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

Insights into Mindfulness Lightbulb Moments Cards

"Mindfulness is paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgementally to the unfolding of experience moment by moment."  Jon Kabat-Zinn, Professor of Medicine Emeritus and creator of the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) programme  at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

Ei4Change has available Lightbulb Moments cards giving insights into various aspects of emotional intelligence.  These have been well received as a valuable resource in education, training and coaching.  

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Lightbulb Moments are free to download from the Ei4Change website.  You can  access to all the Lightbulb Moments series and other free resources by clicking on the button.

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