We’re all familiar with the word ‘resilience’, but what about ‘presilience’? I’m guessing even though you may not have heard of presilience before, you get the gist: prevention.
I think of it this way, presilience is about attending to our wellbeing in a proactive, preventative manner. So that when life’s inevitable stresses happen, we’re in a well-resourced state to meet the challenges of the moment, and bouncing back from adverse experiences is easier.
Let’s just pause and go back in time for a moment.
More than 300 years ago, Benjamin Franklin said, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Interestingly, word historians say that when Franklin wrote those words, he wasn’t referring to the prevention of illness, but rather fire prevention. Ironically, his famous phrase is so very fitting when it comes to burnout.
And for the record, burnout is real. In 2019, the WHO identified burnout as an occupational phenomenon, characterised by:
- Complete exhaustion,
- Zero care factor about our work, and
- The work that we do, is of reduced quality.
Burnout is the accumulation of stress that has gone unchecked and has built up over time. To be clear, we can be stressed but not necessarily burned out. But if our stress isn’t monitored and addressed along the way, it can eventually lead to burnout.
Burnout isn’t just about over-working, it’s about under-recovery. Burnout is the accumulation of stress that has gone unchecked and has then built up over time.
I believe we can prevent burnout by mindfully attending to our presilience. In my work with professionals, I support them around putting together personal presilience strategies that are designed around regularly attending to the social, emotional, physical, and mental (cognitive) domains of life. I help them to mind their mojo.
Ever get sick on the first few days of a much-needed holiday?
If so, that’s the body taking over and going into recovery-mode. You work really hard and deserve for your holiday time to be about recreation, not recovery. Pushing hard all year and putting off recovery time until holidays is not an effective approach to stress management. The binge / purge approach to stress management is not sustainable for professionals, especially those in high-stakes, high-stress environments.
Personal presilience strategies are a simple, but formal plan, of the mindful actions high-achieving professionals regularly weave into the cracks and crevices of their days. All in an effort to help prevent:
- Stress from building up, going unchecked, and leading to burnout, and
- Being in state that is so lowly resourced that it makes bouncing back from adverse experiences longer and harder than it has to be.
Attending to our stress in a presilient way has so many benefits. It’s important to manage our stress, not just to prevent burnout, but because it is one of the top three threats to our brain’s attention system.