What is resilience and how can you develop a more resilient workforce?

Resilient people keep proper perspective and persist with coping efforts long after less resilient types become demoralised and give up.

Resilience is not something that you’re either born with or you’re not. Resilience develops as people grow up and gain better thinking and self-management skills and more knowledge. Resilience also comes from supportive relationships with parents, peers and others, as well as cultural beliefs and traditions that help people cope with the inevitable bumps in life. Resilience is found in a variety of behaviours, thoughts, and actions that can be learned and developed across the life span.

Specifically, emotionally resilient people tend to:

• Have realistic and attainable expectations and goals.
• Show good judgment and problem-solving skills.
• Be persistent and determined.
• Be responsible and thoughtful rather than impulsive.
• Be effective communicators with good people skills.
• Learn from past experience so as to not repeat mistakes.
• Be empathetic toward other people (caring how others around them are feeling).
• Have a social conscience, (caring about the welfare of others).
• Feel good about themselves as a person.
• Feel like they are in control of their lives.
• Be optimistic rather than pessimistic.

These special beliefs characteristic of resilient people help them to keep proper perspective, and to persist with coping efforts long after less resilient types become demoralised and give up. When not-so-resilient people face difficulties all of their emotions turn negative. If things are good, they feel good, but if things are bad, they feel horrid.

In order to become a more resilient person, it is necessary to work on cultivating positive beliefs and attitudes.

Alive & Kicking Solutions has been working to build people’s emotional intelligence and emotional resilience for the last 15 years.

Our workshops help people to take full responsibility of their situations and emotions that impact their ability to respond or react in given situations. Now that resilience is receiving so much attention businesses are recognising the need to build individual capability to be effective in the face of ever-increasing change. Our expertise and experience has been brought to hundreds of workshops and to thousands of people who have learned to be ‘above the line’ and take 100% responsibility for the results they get, in good times and in challenging ones.

Resilience training provides essential skills to employees to support and assist them to adapt to change, innovation and new ways of thinking.

How we help build people’s skills to become more resilient

To build up the resilience in employees, we begin with an understanding of what resilience is – it is an individual’s ability to remain ‘in balance’, that is, healthy and effective, when things are going well and when faced with change and disruptions that life or the workplace has in store for us. These disruptions can be single events that occur throughout our lives (redeployment and redundancy) or they can be an accumulation of smaller discomforts (challenging projects, conflict amongst colleagues, organisational politics, criticism in their job, change of process, learning new systems, uncertainty about the future) that when they reach a breaking point the person finds they are well out of balance, and may experience symptoms of stress, sadness or depression, not eating well, not sleeping well, and the like.

Studies have shown that when people understand there are different ways they can react to these disruptions and they can be shown to develop skills to make meaning of the disruptions, they are far more likely to thrive from the disruptions rather than be adversely affected by them, and thereby not fully reintegrated back in to their normal functions and abilities.

The Alive & Kicking Resilience Program

This is what our Resilience Program addresses – the definition of what it means to be resilient, exploring ways to build up one’s personal resilience by using very effective and practical methods, and developing skills to manage change and other disruptions to achieve a positive impact in all areas of their life, personal and professional.

Some of the latest work on resilience building emphasises the importance of increasing people’s ability to experience positive emotions – as opposed to just trying to minimise stress and other negative emotions. Our program is designed to build skills of resilience and to develop a more positive outlook in one’s approach to their work and personal life.

Benefits of resilience training:

• Resilience to change
• The ability to manage their own mindset
• The ability to create a positive working culture
• The ability to move forward, and overcome fear
  • Fear of the unknown
  • Fear of new things
  • Fear of restructure
• The ability to fully participate fully and be engaged in all new initiatives
• Understand and list the benefits of resilience training

The organisation will benefit as participants will be more open to change, more willing to accept new ways and become more responsible for their own performance and improvement.

Resilience training has far reaching benefits to health, family, career success and overall wellbeing.

As Harvard Business School’s Rosabeth Moss Kantor says resilient workers are “fast, friendly, flexible, and focused.” A resilient workforce is healthy, energetic and enthusiastic and finally, a resilient workforce is a productive workforce.

Contact us to find out how we can help you build a culture of highly engaged, highly motivated, high performing people.