Achievement Builds Resilience

"While early childhood professionals are naturally a hardy group of people, we regularly draw on our resilience and strength. If we don't replenish these, we'll burn out.  To avoid this, we must continually nurture our resilience." These are the views of Rachel Robertson and Helen Zarba in their article "Getting and Keeping Your Groove: Building Resilience in Adults," which appeared in the Beginnings Professional Development Workshop, Mental Health. In the article the authors laid out a wide range of resilience-building solutions including focusing on "personal perceptions of achievement and ensuring that each person has the opportunity to establish and achieve goals in areas that matter to her." Here are some of their strategies for facilitating achievement:

• Challenge yourself.  Push yourself, step out of that box, take risks: Discover something new about yourself by exploring a new hobby; make plans for the next step in your career; create fitness goals for yourself. Don't let predetermined theories of success discourage you. Find a buddy to work with in achieving your goals.
• Come up with group goals and work together to achieve them. Enjoy the process of identifying and working ­together toward an agreed-upon goal as much as achieving it. Reflect on what you're gaining in the process: a deeper understanding of each other, shared experiences, new skills, and so on. Celebrate each step along the way.
• Give some attention to your strengths. Spend time ­identifying each team member's strengths and create ways to encourage their contributions to the team/workplace in new ways.

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