Enabling the Resilient Organisation

Free Yourself From Resentment

March 10, 2021

Resentment is a perception of unfairness – you’re not getting the help, appreciation, consideration, affection, reward, or praise you deserve. This sense of unfairness, together with an innate anger, combine to give the root of resentment.

It is also an amplification process of three steps:
– there is the trigger for anger.
– there is an amplification of that anger because of the unfairness of the situation.
– the universalising of that situation – feeling or thinking that it will always be like that.

Resentment is never specific and rarely goes away. Where anger is a tool to put out fires, resentment is more like a smoke alarm that’s always on, just in case a spark should ignite.

Other people might think your resentment is about the past and urge you to ‘let it go’. But resentment is really about the future. After an intimate betrayal, it seems to protect you from the danger of trusting again.

Resentment has a strong component of self-punishment and can breed distrust. Though usually obscured by the inclination to devalue those we resent, the self-punitive nature of resentment revels in sentiments like: “Why did I ever trust her!”; “I knew he’d let me down!”; “How could I have been so stupid to believe him again!” The false appeal of self-punishment is that it seems to keep us safe from future hurt and disappointment. If you get mad enough at yourself – and punish yourself sufficiently – you might not be “so stupid” as to trust or rely on that person – or someone like him – again. This illusion of protection from hurt is the “great lie” of resentment. In fact, you get hurt a lot more often when resentful, for the simple reason that people react to what they see.

What resentment does for your resilience

Resenting a situation or a person drains your energy massively and therefore drains your resilience. It occupies your mind and heart; it reduces your focus and distorts your perspective. It makes you reactive and can add to, or cause conflict, stopping you communicating with others that really matter to you. It is harder to be calm and be present, to step back and see things differently. It distracts you from using your energy for the positive things that you want to do and achieve.

When your mood is positive you are caring, playful, romantic, supportive, cooperative, analytical, or creative. A few negative feelings are not likely to change your mood. But, when your underlying mood is resentful, you can experience emotions like waves of anger, anxiety, jealousy, or envy, which motivate behaviour that is controlling, dominating, impulsive, possessive, confrontational, vindictive, dismissive, withdrawing, or rejecting. A few positive feelings here and there will do little to alter your mood.

In short resentment is a bit like a dementor from Harry Potter (Ref: Harry Potter & The Philosopher’s Stone by J.K. Rowling) – it sucks the life out of you, drains your resilience and makes everything grey and heavy.

What You Can Do To Shift Resentment

Notice it and honour the intention behind it – to protect you
Decide you want to change being hijacked by resentment
Use the HALT tool to figure out what the source of the resentment really is, and how you might go about changing it.

Bottom Line

Being free of resentment is resilience building. It takes guts to notice and accept you are feeling resentment. This is half the ticket to changing how you feel.

Don’t let your mood be so affected by covering up what you really need via resentment. Honour your needs, and let yourself be free.

Author

Jenny Campbell, CEO, Resilience Engine

Resentment Halt

March 3, 2021

Here are some typical symptoms of resentment. Which ones are yours?

Confusion – Why don’t others get it? Why don’t they understand and appreciate what you have achieved?

Inner self-talk battle – half of you is angry that you didn’t say what you felt, the other half is feeling selfish or ashamed.

Short-temperedness – You pick a fight because you are not getting what you need. Switching attention to others’ failures to feel better about yourself.

Passive aggressive behaviour – bad mouthing the subject of your resentment to others or to yourself under your breath or in your head!

Increased anxiety – when you aren’t listening to or speaking up for yourself anxiety can go through the roof.

When you spot your symptoms of resentment check for HALT signals;
Do you feel: Hungry; Angry; Lonely; or Tired

When any of these discomfort or deprivation signals are in play, you are more vulnerable to obsessive ruminations about the resentments that you carry around. If you find yourself unable to let go of obsessive thoughts of resentment, you need to evaluate if you are in a psychologically vulnerable state due to the above factors. Meet your needs for food, rest, companionship, etc. before even attempting to get some perspective about the activity in your brain.

How resilience coaching makes the difference

July 13, 2020

What is the difference between resilience and normal executive coaching? Two main things:

Being able to be aware of the client’s resilience defines very clearly their capacity for change. That means it can help you as the coach set expectations for yourself and the client.
Given whatever start point the client has, knowing the key things for their resilience needs, for that exact start point, helps sift through the masses of options that you have as a coach. Resilience is a priority for all change and therefore for coaching

Read this client story.

Our coach worked with a senior Director in Academia, in an institute considering a merger with another academic institution. The Director has led his division through a difficult time already, and now was facing a much bigger issue of merger. For many complex relational and Board issues, the context of the organisation was a toxic one. There were SO many difficulties – financial, industry changes, people’s motivation was low, all areas were under heavy scrutiny, trust issues prevalent everywhere. The client felt very responsible for ensuring that his area came out ok at the end of blood letting.

In the first coaching session, there were so many questions, both client and coach found it all overwhelming. Where to start the work?

The thing that stood out from a resilience point of view was that the client was very, very tired. That meant they had little capacity for change. And ethically the coach knew this and knew that energy was the key to unlock the client’s resilience.

Checking this out as the first step in the coaching changed everything for the client in the next year of work. The coaching work was all about Adaptive Capacity¹ – Energy, Pacing and Perspective. No business strategy was discussed without work on these fundamental resilience factors.

One year on, the client was caring for themselves, had entirely embraced his energy needs (‘I really believe in this resilience stuff’ were his actual words), and was leading the merger conversation, openly, wisely and with great clarity. His goals for his people and organisation were being met as best as possible within such a complex situation. But most of all, the client had the sustained resilience to keep going and not just see the challenge as a short-term one -in fact the coaching, and the merger, took a further two years to sort.

Two years on from that original period and the client continues to talk about and invest in their resilience. Proactively they take time out to connect with their research interests, connect widely and often with stakeholders, and most critically, ensure good boundaries between work and home. In the day to day, they notice if they get hijacked by particular old issues or behavioural patterns, and can interrupt these quickly. This attention to their Resilience River© is very simple but very effective.

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The Resilience Engine aims to make resilience accessible to everyone by equipping organisations with an internal resilience capability. Our clients can create cohorts of internal resilience coaches via our Resilience Accreditation Programme. Our next open programme is February 2021; we will be launching a Corporate version of this in the Autumn of 2020.

Clients also deploy our online services that give managers and their teams tools to support and extend resilience. Starting from £1+VAT per staff member, our extremely accessible pricing help organisations scale up.

Resilience is one of the key topics for now and 2021. Get in touch to learn how we can help you.

The Resilience Engine team

References

Adaptive Capacity is part of The Resilience Engine® research model, which explains how to build resilience.

Encouraging self efficacy in the workplace

February 26, 2020

Busting The Myths of Resilience Series Myth 3: Confidence is needed for resilience
Encouraging self efficacy in the workplace Part 2: Confidence and resilience. Self efficacy

In the previous publication, you saw that a resilient way of living and working includes nourishing secure bases. Secure bases drive a deep level of confidence in feeling both safe and inspired to be everything you can be. Secure bases provide the bedrock for being able to innovate and experiment, encouraging both security and growth at the same time. An amazing combination.

They also provide the gateway to enabling voice, diversity and inclusion in the workplace, collaboration, good leadership as well as innovation and change. One part of creating a resilient culture then is to foster secure based leadership. (Reference George Kohlrieser, Care To Dare).

The other type of confidence that is of critical importance within organisations is the knowledge that you can execute a task or deliver on a particular project or get through the challenges ahead. It’s going further than secure bases, but activating these together with a set of skills and attitudes. It’s all the skills of resilience, such as combining both independence and dependence, or fostering both pragmatism and optimism and being able to choose which you draw on in any situation or moment.

This layering up from secure bases gives rise to self-efficacy, which is itself an outcome of resilience.

Alfred Bandura, the originator of the theoretical construct of self-efficacy, describes those with ‘self-efficacy as people with high assurance in their capabilities who approach difficult tasks as challenges to be mastered rather than as threats to be avoided.’ 1

He also says that the most effective way of creating a strong sense of efficacy is through what he describes as ‘mastery’ experiences. It means shooting for targets that are stretching and achievable.

Another element is that mastery must be modelled by others, especially leadership. And those modelling must be perceived as similar to those they lead; the distant can’t be too far otherwise the leaders create a ‘them and us’ situation. Again part of resilience is being able to fully embrace your own power, whilst remaining humble.

To even think about creating the conditions for ‘mastery’ can be daunting for some. For those leaders who are exhausting themselves through overcommitting or doing something they don’t find energising, what room is there for feeling masterful about anything?

It all demands proactive investment in resilience. Building resilience across an organisation can be a very pragmatic process but it does take quality thinking and quality time. This is part of The Resilience Way, exemplified in the book The Resilience Dynamic®.

If you would like to know more about how The Resilience Engine is helping organisations build a resilience culture, please get in touch.

References: Hughes, R., Kinder, A. & Cooper, C. L. The Wellbeing Workout. (2018). doi:10.1007/978-3-319-92552-3

Busting The Myths of Resilience Series Myth 3 – Confidence is needed for resilience

January 20, 2020

Which comes first then, confidence or resilience?

Part 1: The Link with Secure Bases

“Much of the academic and popular management literature states that for resilience you need confidence: ‘Self confidence is a crucial component of resilience because it creates a forward motion of positivity and optimism.’¹ Many resilience evaluation methods use confidence as a survey measure contributing to your output resilience level. The voice of this body of literature has resilience as an output of confidence.

A few writers and some researchers don’t try to distinguish one from the other and instead just conflate the two concepts. Resilience is confidence, confidence is resilience”.– Extract from The Resilience Dynamic® by Jenny Campbell

This type of thinking has two sources:

either from clinical research where there has been significant trauma with an ensuing period of major deficit of resilience, i.e. not coping

a limited definition of resilience and/or confidence itself

With the many sources of research taken into account, The Resilience Engine’s research has found that ‘confidence and resilience do not have a one-way relationship, but instead are interlocked and generative together.’

What’s more, confidence building is not a woolly thing, it is in fact a clear and actionable process.

***The Resilience Engine sees the relationship between confidence and resilience* *as a generative loop:***

Secure bases can be drawn on in the moment of any situation, by bringing them into your attention, your memory, or indeed how you feel. They give you a lift, a burst of energy, inspiration to keep going or to look about for other options, or to shift towards something more meaningful. Knowing that these secure bases work for real for you in your day-to-day work and life is what delivers confidence in your future.

The Resilient Way contributes to, enhances and indeed creates secure bases:

The learning from your past experiences contributes to how your secure bases support you and give you safety.
Difficulties of previous relationships, where maybe your boundaries were badly managed, will help you understand which people now really can and do act as a secure base for you.
Challenges that you have overcome will enhance your sense of purpose or meaning today and in the future.
When you do come through a period that is tough, you realise how important your secure bases are to you. And that enhances your level of security in what you’re about in this world.
New meaning in your life, whether new places, new relationships or new purpose, all can form new secure bases.

Living in a more Resilient Way in the present enhances your secure bases. The more you invest in your relationship with these secure bases, the more they provide that sense of both security and inspiration to take risks.

As the base layer for confidence, secure bases are therefore both enhanced and drawn on by living more resiliently. It’s definitely a two-way street.

What are your own secure bases? For example, who inspires you to be both yourself and to be the best you can be? How often do you connect with these folk in your life? Are you enhancing this secure base in the way that you allocate your time across work and personal life? Or are you trading on what-was-once-upon-a-time and thus diminishing the confidence you might have?

Secure bases don’t stand still, you need to nourish and protect them. This is part of The Resilience Way, exemplified in the book The Resilience Dynamic®.

Got you thinking?

References: Hughes, R., Kinder, A. & Cooper, C. L. The Wellbeing Workout. (2018). doi:10.1007/978-3-319-92552-3

Principle 10: Model It!

February 27, 2019

These results demonstrate a somewhat profound disconnect between what organisations believe are the best strategies to build resilience, and what they are actually doing.
In fact, there is a strong suggestion in the results that organisations largely do not know exactly which programmes produce the best results in the cultivation of resilience. Or, that they may in fact be pinning their hopes on initiatives that do little or nothing to promote true resilience.
Penna Organisational Resilience Survey June 2018
Data from 700 senior HR professionals in 7 European countries

Model resilience, your capacity for change. That means investing in it, talking about the up’s and down’s of it, putting a personal stamp to it. It might all seem really obvious, after all, it’s what leaders are asked to do all the time about all sorts of thing –brand values, people processes, how to manage clients, the way things are done around here, managing change. It’s all about walking the talk, showing that you mean what you say.

But many leaders don’t manage it. Why? Two key reasons:

The leader does not have enough capacity to make the changes within their own area.AND/OR
The change – the resilience demand – is anti-cultural. If it’s embraced, it will mean the leader will stand out as going against the grain. Exposure. It’s a very demanding scenario from a resilience point of view.

Because leaders, like their employees, when forced to be vulnerable also feel powerless
Glenn Llopis
Forbes, May 16th 2017

Both reasons are where the resilience demand of the situation is greater than the current resilience levels of the leader. If the leader doesn’t act fully on the change, it ends up looking like lip service. And that of course blows the change out of the water; people smell a rat.

Here’s the nub of making difficult changes. If the leader sees themselves as a credible carrier of this new change, plus has invested in their capacity for change, they will enact on it. If they don’t see themselves as credible, they will worry about how others will see them and do nothing or very little. It’s really all about the leader’s confidence in their own value within the organisation.

Since confidence is an outcome of resilience, it comes down to this: the resilience gap in the situation can be filled if the leader invests for real in their own resilience. So I am not talking about modelling as in a fashion model putting on a superb new coat. No! Modelling resilience is about living and breathing it. It doesn’t mean lying on the psychologist’s bed talking about your upbringing but it does mean means a deliberate investment into your energies, purpose, and attitudes and skills that enable you to be the most adaptable. We call it your Resilience Engine®.

We would be delighted to discuss more about we can help you get it right for the resilience and wellbeing of your people and organisation. Get in touch via info@resilienceengine.com.

Author: Jenny Campbell