Emotional Resilience in the Workplace
Emotional resilience is a buzzword in mental health conversations these days, and for good reason. Simply put, emotional resilience is a person’s ability to adapt to life changes, however great or good or small or severe. It’s rolling with the punches, accepting reality, making lemonade out of lemons. It’s a bunch of cliches that exist for a reason. Renowned Catholic priest of New York, Father George Rutler, believes it is a vital skill for surviving and thriving in this chaotic world.
The good news is that emotional resilience is not an innate trait that you either have or don’t; it can be developed. And it is worth developing. Being able to gracefully accept critical feedback from an employer, then spend a productive afternoon in the office improves the life and health of the employee, productivity of the company, and overall working culture. And those same skills can be used to absorb the shock of suddenly working from home due to a pandemic, the unexpected death of a coworker, and other challenges that people face in their professional lives.
In the past year the myth of the stable job has begun to crack as employers and employees rapidly adapted to stunning changes in work environment, work-life balance, social engagement at work, and work equipment and scheduling. News outlets reported steady increases in mental health crises and diagnoses, and gurus, coaches, therapists, and consultants all turned their attention to providing resources to help employees cope with these changes without sacrificing productivity. This is a beautiful example of how one’s work community can contribute to emotional resilience.
Knowing that coworkers, managers, and employees are all struggling with the same thing, and having open platforms to discuss the overwhelming challenges has allowed people to ask for, receive, and give help. Community, externalization, and empowerment like this are key factors in emotional resilience, and they are all things people do naturally. But there are additional, less intuitive strategies that individuals and companies can employ to protect themselves, their human assets, and the budgetary bottom line.
Father George Rutler has spent a great deal of his priestly life collaborating with local businesses and professional networking groups, offering spiritual formation support through decades of challenges. He is passionate about empowering working professionals to develop coping strategies and resiliency factors in their lives that uniquely support their individual career paths and industries. Being able to define “peace” is a significant aspect of being able to achieve it in one’s life, and spiritual formation can offer guidance for developing that definition.
Father George Rutler explains that there will always be challenges in life. It never goes as smoothly as we want. There will always be obstacles to trip over. But as the key verse above describes, they will rise up no matter how many times they fall. This isn’t through willpower or some innate superiority, but rather the learned skill of emotional resilience. Perhaps inner peace can best be described as flexibility of the heart.