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Whenever I speak with someone I’d like to hire, what I am looking for is resilience. Is there any sign of resilience in their personality? I firmly believe that the following 5 pillars of resilience are essential for your success. You can cope with stress way easier than before when you try to master each of the five pillars.
Resilience, or in other words, perseverance, adaptability, and strength, is something everybody should try to build up. You won’t be able to build that overnight, not within a month. If you follow these five principles, you will experience a massive improvement on your end.
As you might have guessed, there are different concepts regarding the five pillars of resilience, and I would like to provide you with an overview here. I will also let you know what version I “work” with and my learnings from it.
One resonates better with me than the other, but a bit more on that later. So now, let me dive deeper into it.
The first concept of the 5 pillars of resilience: Energy, future focus, inner drive, flexible thinking, and strong relationships
The first concept of the 5 pillars of resilience is around energy, future focus, inner drive, flexible thinking, and strong relationships. Let me explain to you all 5 pillars here.
Pillar 1 – Energy
The energy pillar is about sustaining your physical energy at a good or even high level. But why is that important? I know from experience that the more you train, the more resilient you will become. Your physical health and condition are essential to be mentally healthy and stable.
You should step your game up and take personal responsibility for your physical energy and health. You will be ready to take on whatever comes along. No matter how hard it will be – you will do well.
My Aikido and Iaido training helps me a lot with that.
Pillar 2 – Future Focus
While different types of meditation teach you to stay in the here and now, I firmly believe you need to focus intensely on your future. It would help if you had a plan or maybe a sense of your purpose and direction.
This helps with finding ways to get there. It is beneficial to have a plan, keep track of it, and break it down into smaller parts. When you face difficulties along the way, you will find an easier way out of a crisis as long as you have a vision of your future.
Finding new directions after a setback and taking the first steps is crucial for personal and professional growth.
Pillar 3 – Inner Drive
The inner drive or believing in yourself is essential not to lose focus. Building up the confidence and motivation inside yourself to reach your personal goals is crucial. Knowing that you can get things done is essential when facing tough times; sooner or later, this will happen to all of us.
In 2019, I had the most challenging time in my career. I worked for a CEO – before I took over his position, that was just crap. He outright lied to our owner and treated people like shit. I stood up to that because I knew I had a bigger goal than just sitting and waiting for things to change.
I am so glad and grateful I had the inner drive and resilience during those tough times. This led me to a new career path after working roughly 20 years in my industry.
Pillar 4 – Flexible Thinking
Flexible thinking is so critical. Many years ago, I tended to think black and white only. Today, I am flexible with many things in my life, not only on a professional level, no matter how hard the pressure is on me.
There is a saying that without flexible thinking, you cannot see the wood for the trees, meaning you are stuck. It’s of uttermost importance that we all learn to think out of the box. Only by doing that we can identify new possibilities, think and work as lean as possible, and quickly shift our direction.
Pillar 5 – Strong Relationships
The last of the 5 pillars of resilience in that version is about strong relationships. One might think that resilient people are independent, working alone and making decisions independently, but they aren’t.
Relationships are essential for everyone, whether work-related or about your private network of friends and people you trust. If you have a support network that trusts in you and you are open and honest with them, you will be able to face all difficulties wherever and whenever they arise.
The second concept of the 5 pillars of resilience: self-awareness, mindfulness, self-care, positive relationships, and purpose
This second concept of the five pillars of resilience is more about your personal development than your professional development. At least, that’s the way I understand and see it. So let’s dive deeper into it.
Pillar 1 – Self-Awareness
As the first pillar of resilience, we do have self-awareness. This is purely about having a good understanding of who you are and what your personality looks like. You should know your strengths and weaknesses at some point in your life.
Of course, it’s not all about that. It also helps to be aware of your beliefs, thoughts, and motivations. The more you know and understand yourself, the easier it is for you to understand other people’s points of view.
When times are tough, you will know by heart how to respond accordingly.
Pillar 2 – Mindfulness
Interestingly, mindfulness is the counterpart of future focus in this concept of the 5 pillars of resilience. As you might know from my articles about meditation, mindfulness is all about being in the present moment.
It’s less focused on the future and more about being aware of your emotions and perceptions. Practicing mindfulness daily might help to stop every once in a while and breathe. Take in what you experience without any judgment, and don’t let it just pass by.
Pillar 3 – Self-Care
Caring about yourself is always crucial. But the specific parts of your life you need to take care of yourself are most likely different than any other person’s. To give you an example from my personal experience: When COVID hit the world at the end of 2019, everything was shut down.
My wife and I became our son at the end of 2019, while everything looked normal in our country. In March 2020, we were no longer allowed to meet anyone or go out, and we were locked up for weeks while we could only get the essential things from the stores.
Having a child for the first time is a true challenge. Those who have kids will understand what I am talking about. Suddenly, your life turns around by 180 degrees and changes significantly.
Taking care of yourself is crucial.
What I was missing the most during the first year and a half was having time on my own. And I still do miss that as I am the kind of a person who needs time off to recharge my internal batteries. You will learn more about that in my article about introverts and extroverts.
So I realized that I had to face the truth and let my wife know that I do need some time on my own to take care of myself. Luckily she understood that because we had known each other already ten years before we had our son.
I can encourage you that if you are in a situation where something does not feel right for you and you start realizing what it is, consider talking to someone directly affected by your feeling.
Pillar 4 – Positive Relationships
Relationships are essential for everyone. Especially when you have a hard time being, it helps if you create bonds with people that care for you and you care for them. Some of you might believe that they are an island. I thought the same, but the older I get, the less I believe in that saying.
When my wife and I got our baby, I slowly started realizing that not having a local support system with people you love and trust is. It can be challenging for yourself and even for a relationship that has worked well for more than ten years.
The sad element here is that I was different when I was young. I knew so many people, but after suffering from severe emotional trauma due to my upbringing, I started to no longer rely on others. That’s the reason why I gave up on so many friends. But that’s backfiring on me now.
So I can only recommend not giving up on your friends. Start building relationships early in your life as it gets harder and harder to build new relationships the older you get. Last but not least, nobody wants to die alone.
Pillar 5 – Purpose
Everybody seems to strive to find their purpose in their life. It would help if you found the place where you belong, and many of us want to serve something bigger than ourselves. As unique as your purpose is, as an individual, your personal goals will be.
The importance is that you find your goal, work towards it and own it. This will help you move forward whenever you experience a setback.
Conclusion
As you can see, these are two different concepts, and the first one is more business focused while the second one is more on a personal level. From my perspective, both concepts have their justification.
