Personal resilience – activity

As you will have read, Manage your energy, not your time suggests a number of habits, rituals, and practices across the four dimensions of energy: physical, emotional, mental and spiritual.  If you think of these as the resources that are available to you to help you to survive and thrive, unless renewed, these resources will deplete over time. Consider how resourceful across these dimensions you are feeling right now?

  • What are you already doing to ensure that you regularly renew your resources across these four dimensions of energy?  Think about your activities in the last week, look at your diary if necessary to jog your memory, and make a note of anything you have done in that last 7 days that will have renewed your energy across any of the four dimensions.  Please record which of the dimensions each activity has renewed for you: physical, emotional, mental or spiritual?  Of course, some activities may have an impact on more than one of these dimensions.
  • Does this feel enough to you?  Do you generally find you have sufficient energy to survive and thrive?  If so, how can you ensure you protect the habits, practices, and rituals that you have discovered?  When do they become threatened? What can you do to mitigate against this? 
  • If you are thinking that you don’t typically do enough to renew your depleted energy resources, what more can you do?  Make a plan now to introduce one or two new habits, rituals or practices in the next 7 days. As you think about what you might introduce, be clear which of the four dimensions of energy you think will be impacted by this new activity so that you can more clearly review the efficacy of your choice.
  • And what can you do to support others to do the same?  What is your role in creating the conditions for others to renew their energy resources?  What can you do together, collectively with your team, department, unit, colleagues etc. that will encourage others to build their resilience?  At the very least, make a plan for how you can discuss this topic with others to start to explore with them what you could do as a collective effort to build resilience amongst team members.  Make some notes in your e-journal about how those conversations go and share any discoveries you make on the discussion forum.
  • Before you complete your work on this topic of personal resilience, we’d like you to watch another TED talk; this one is by Shawn Achor, who concludes his talk with some further suggestions for some regular energy renewal habits.  Shawn’s style is very different from Bryan Stevenson, not least because his pace of speech is very quick; so be ready for the rapid delivery style. If you miss any of the talk first time around then, as with most TED talks, there is a link to the transcript of the presentation so you can do some further study after you have seen the presentation.

Now complete your plans for how you are going to ensure you find opportunities to renew your own energy resources and, where possible, the energy resources of those with whom you work.