Sunday, 3 November 2013

Resilience: where do I find the energy?

Resilience is an exciting combination of:

1.    Personal Competences (like the 7 you can find in our Resilience Scan)
2.    Social energy sources
3.    Structural energy sources

After our last blog-series on resilience, where we have discussed the 7 personal competences, we start a new series on ‘Social Energy Sources’ today.

Aaron Antonowski writes the following on this topic: ‘people who are socially well integrated and rooted within a warm family, likeminded people, a community and a national identity (which they are proud of), automatically create one of the pillars for a healthy lifestyle and resilience.

Now, you might think: this sounds well, but really, how can you ever be integrated and rooted in all these environments. Such thinking does not sound unfair. Still, fact remains; who wants to develop resilience cannot refrain from building up his or her social sources. Let us start with a short list of some of the social sources:

1.    Family, partner, children, grandchildren, broader family;
2.    Friends en acquaintances;
3.    Community, associations, sport-clubs and other tribes;
4.    Professional contacts, colleagues, intervision-groups;
5.    Our national identity, clan.

Well then, ask yourself: on a scale of 1 to 10, how much energy do you receive from each of these 5 sources? Then, question nr. 2: what people, within each source, are mostly giving you energy, and who is mostly draining your energy?

Create a little list; divide the energy-givers from the energy-drainers. And, perhaps, choose to park the energy-drainers for a while, and find out how you can spend some more time with the energy-givers.

Starting next week, we will take a look at each of the 5 sources.

Good luck

Paul Donders

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