The Importance of Resilience

The Importance of Resilience

Resilience is a measure of someone's ability to recover quickly from stress, defeats and upsets. To "bounce back stronger" with improved performance.

Resilience is composed of many elements: emotional, intellectual, tactical, social and systemic.

Resilience is important because, to be a high-level achiever, everyone has to suffer numerous setbacks, criticisms and defeats. When faced with negative events, most people become demotivated, upset and depressed. They lose heart, and their performance drops in both quantity and quality. What we need is the opposite response to negative events. When there are major difficulties to be faced, we need people to be at their best, not at their worst.

Teaching people to understand the importance of developing resilience is important, because it develops mechanisms to give better protection against situations which could be overwhelming.

What is Resilience Training?

Resilience training is specialised training designed to improve peoples' ability to continue performing at their best, even when faced with hostile environments, or after suffering a series of criticisms, set backs and defeats.

Whenever we face difficult times, we want people to become more determined, more resolute, more creative, more organised. In the face of difficulties, we want people to "step up", not "drop out". We want people to be more resilient.

How can we make people more resilient? By training them. It is important to remember that resilience is not an innate, genetically determined characteristic, such as eye colour, or height. Resilience is a learned behaviour, or to be more exact, a set of learned behaviours, that can be taught, learned, practised and developed. Resilience is more like physical fitness and is improved by proper training.

Resilience training will:

• Improve emotional responses to setbacks and difficulties.
• Develop better tactical responses to setbacks and defeats.
• Find potential benefits in any change in circumstances.
• Positively affect workplace culture and thus make everyone more resilient.

1. Emotional Resilience.

Resilience training improves the emotional responses of people to setbacks and difficulties. This is accomplished by asking people to change the meaning they associate to the event that confronts them. Emotional resilience training shows people how they can change the way they feel by changing the meaning that they ascribe to events.

Disempowered meanings create disempowered people. Empowered meanings create empowered people.

Resilience training starts by changing the way we think and talk about difficulties and defeats.

2. Intellectual Resilience.

Resilient action has a definite structure. People who lack resilience, tend to act in chaotic, disorganised, incoherent ways and try to resist change. On the other hand, resilient actions are purposeful, well organised, intelligently implemented, and evolutionary in nature.

Resilience training teaches the structure of resilient action and shows how it can be implemented in practice. This improves intellectual responses by improving the ability to analyse problems into their component parts, categorise them, find causes and solutions for each part, then reassemble in the form of a practical plan of action, which should improve on the current situation.

3. Resilience to Change.

The world is in a continual state of change. Most people find it stressful. But change always carries within it the seeds of a benefit. Which, if identified and cultivated, can be made to grow into a beautiful benefit tree.

Resilient people presuppose that there is a potential benefit in any situation, and they set out, methodically to actualise that potential.

Resilience training shows people examples of such cases, in the expectation that the delegates will start to look for the similar benefits in their own situation.

4. Team Resilience.

Resilience is one of the most important things in the world right now, since the COVID crisis has put many people into fear mode. Fear is not conducive to clear thinking, rational action and positive results.

We want the team to pull together and become ever more coordinated and unified. We don't want a bad situation to become a trigger for people to fall out with each other and play the blame game. We need the team-spirit to become strengthened by tough times. The more people who become resilient, the better off we all become.

Teams build systems. It is our systems which ultimately see us through the tough times. Winning teams, build winning systems.

Resilience Training Course

If you want to instil clear thinking, rational action and positive results into your teams, please take a look at our in-house Resilience Training Course and learn to lead people through tough times.