If you asked anyone on the street what the characteristics of a good leader are, what do you think you’d hear? Probably all the usual suspects: tenacity, integrity, insightfulness, etc. How about resilience? It probably didn’t come to the top of your head, but it’s certainly just as essential.

Resilience is the ability to pick oneself back up after encountering difficulties. It’s synonymous with elasticity; the point to which you can be stretched without breaking and return back to normal. Having resilience means not just recovering from turbulent situations but anticipating them and knowing they come with the job.

Resilience is more crucial to work life than most may realize—not just for leaders and employers, but for employees too. This is no more apparent than in the field of long term care, where most staff encounter high-stress, high-pressure situations on a daily basis.  Caring for complex and frail patients at the end of life can be emotionally distressing by nature, and add to that patients and families of patients under extreme stress with high expectations that can often be difficult to manage. Often times, staff work long hours of physical labor for less-than-extravagant wages.

It’s no wonder the long term care industry has high turnover rates and lower levels of employee satisfaction, this kind of work is certainly not for everyone, but those that do rise to the challenge have one thing in common: resilience.

Resilience is just as useful of a strength in one’s personal life as it is in their work life, and in fact the two are correlated. If someone can acclimate easily at home when difficult family and financial problems arise; they’ll be able to better deal with the challenges of work.  But if not, they can be overwhelmed by these compounding stresses and their personal and  work lives end up affecting each other negatively.

Thankfully, resilience isn’t something you either have or you don’t—everyone naturally has resilience and it can be trained and improved like any other learned skill!  SurTHRIVELeadership is designed around this belief and is dedicated to developing personal and professional resilience. In the coming blogs, we’ll unpack SurTHRIVELeadership’s philosophy and how each element of THRIVE is a necessary ingredient in cultivating resilience.