Mental toughness: Resilient employees can thrive during and after COVID-19
Andrew Shatte, Ph.D., specializes in resilience research. He says you probably don’t realize that your pandemic mentality may be creating a stronger you, one who will be more prepared to deal with the next major crisis.
While these may be difficult times, Shatte suggests it’s possible to build up resiliency to help deal with this new reality. “Staying calm and focused is the center point of resilience,” says Shatte, psychologist and chief science officer at meQuilibrium, a well-being and resilience training platform based in Boston.
While it may be difficult, Shatte recommends practicing positivity. “Recognizing that our brains, while in this uncertainty, will tend to go negative
so we need to counterbalance that in order to be realistic,” says Shatte, who recommends taking a few moments each evening to focus on and share some of the good things that happened that day.”
The good and the bad
Shatte says that whether or not people learn new lessons from the pandemic remains to be seen. “What we typically find from these things is that the good lessons tend to get forgotten,” says Shatte. “Resilience isn’t just about dealing with the bad stuff; it’s emerging from the crucible of an adversity stronger
and better for it. And it’s the minority of people who are able to achieve that. They grow and they recognize their growth through this.”
Shatte points to the mindset of many after the recession in 2008. “It was enormously powerful for a lot of people. It reinvigorated their lives, they reinvented themselves and they completely realigned their values to a new priority. And I think the same thing could happen here,” Shatte says. “What we tend to see, however, is people take away the negative lessons and those stay with them longer. While Shatte feels it’s too early to be encouraging people to seek out the positive aspects from the pandemic, he hopes they’ll eventually be
able to use the experience to their benefit.
Return to normal?
As today’s work-from-home employees head back to the office, Shatte cautions against expecting things to fall right back into pre-pandemic mode. “No one
is going to go back to where they were. Even the most driven people that I know are now saying ‘there’s no way I’m gonna go to the office five days a week. I realize now I don’t need to,’” Shatte says. “We’ll see a shift in thinking. We were
heading that way anyway but in this new world, a new approach is going to make more sense.”
Still, Shatte says don’t expect any short- or long-term changes to postpandemic business practices until people feel comfortable going back to the workplace. “The onus is on the organizational leaders to ensure the safety of people who are returning to work,” he says.
And if and when that threshold is reached, Shatte says employees will have to deal with new — yet familiar — return-to-work emotions. “I think you are going to find that people are not going to like it. It’s almost like what happens at the end of the summer when you’re in school or at the end of a vacation when you’ve spent all this great time with family and now you need to go back to the office. There’s going to be that feel to it,” he says. “We’ll re-adjust, for sure, although many of us will do so grudgingly but I really do think that it’s never going to be as it was. We have to be ready for that.”