Self-knowledge for resilience in research
How do I stand at the moment
What builds my resilience, what drains my resilience away?
Knowing yourself, your strengths and development areas are the first steps to deciding to take some relevant and achievable action. What, and who, builds your resilience? What situations use up your resilience and how do you recover?
Take a few moments of self-reflection, have conversations with colleagues, supervisors and friends and or use online tools and resources to help you discover more about yourself. Self-knowledge builds over time.
Some resilience-building activities are regularly repeated behaviours in certain situations or with specific individuals or groups. The same is true for resilience-draining ones. When things go well and you feel encouraged and strong, think about what led to that. Similarly when you have used a lot of energy dealing with something or someone, pause to work out what or who has caused you to use so much of your resilience in dealing with it/them.
The iResilience questionnaire and report from Robertson Cooper tells you more about their researched model of resilience and how to develop your own resilience. It is a helpful starting point to supplement the contents of this booklet.
What are my best and most productive times of day?
Are you a morning person or an evening person? When do you have your biggest focus for important tasks?
This is a question of when is the best time in the day for you to have periods of 30-60 minutes of focused working time where you can really concentrate on getting important things done rather than one about setting hours aside to lose yourself in a task.
- When is it a good time for you to read?
- When do you find it easiest to write something?
- If you were to answer emails only once a day when would it be most useful for you to do that?
- If you were to take a break from using the Internet for an hour a day when would that be the most effective for you?
Resilience can be built by the completion of things you and others care about. We can often find it easier to complete things if we do them when our energy is at its highest for that task. As busy researchers, it can often be difficult to find the time, energy and environment to write and develop a writing habit despite many of the outputs being written ones. Finding and sticking to your “writing time” may be a resilience builder for you.
Read this article that identifies six common habits, that academics interviewed, tended to use to boost their productivity.
How do I respond to a deadline?
How you manage deadlines may contribute to either building your resilience (by enabling you to get-things-done and feel purposeful) or drain your resilience (by the lack of sleep or stress they can create when one is imminent).
Typically, we tend to prefer to either stick to a plan OR be excited by the creativity and productivity that comes with the rush of the last minute. Constantly working against our preference, or in an environment where we feel others prevent us from achieving our preferred deadline management approach, can be a significant resilience drain. This can be a particular issue when it leads to conflict or causes stress.
Having some understanding of our own preference and those of others around us can help us to manage ourselves and our environments. If we have language to describe ourselves and what we need we can use this self-knowledge to communicate it to others and potentially restore resilience-draining situations.
Take this online assessment, which covers some deadline-based topics and is loosely based on the Myers Briggs Type Indicator. The outputs of this type of questionnaire can help to give us self-knowledge.
How do I feel about feedback?
Feedback is a difficult topic. We can receive it and dwell on it for days, particularly if we feel that the feedback is personal. How do we respond to feedback?
Whilst at a core level we can believe that: “We all need people who will give us feedback. That’s how we improve.” Bill Gates As individuals…
We can react to it – “the other person is wrong, they don’t see things in the way they should, their perspective is not relevant!”
We can ignore it – “it doesn’t apply to me and my work, it is not worth anything to me at the moment.”
We can sift through it and extract the useful parts – “…actually that bit is relevant and I can do something about it.”
We can take it on the chin and do something about all of it – “They are right, I must do something about all of this!” Our resilience can be strengthened by considering the perspectives of others in developing our own reactions to feedback and what we do with it.
Read Rowena Murray and Sarah Moore’s book The Handbook of Academic Writing – A Fresh Approach that deals with using feedback.
How do I handle criticism and conflict?
This topic could run to pages in its own right. The point of covering it briefly here is to raise it as a subject and ask you how the management of conflict in your life affects your resilience?
Significant conflicts over personal and professional issues have the potential to reduce our resilience over a period of time, whilst handling them well might boost our resilience-building strategies. However, it is often the more trivial ongoing conflicts that need to be addressed in equal measure to the more obvious major ones, in order to sustain day-to-day resilience.
Go to the Kilman Diagnostics website as they have a more detailed description of each of the conflict handling approaches (no purchase necessary).
How do I respond to an obligation?
On your physical or mental to-do list today there will be things you have to/want to do for yourself and things that you have to/want to do for other people. It is often useful to look down your list at the things that are routinely left undone – are these tasks for other people or yourself?
If you regularly prioritise both equally it is likely that your resilience is pretty high – that you satisfy your own needs as well as those of others around you. If you consistently put the needs of others ahead of yourself, it may reduce your resilience.
It is important, to reprioritise where possible and satisfying your own needs, particular for larger tasks, that will make a difference to you professionally or create enough time and space to do things that you know will be resilience building. This extends to all types of commitments as you may find yourself able to keep obligations to yourself to run, walk outside and resist the sugary snacks at the counter when you are feeling resilient which are equally important commitments you’ve made to yourself.
Go to Gretchen Rubin's website, who studies and writes about happiness and human nature, and understanding how we respond to an obligation. Managing obligations to others and ourselves is relevant to how we manage our resilience. How can we create an obligation to ourselves to keep our resilience high?