3 Commonly Used Phrases Around Resilience That Actually Drain Resilience

Resilience is very popular as a topic currently. Everyone is talking about how to build resilience in order to cope with the stresses and strains of everyday life and the odd exceptional circumstance.

It has become very fashionable for organisations to look at building resilience in people and they look to the CIPD, psychologists, coaches and trainers to help them with this erstwhile endeavour. YET, there are a number of commonly used phrases that are used when working with resilience that may exacerbate the issue. These phrases are used so often that you probably use them yourself every day without even thinking about them.

1) Resilience involves “bouncing-back”
Resilience is often defined as your ability to bounce back from the stresses of life.

The idea of resilience as an aspect of human behaviour originates from material science where it describes the property of a material to resume its original shape after distortion or stress – to bounce back.

The issue with the phrase “bouncing back” is that there is an expectation that people will return back to a state where nothing has changed.

You show good resilience by possessing:

• a firm, reliable acceptance of reality
• a deep belief, supported by strongly held values, that life is meaningful
• an ability to be creative, adaptable and to improvise.

This has nothing to do with bouncing (backward or forward) as you continually evolve and improve yourself by learning from your environment and your mistakes and in this way develop your resilience.

2) Resilient people are better at managing “positive and negative emotions”
Emotion is a complex state of feeling resulting in physical and psychological changes that influence thought and behaviour.  Emotions are controlled through interactions of your amygdala and hippocampal complex within the limbic system of your brain. This part of the brain has no language processing ability. It is your neo-cortex – the thinking part of the brain - that assigns a label to the emotion.

The issue with the phrase “positive and negative emotions” is that it assumes some emotions to be good and some to be bad.

Emotions are emotions. You experience them for a reason. They have developed over eons through evolutionary processes as a survival mechanism. It is not the emotion that is positive or negative; it is the thought process and the behaviour that accompanies it that requires the label.

Anger is often referred to as a negative emotion, yet it serves you well to right a wrong, to be more attentive and careful in your thinking and to motivate you at certain times.

Fear is often referred to as a negative emotion. If it is so negative, why can you get so much enjoyment from horror movies and scary films?

Happiness is often referred to as a positive emotion. It is suggestive of a state of blissful nirvana that you must aspire towards, yet it is not appropriate at solemn occasions. Also, happiness will limit you in your ability to communicate effectively, negotiate well and make critical decisions. It can encourage riskier behaviours, encourage you to take shortcuts and lead you to make more mistakes.

Resilience is developed through the intelligent application and expression of identified emotions, known as emotional intelligence.

3) Resilient people have a good “work / life balance”
Resilience is having a clear, realistic focus of what is important and being able to prioritise effectively.

The issue with the phrase “work /life balance” is that it compartmentalises everything into work activities (meetings, clients, trips, conferences) and life activities (family commitments, holidays, hobbies, keeping healthy).

Think about it. The phrase is actually meaningless. Life is not at one end of a fulcrum with work on the other end! Work is an integrated part of life.

You only have one life – you just happen to live some of it while working and some of it engaged in other activities. Like most people over the age of 20, work takes up a major proportion of your life and has to be realistically integrated into all of your activities to give you a rich, rewarding and meaningful focus.

Resilience is developed though realising what is necessary and important, keeping fit and healthy, and building rewarding, authentic relationships inside and outside of work. It is all about personal organisation and finding ways to relax.

Perspective on issues and your ability to look at problems creatively is lost under continued stress. The popularly of resilience tries to rectify this, however, your good intentions could be diminished by the inappropriate language that you use inadvertently.

Adapted from "The Authority Guide to Emotional Resilience; Strategies to Manage Stress and Weather Storms in the Workplace" - published May 2016.  Available to order from Amazon - https://goo.gl/JdQKsX

Personal Transition through Change

Organisations don't just change because of new systems, processes or structures. They change because the people within the organisation adapt and change too. Only when the people within it have made their own personal transitions can an organisation truly reap the benefits of change.

The Personal Transition through Change curve is widely used in business and change management. This tool is extensively used in all sizes of organisations across the world to understand the emotional pathway that people go through when they experience any change.

John M. Fisher is the Chartered Psychologist who researched and developed the Personal Transition through Change curve. He presented at the Tenth International Personal Construct Congress, Berlin, 1999, and subsequently developed in his work on constructivist theory in relation to service provision organisations at Leicester University, England.

See if you can relate to these steps:

Anxiety – You don’t really know what’s going to hap­pen next, and you aren’t sure what any change will really look like at this point.

Happiness – You’ve committed to the change, and you are feeling really good about it.

Anger – Some anger and frustration is directed at others, especially those who you believe are responsible for forcing the change.  At a later stage, this is directed at yourself with feelings of guilt for not having coped as well as you believe you could have.

Despair – You may feel confused and apathetic and really start to wonder who you are.

Other pathways on the curve are:

Denial - where you deny that any change is occurring at all

Disillusionment  - where you decide that the change does not fit with your value system and you decide to have nothing more to do with it.

Hostility - where you show aggression towards yourself and others and the change, in general.

John explains how he came to develop the change curve and how he uses it in his work in an exclusive Ei4Change podcast.

You can listen to the full podcast through iTunes or on the Ei4Change website.

Copies of the Personal Transition through Change curve can be downloaded free of charge, along with other free resources on the Ei4Change Resources page.

The Authority Series

‘The Authority Guides’ is a new series of pocket-sized books offering highly practical and accessible guidance on a wide variety of business matters. They are published by independent business publisher SRA Books under the imprint Authority Guides.

The books are aimed at the busy business professional and business owner; they are snappy and practical with absolutely no unnecessary padding and waffle.

Each book in the series has been written by an author who is not only an expert in their field but who is working today at the coalface of their specialism.

The first three books in the series are:

‘The Authority Guide to Emotional Resilience in Business: Strategies to manage stress and weather storms in the workplace’ by Robin Hills

The emotional resilience of those involved in a business will contribute significantly to the organisation’s success. This Authority Guide from leading emotional intelligence expert, Robin Hills, will help you change the way you think about yourself and the way you approach potentially difficult situations. You will be able to develop your own personal resilience and understand how to develop resilience within the hearts and minds of your team and your organisation.

Robin Hills is the director of Ei4Change and is based in Greater Manchester. He has over 30 years’ commercial and leadership experience having worked in a variety of sales and marketing management roles. His special interest lies in emotional intelligence and linking together the outputs from assessments to give real practical relevance to improve effectiveness and productivity.

 

‘The Authority Guide to Marketing Your Business Book: 52 easy-to-follow tips from a book PR expert’ by Chantal Cooke

It’s never too soon to start thinking about how to market and promote your book. In this Authority Guide, leading book PR and marketing expert Chantal Cooke, presents 52 tips that will make your book stand out from the crowd, build your credibility as an author, and ensure you achieve those all-important sales.

 Chantal Cooke is an award winning journalist, broadcaster and author. She has over 25 years’ experience as a columnist, broadcast and print journalist, and radio presenter for the BBC, commercial radio, national newspapers and magazines. Chantal has reported from Bosnia and Northern Ireland, and written travel articles for a variety of publications including the Independent on Sunday.

‘The Authority Guide to Financial Forecasting for SMEs: Pain-free financials for finance and planning’ by Simon Thompson

In this Authority Guide, forecasting guru Simon Thompson shows you how to build financial forecasts quickly, effectively and cheaply through his unique, proven and easy-to-follow 10-step process. By learning how to create effective forecasts you will master the ability to understand the potential financial outcomes for your business and be able to communicate financial information in order to successfully raise investment or loans.

Simon Thompson is a specialist in financial forecasting for small businesses. Established in 2011, his business ‘Edge Forecast’ has refined a unique combination of expertise, support and software, which has helped UK businesses raise millions of pounds of crowd-funded, angel and bank finance.

 

Each Authority Guide is packed full of useful information to help business leaders grow themselves, their teams and their business. 

For more information www.authorityguides.co.uk

Coaching with “Images of Resilience”

In conjunction with RSVP Design, Ei4Change has produced a toolbox to support training, personal development and coaching around resilience.

Images of Resilience contains multiple copies of 16 carefully designed images drawn in an attractive cartoon style.  The images are metaphors, representing a range of experiences and emotions linked with the theme of RESILIENCE.  They facilitate the exploration of different facets of resilience and its connections with stress, change, challenge and learning.

Images of Resilience is an extremely powerful tool for use in one-to-one coaching.  It can also be used in small group discussions (of up to three people).  

Here is a detailed example of how you can use Images of Resilience in coaching.

1. Explain that the images represent a range of aspects of resilience: some of the skills, behaviours and attitudes that are required to develop the personal resilience and deal with challenges, pressures and stress in both personal and professional environments.

2. Explain that this process is intended to help individuals to think about the responsibilities and pressures that they are currently facing and to consider their own strategies and approaches to managing themselves.

3. Begin by giving an example.  Select the image called ‘Drive and Motivation’– the picture of migrating animals and birds.  Describe how this image represents an internal drive that motivates the animals to undertake long, demanding and potentially dangerous journeys.

Ask the questions:

“What is it that motivates you?

“What is the internal drive that makes you want to commit to something that might be difficult and stressful?”

4. Listen to the answers, then show the card called ‘Risk’ – the person entering the radioactive environment.  Describe how a challenging management role has risks attached – for both the manager and the people being managed.

Ask, “What are those risks and what do you think you can do to prevent or over come them?”

5. When you have worked with these two examples, spread the remaining cards (with supporting notes) randomly on a table and ask the coachee to choose two or three further cards.  Each of these cards should represent an aspect of resilience that the coachee feels is important to demonstrate and strengthen.

(Allow enough time for the coachee to consider the cards and hink about what they might mean – a minimum of 5 minutes of reflection time).

When the cards have been selected, ask the coachee what the cards mean to him / her.

Explore two aspects:

• Why the coachee selected this card and why it is an important skill or quality.
• The extent to which the coachee feels that they have, and can rely upon, this quality.

Can they give examples of how and when they use it?

For example, if the coachee selected the image entitled ‘Bouncing Back’ – the wobbly toys, can he / she describe situations in which he / she has taken knocks or criticism and been able to bounce back in a positive way?

6. Finally, ask the coachee to select two cards (these may include a card or cards that have already been discussed).

• The first card should represent what they feel is their own most valuable ability in relation to resilience (ie, what they think they do best and find most useful).  For example, this might be endurance – a willingness to work with uncertainty and ambiguity or an ability to find creative ways of dealing with barriers to progress.
• The second card should represent what they believe they would find most difficult.  For example, keeping focus when there are many distractions and being flexible about a process when under pressure to deliver results or overcoming their fears.

7. Explore the coachee’s choice of cards and then ask them to summarise their thoughts and discussions through effective questioning.

This process will explore various dimensions of personal resilience within the working environment leading to a depth that may have taken many hours within an ordinary coaching session.

Images of Resilience can be used in education to help students explore specific skills  valued by employers and to manage work as a part of life to find their own personal coping strategies when under pressure.

For more details click here

A video giving more details about resilience and Images of Resilience is available on YouTube.

For more information, and to order Images of Resilience, visit www.rsvpdesign.co.uk