I was speaking with a group of retail management folks in Asheville, N.C. recently and the topic of physical and mental fatigue was foremost on their minds.  They were sharing with me that they felt like their ability to bounce back from one crisis event to another was decreasing and that they were having a more difficult time rallying the troops to rise to the occasion.  I proceeded to tell them about the experiment we did in my college kinesiology lab many many years ago.  We were learning about the co-efficient of resilience and how it applied to physical training and work.  We would take a rubber ball, about the size of a red playground ball and drop it from a 10 foot ladder.  The first time it hit the floor it bounced way back up, had a good amount of resilience we would say.  The next bounce it took was not as high and each bounce thereafter was less in height.  We could easily see that with each physical hit the resiliency of the ball decreased greatly.  I shared with them that the lessons learned from this experiment clearly apply to our lives.  It seems like we take “bounces” or hits  in all shapes and sizes every day and for the most part, we come back from those hits quite well. But, there are indeed times when too many hits are coming in a row that we lose our ability to bounce up as quickly or as high as we once did.  They were happy to hear that there was a logical reason for what they were noticing.  So how do we keep our resiliency?  We need to realize that not all things create a crisis.  We need to define what is regular for our day to day work world and we need not give in to the frantic vibes that others may be throwing our way.  We are way more resilient than we think.  Remember the bouncing ball!