Your Job

In the next few months I’m going to be presenting some challenges and then discussing some possible ways of dealing with them using the skills and the attitudes of resilience. These challenges are part of a game called “Bounce Back” that we developed a few years ago to teach the skills and the attitudes of resilience. We are in the process of creating an electronic “Bounce Back” that can be played over a website that will present these challenges to players and provide them with some immediate feedback regarding the skills and the attitudes of resilience that we think might be useful in responding to the challenge.
So let’s assume that you are playing “Bounce Back” and you have just been dealt this challenge:
Because of your job, you are repeatedly missing activities that your children are involved in, such as Little League games and dance recitals. Your boss e-mails you at home. You’re working long hours and you spend a great deal of time apologizing and trying to explain why you’re not able to leave the office earlier.
How would you use the skills and the attitudes of resilience in dealing with the challenge?
As I have said previously, everyone is different and what we are going to give you now are just suggestions as to the skills and the attitudes that you might apply to the situation that’s just been described. First of all, we assume that it might be good to try to talk with your boss and especially with the other people in your life about the conflict that you are facing. Communication would be one of the critical skills to use in dealing with this challenge. We also would assume that you might have some feelings about what’s going on and would need to manage those too. Again, communicating about those and venting them might be a good idea. Flexibility would also be useful in trying to develop a plan and a solution to dealing with the situation that you are confronting. Stepping back a bit and reviewing the priorities in your life and looking at what’s really important might also help you make some decisions and develop a plan of action. And, obviously, after you’ve developed a plan of action and talked with others and looked at what’s important in your life, doing something is going to be critical. Hopefully, after communicating with others and developing a plan, you may feel more confident that you can now deal with the situation.
As I said earlier, these are only suggestions, and we would suggest that you think through if and how you might apply them. There might be other skills that you think you could apply or other ways you might want to approach this situation. Again, every situation is different, as is every individual confronting a challenge.
In our next blog we’ll take another challenge and discuss the skills and the attitudes of resilience that might be useful in managing it.