Building resilience
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Overview -
Exercises
Overview
In practice: Developing personal coping strategies when under significant pressure both in work and outside, in order to bounce back from setbacks and challenges.
"Resilience is the ability to cope with pressure and bounce back from challenges and setbacks."
Researchers have found four key areas that help us to maintain and build our resilience in the face of setbacks. Building our resilience is a matter of building our strengths in these four areas.
Building personal resilience helps us to cope with the pressures and stresses of life at work and outside. These stresses can take a serious toll on our mental and physical wellbeing , which is reason enough to think about what we might do differently.
Even if we feel beleaguered and down on our luck now, there are things we can do to help ourselves. There are also things we can do to build our colleagues resilience, and things they can do to help us.
No-one goes through life stress-free. Most of us feel resilient in some situations, but less so in others. What stresses me out may not bother you at all. Resilience is not about having a stress-free life, but about recognising that quite a lot of the stress you experience comes from the way you ‘think’ about your situation and your ability to deal with it . You can build your resilience by using the power of positive emotion and increasing your emotional agility.
Positive emotion
The real skill resilient people learn is how to navigate their way through the stresses and pressures they encounter. One way of doing this is to use the power of positive emotion. Research on positive emotions (see below for some key examples) suggests that they have a 'broaden and build' effect 1 that helps us to bounce back more quickly from difficulties and provide long term increases in resilience for the future. The experience of positive emotions has been shown to broaden our horizons and awareness of possible ways through our current difficulties, which in turn builds our resilience for the future and enhances our positive feelings. A virtuous circle is created enhancing our ability to 'bounce forward' from challenges.
Ten positive emotions
- Joy - feeling pleasure at good news
- Gratitude - appreciating your good fortune
- Serenity - being content with the here-and-now
- Interest - encountering something safe with curiosity
- Hope - envisioning an improvement in your situation
- Pride - having a sense of achievement or confidence
- Amusement - enjoying a humorous moment
- Inspiration - being motivated by witnessing someone doing well
- Awe - encountering something that moves you on a grand scale
- Love - having any positive emotion in the context of a safe secure relationship
Kicking this process off when times are tough and finding positive emotions in the middle of turmoil is not necessarily easy. Reaching out to your support networks and showing confidence may require courage, finding strengths you didn’t know you had or learning new skills. But the more self-confidence you can develop, the better you can make your support networks and the more you can use positive emotions to think flexibly about your situation, the more likely you are to cope well with it and build up your resources for future challenges.
Emotional agility
All of us can get hooked by unhelpful or disempowering thoughts. BUT our thoughts about the world are not the same as facts about the world, and it this difference that is at the basis of learning how to develop our emotional agility2. Increasing our emotional agility can help us to overcome stress and improve our resilience. It is based on a well-researched process for building psychological flexibility called ACT3.
The emotional agility approach encourages us to pay attention to a difficult thought - but to accept it as a thought rather than necessarily as a truth about the world. Rather than just thinking "I know I am going to fail at this" the emotional agility approach encourages us to say to ourselves “I notice that I am having the thought that I know I am going to fail at this". This ‘acceptance’ and labelling of the thought, as a thought, helps us to distance ourselves from it and become less ‘hooked’ by it. This in turn gives us mental flexibility to be able to be more constructive in our response – to do what we really want to do rather than doing something in a knee-jerk fashion based on our distorted thought. This second stage – choosing to act in line with what we really want - is the essential freedom that is liberated when we realise that our automatic thought is just that – a pattern of thinking that has become inflexible and unhelpfully embedded over time.
The Emotional Agility exercise runs you through a real example of reducing the power of one of your unhelpful and disempowering thoughts, and then choosing to act in line with what you really want - becoming more psychologically flexible and resilient in the process.
Click the Exercises button at the top of the page to help you to maximise your own resilience.
1. Fredrickson, B, 2013, Positive Emotions Broaden and Build, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 47, 1 - 53
2. David, S and Congleton,C 2013, "Emotional Agility", Harvard Business Review, November pp. 125 - 128
3. Hayes, S et al 2006, "Acceptance and Commitment Theory: Model, processes and outcomes", Behavior Research and Therapy, 44, 1 - 25 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2005.06.006
Exercises
Exercise - Learning from your own experience of resilience
The aim of this strength-to-strength exercise is to build your resilience.
Exercise - Appreciating your strengths
The aim of this from-strength-to-strength exercise is to help you identify what you already do well and useuse it as a solid foundation for building further.
Exercise - Emotional agility exercise
An exercise to help you become more resilient by being more true to yourself when unhelpful thoughts and feelings disempower you.
Exercise - Expressing gratitude
Research shows that doing this every day for a week will increase your happiness and resilience for months. Expressing positive emotions gives you a long term boost!
Exercise - Mindfulness with an external focus
This short exercise helps you to focus on the here-and-now of the external world, and take you away from worrying rumination.
Exercise - Overcoming negative thoughts
The aim of this exercise is to identify and build on your / your team's strengths.
Exercise - Conquering disempowering beliefs
The aim of this exercise is to help you identify and change disempowering beliefs that may be holding you back from reaching your full potential.
Exercise - Using the RobertsonCooper i-Resilience report
RobertsonCooper have an evidence-based model to help you increase your resilience. Completing their online questionnaire will give you plenty of tips of what to avoid and what to build on.
Exercise - Mapping your future
The aim of this exercise is to review your current situation and help you imagine your new future.
Exercise - Active imagination
The aim of this visualisation exercise is to help you imagine a new future for yourself by simply finding some time for yourself and visualising the future you would really like. You can sketch it, write it down, talk to somebody about it - the choice is yours.
Exercise - Perfect days
The aim of this visualisation exercise is to help you imagine a new future for yourself by simply finding some time for yourself and visualising in detail what a working day and a leisure day would look like. You can sketch it, write it down, talk to somebody about it - the choice is yours.