Change and challenge affect everyone differently. Even so, research by the American Psychological Association shows we can get better at handling life-changing and stressful situations over time. We can acquire coping skills, a.k.a. resilience.
As farmers, we’ve experienced repeated setbacks and we’ve been able to explore our resilience boundaries over the last few years (COVID-19, weather, war, inflation, labour shortages, etc.). But we may still have lots of misconceptions about what it means to be resilient.
“Conventional thinking assumes (resiliency) is something we find within ourselves only when we are tested — a kind of solitary internal ‘grit’ that allows those of us who are strong to bounce back. But that’s not necessarily true,” write the authors of ‘The Secret to Building Resilience.’
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Grit is more aligned with perseverance, which is defined as a deliberate and focused effort over time.
Resilience, on the other hand, is how we learn to cope with and recover from difficult experiences and setbacks. It’s about learning healthy ways to adapt, move forward and thrive.
Resilience levels are not connected to gender. Research by the ADP Research Institute found “men and women around the world have almost exactly the same levels of resilience.” Age doesn’t seem to be a significant factor either.
And being resilient does NOT mean you never experience stress, intense emotions or suffering. Being resilient simply means that you accept the situation, focus on possible solutions and learn better strategies that promote adaptation to change and adversity.
What’s happening in our brains
Stress and uncertainty trigger a response in the amygdala, part of the brain’s limbic system which first appeared in small mammals about 150 million years ago. Often referred to as the Old Brain (versus the “new” higher-level thinking neo-cortex that evolved more recently), it is vital to our survival mechanisms.
When the brain senses a threat, it initiates the “fight, freeze or flight” response. Highly stressful and/or uncertain situations stimulate a whole series of physiological reactions (the body directs blood towards vital organs like the heart; hormones such as adrenaline are released) so you are prepared to face the challenge or run for your life, and emotions like fear, anxiety and aggression are triggered.
Eons ago, Old Brain threats used to be giant man-eating tigers or other cave people looking to club you over the head and steal your food. Modern era threats are not often of that calibre, but the brain isn’t very good at differentiating. Anything that threatens the safety, equilibrium and well-being of the body can set off the fight-freeze-flight chain reaction, including business changes and challenges or personal difficulties.
“We should understand that the human brain simply was not built for this,” say Heidi Grant and Tal Goldhamer in Our Brains Were Not Built for This Much Uncertainty. “Knowing what your brain does well — and what it does surprisingly poorly — can give you a much clearer sense of the strategies you need to not just endure, but to thrive.”
Let’s explore some of those strategies.
- Uncertain times, such as planned or unplanned changes to the farm business, call for certain actions. “Uncertainty leads to decreases in motivation, focus, agility, co-operative behaviour, self-control, sense of purpose and meaning, and overall well-being,” write Grant and Goldhamer. They also note that threats impair your working memory: you can’t hold as many ideas in your mind to solve problems and you can’t retrieve as much information from long-term memory when you need it. They suggest two strategies to increase resiliency in the face of uncertainty:
- 1) Use realistic optimism when setting expectations. In other words, “believe that everything is going to work out just fine, while accepting that getting there might not be easy.”
- 2) Use bigger-picture thinking. We tend to get mired in the weedy details when we encounter difficulty or uncertainty yet Grant and Goldhamer found that when we shift up to bigger-picture thinking — i.e., considering larger meaning or purpose — we’re better motivated and significantly more resilient when challenged.
- Resilience is also enabled by strong relationships and networks. “These interactions can help us to alter the magnitude of the challenge we’re facing,” write researchers Rob Cross, Karen Dillon and Danna Greenberg. “They can help crystalize the meaningful purpose in what we are doing or help us see a path forward to overcome a setback — these are the kinds of interactions that motivate us to persist.” They suggest nurturing resilience by building a wide and varied network of personal and professional interactions. The researchers say, “Resilience is a team sport… (Our networks) can help us see a path forward; provide empathic support so we can release negative emotions; help us to laugh at ourselves and the situation; remind us of the purpose or meaning in our work; and broaden us as individuals so that we maintain perspective when setbacks happen.” So, find your people and lean on them for support, insights, perspective adjustments, and emotional release.
- Another tactic is mental conditioning. Teaching yourself to adopt a neutral mindset will help your mind stay on track when negative thoughts and anxiety want to push it off. Negative thoughts and worries make it more likely you’ll struggle on basic tasks, Christine and Mike Porath warn in their article How to Thrive When Everything is Terrible. “Don’t get sucked into analyzing past failures or hijacked by future fears or thoughts. Take one play at a time,” they write. The language you use conditions how your mind thinks and reacts, so shift to more neutral language when framing and speaking about a challenging situation (e.g. instead of saying “This situation is devastating” say “This situation is a challenge.”).
Resilient businesses
As a farm owner it’s not only your personal resilience that matters during times of challenge and change, you also need to consider the resiliency of your business.
“There’s no instruction manual for business resiliency,” says Ed Jay in To Small Businesses Everywhere: Stay Scrappy and Embrace Economic Chaos. “Still, recent research is showing that truly resilient companies tend to be those with leaders who think ahead, review their business operations often, and put people first.”
McKinsey & Company, a global management consulting firm, suggests that to tackle “institutional resilience,” leaders can pose three key questions: How well is the company prepared to respond to disruptions and apply all available resilience levers? Has the company defined the right scenarios and does it have an analytical tool kit in place to anticipate the next storm? Is the business investing in an agile organization to build a resilience muscle that will serve in the long term?
Interestingly, the ADP Research Institute report mentioned above found that the type of work you do may have an impact on your resilience. They found significant differences in the resilience levels of people based on their perception of daily job complexity. They asked study participants: “Which of the following best describes a typical day at work?” and assigned a value of percentage HR (Highly Resilient). The results were as follows: I have a level of freedom to use my expertise to create: 28 per cent; I use a level of expertise to solve similar problems each day: 18 per cent; I do similar repetitive tasks each day: 12 per cent. What I found intriguing was that farmers can easily fall into all three categories, making for potentially very high resilience levels!
“It’s not the presence or absence of difficulty, but how they (businesses) deal with the inevitable difficulties of life,” Jim Collins writes in his book Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t. Business environments — and life — are inherently uncertain. We can mitigate some of the resultant stress and anxiety by finding ways to make situations less abstract and more “real” by establishing resilient coping mechanisms.
“Resilience is a reactive state of mind created by exposure to suffering,” concludes the ADP Institute. “The real is almost always less scary than the imagined. The more tangible the threat, the more resilient we become.”
– This article was originally published in the March 2024 issue of Country Guide.
