VUCA Bazooka?
Volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA) could be described as the new normal across politics, world health and business. You might not be surprised to know that at a neurological level your brain is programmed to experience this as a threat, but you may not know how best to deal with it.
How you react to any threat depends on a number of factors and the more you are familiar with these, the more resilient you will be. So take a minute and ask yourself how much do you know about:
- The way you solve problems and in particular your “fluid intelligence”, which is your capacity to deal with unfamiliar, rapidly changing, incomplete or vague information? Do you relax and stay creative or do you get tense and jump to conclusions? There’s a clue here: relaxation and good stress management are essential!
- Your personality – in particular your openness to different experiences, thoughts, feelings and ideas and the degree to which you recognise and manage your emotions? How well do you know yourself? Are you playing to your strengths?
- Your personal narrative – the collection of beliefs that you hold about yourself and the degree to which they are empowering and enabling or restricting? Do you have a restricted or a growth mindset?
- What drives you when you are under pressure; whether your strengths become overdone and where your risks of derailment lie; also whether you become susceptible to hurrying up, attempting to be perfect, trying to please others, self-sabotaging or toughing it out? What’s lockdown been like for you? A time to reflect or a period of “toxic productivity”?
- How you form and maintain relationships when you are under stress – whether you deal with life’s ups and downs with equanimity; whether you cling to people or hesitate to approach others for fear of rejection? Recent working patterns have left a lot of us feeling isolated and vulnerable. How have you been coping?
- The extent to which you freeze, flee or fight when faced with danger; how active and solution-focused your thinking is? Do you have days when you have been busy but not sure what you have acheived?
- How you control your mood, exercise self-compassion and deal with disappointments? How would you rate your bounce-back abilty?
When facing VUCA, make sure you are at the right end of the bazooka! To find out more about how coaching could help you, get in touch with us today.
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