Life throws curve balls. Here’s how I bounce back.

Resilience. It’s become one of the great buzzwords of the past couple of years, and for good reason. Resilience is all about bouncing back from tough times and setbacks, and the Great Pandemic has certainly tested ours to the limit.

A lot of people think that resilience is something you’re born with. A recent training session at King Price showed me that’s simply not true. In fact, resilience is a learned skill – and you actually never finish learning it.

Is it something we all should learn? Absolutely. The ability to be resilient is a huge advantage, both in the workplace and in your life. It has a major impact on your personal wellbeing, and increases longevity. It boosts your work performance, gives you hope through difficult circumstances, and helps you feel in control when everything around you is going crazy.

Being resilient doesn’t mean you won’t have problems, or will suddenly stop making mistakes. It means that when you do make a mistake, you’ll be able to learn the lesson and move on. And that’s a critical skill in life.

So how do you become more resilient? One of the most important factors in developing resilience is to live authentically. ‘Being authentic’ is another of the popular buzzphrases of our time – but what it really means is that you know your values, and you live them. Your words and your actions align. As my Afrikaans colleagues would say, ‘jou oggend en aandpraatjies stem ooreen’ (what you say in the morning is the same as what you say in the evening!). Bottom line: it’s tough to bounce back from stuff if you’re battling to be yourself in the first place.

Another part of leaning to be more resilient is to realise that you can’t control what life throws at you, but you can certainly control your reactions to it. It’s about being very clear about what you can control, and taking back your power over that. It’s about recognising your role in situations, and changing your behaviour if necessary.

I’ve always had the mindset of trying to reframe problems as opportunities. Turns out that’s another building block of resilience. Instead of thinking, “I have to do this thing”, rather think: “I get to do this thing”. It’s a subtle difference in approach that makes a big difference to how you feel about something, and end up doing it.

And then, just be human. Allow yourself to accept compliments, without brushing them off. Be genuinely happy for other people when things go right for them. Just roll with the waves of life, rather than trying to fight them. That, my friends, is resilience.