 about resilience and agility in the workplace. One of their goals was to determine how these two factors contributed to happy employees that were producing really well or burn out.

So, as you might imagine, they did find some interesting results.

Benefits of Learning Resilience and Agility TogetherTogether, these skills make people more engaged at work. In the study they conducted, the researchers found that they see much more meaning at work and purpose in their work when people have both resilience and agility.

They are more hardy, basically. That means you don’t burn out as quickly or burn out as much.

In fact, in this study they were 71% better off on the burnout scale, meaning that they were less prone to burnout when they had high resilience and agility together. And, people with high resilience and agility also had much less depression and anxiety.

What If We Focus on Only One of These Skills?Now, if you were to just take away resilience (this “bounce-back” factor) and you only focused on agility (the whole strategy part) adapting quickly but not really the bounce-back part, that doesn’t really save you. Because, people with just the focus on agility and not resilience in this study, they found that those people actually had more depression, more anxiety, and were more likely to be absent from work.

So what is this mean about us in our personal lives? And, why do we care about these workplace terms in our every day, day-to-day living?

You Can Learn ResilienceOne of the results of this study was that resilience was found to be the ability to rebound productively in challenging situations. Of course, that’s the definition of resilience.  But here, it’s something that we can actually learn.

It’s a skill, not just a personality trait only a few people have.

That may surprise you. It used to be that we thought resilience was sort of this natural trait you were born with.

This skill can actually be learned and can be taught to people in the workplace.

But it can also be learned in everyday life.

What Does Resilience Really Mean?The skill of resilience requires emotional control, optimism, self-efficacy, and problem-solving.

Emotional control is the part of resilience that we’re most interested in today.

Because, a lot of what we experience in life that frustrates us or holds us back really has to do with our emotions.  It’s either our emotional response to something that’s going on, the emotions we feel in relationship to other people, our relationships with them, or the emotions we just feel about ourselves or our situation just how we are right now.

So, emotional control is big. And, it can go miles in helping us to be resilient and rebound to challenging situations.

You Can Use Agility as a StrategyThe term I mentioned, agility, this is the ability to adapt to changes. It means that you can react appropriately and adapt to changes quickly. So, you can take advantage of new opportunities.

Agility helps you keep learning. It helps you to want to try something new. And, agility means that you use strategy to do this.

Agility Keeps You CompetitiveSo, if you’re in business, agility makes you competitive.