This month, as part of our regular ‘Careers Corner, we caught up with Amy Wilkinson, Coach and Facilitator at Amy Wilkinson Coaching, about what resilience means to her and how you can build your own resilience toolkit.
“Working in the Food and Grocery industry my whole life has taught me a lot about resilience, never more those low points that often came after the big highs – “We’ve won a multi million pound contract, whoop!” Quickly followed by – “The factory are struggling to produce it and we are shorting like crazy! Can you phone the customer and tell them?”
Sound familiar?! What is the difference between someone who can ride those waves and someone who gets crushed under the weight of it all? Their resilience levels.
For a long time, I thought of resilience was just “pushing through”, plastering on a brave face and getting the job done at all costs. That led to mental and physical burnout for me.
Over the last 10 years I have researched and built my resilience and here’s the 4 key components of resilience, which I use as a framework for my resilience building workshops:
1. Emotional intelligence – recognising your emotional triggers and what messages they are sending you, is super important inside and outside of work
2. Self regulation – knowing how to rest, restore and reinvigorate yourself after a stressful period at work is key to avoiding burnout
3. Solution seeking mindset – the way we frame a problem has a massive effect on how we are able to handle it. Learning to reframe your negative thought patterns can really help.
4. Support network – as humans, we need connection and being able to reach out and ask others for help is a key component of being a resilient person
By keeping all of these in mind and building my own “resilience toolkit” I have managed to recover from being bedbound to a thriving career in food – and I know I will never burnout again, as I can recognise the signs much sooner.
If you’d like to hear more about my burnout story and what you can do to build your own resilience toolkit you can listen to the Oh for Food’s Sake podcast or join the ‘Building your resilience toolkit to prevent burnout’ webinar with Meat Business Women on 13th June 2023.”
