Squiggly Skill Sprint Day 10: Resilience

It’s day 10 of the Squiggly Careers sprint, and today’s topic is Resilience https://www.amazingif.com/listen/skills-sprint-resilience/

Today’s post is later in the day as I’ve spent the last three days pretending to be still in my 20s at a music festival. Saying that, it was pointed out that the crowd for Suede and Blur were rather more mature. Either way, seeing some bands with friends has been a great little recharge.

Anyway, on the topic of resilience. What is interesting to me is what Helen and Sarah say about recharging your resilience with other things away from work. I spent many years training in martial arts, and there is a japanese phrase often used in karate, “Nana Korobi, ya oki”, which means “Fall down seven times, stand up eight”. I consider myself to be resilient and determined, and have been told as such. A lot of this I can trace back to adversity when I was younger. So in many ways it suited me having hobbies that are very much based on persistence, determination, and keeping going until your body gives in.

Saying that, I wonder how much that takes out of someone, when you have to be determined and bloody-minded all the time, in work and away from it. When the time that you should be recharging that resilience is arguably draining it.

The podcast talks about enmeshment, or the idea that you are so intertwined with your work that the ups and downs of work affect you too much. I think the risk of enmeshment is often down to what your identity is. Do you stay in a workplace beyond the natural time to leave because you identify too much with the company or the role? Do you stay with a hobby or pastime beyond the point where it is recharging you?

One of the things that changed for me over the pandemic was that karate wasn’t fun or feasible for me over Zoom, and I suddenly had my long-standing identity of being a martial artist challenged in a way that it never had been before. I’m not training like that any more, and that really came down to me coming out of the pandemic without that sense of identity any more.

Given that I have time for myself at the moment, I’m focussing on those questions of identity, and seeing what I am naturally gravitating to when I am not being forced down any path for the first time in a long time. Hopefully at the end of this period I’ll come out reset and balanced for the next phase, and not depleting my resiliency banks forcing myself down a certain path.