Resilience Coaching

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.

Resilience Coaching

January 29, 2020

I have coached two clients in the last week, each of whom had deep issues around identity, values and beliefs that were showing up in their leadership. The level of exposure is new for both clients; they have previously climbed their respective corporate ladders in a way that whilst stretching, had been essentially safe.

In the coaching sessions, both clients were really rocked because in a new context, their leadership style is under scrutiny and falling short. One might say to yourself ‘aha, same issue, good, I know the approach to use!’. But each need a different approach entirely, because of the start point of their resilience levels.

Take Client A. A senior operational leader, come up through the ranks, always been about delivering turnaround and distinct stretch in their area. Phenomenal track record of taking more and more areas under their belt and delivering sustainable high performance as they go. I meet them when they have been reassigned, suddenly, into a problem area. This is all at the same time as a restructure of their original business division.

As a result of the reassignment, client A loses all their staff, all their normal areas of control, all influence on how the new structure should be managed, everything. On top of that, they have no idea how to approach their new problem area, there is no defined goal, little clarity, no direct control and lots of stakeholders jostling for power. The client is daunted and overwhelmed. Meanwhile they are hijacked by why this whole situation has arisen: the reason for the transfer are unclear but the client cites the following as possible:

The problem area needs this vast experience and confidence, and since the issue is at the CEO level, the client’s boss has put their best person on the job. This would mean it’s an accolade.

And/or

The client has displeased the boss/the CEO/someone and is being hived off into a smaller (even though currently more critical) area. This would mean it’s a punishment.

And/or

The client has got so good at leading and managing their area, that there is little room for growth of their next best people unless they move on. The client just can’t see that, so a forced move will leave others to backfill and grow. This would mean that the client is stifling team growth and individuals coming into leadership. Serious!

As the coach, I can’t assume any of this is either true or untrue. I note the polar opposites. I note the negatives. I especially note the energy associated with having to please others. And I work with the ‘data’ that the client presents to me:

The client’s confidence is rocked, deeply rocked
They are lost in the new job and seem cognitively to be stuck
They are suffering from multiple losses in terms of clarity of remit, sense of team and responsibility for staff, their authority.
They are so angry, and so upset, they have already applied for a job elsewhere which would mean then uprooting themselves from a home they have built and love. It doesn’t seem the right answer.

Pretty mega stuff for a first session!

My approach as a resilience coach includes a sense that the client, whilst rocked in this context, is not rocked at their core. They can articulate their abilities and reflect and even take challenge, they aren’t stuck on one conclusion. They in fact know they can perform really well given the right conditions.

So I trust that. Whilst gentle, I do not hold back in the flow of unpacking the whole situation. It helps reframe, it helps spot the lighter moments, it creates laughter when the client notices their own – annoying but true – drivers of wanting to please. It is also clear they are a cognitive learner, the client needs to understand and see the whole picture, and that creates a shift. The whole picture is big. It includes the potential drivers of needing to please at the heart of their success to date. And how this then hijacks them in this new situation.

We shape the resilience coaching work to be to unlock this. The client feels relieved, clear, with a plan, and ready to consider how to practically raise their ‘resilience river’. It’s the full jugular, but without being too heavy, intense or over-exacting. It suits the client’s learning style. Most of all it suits their resilience, their capacity for change.

The work of this resilience coaching is recognising how resourceful the client is in the moment, and whilst having to cope – or not cope – with a massive big issue that has knocked them for six – helping them to reconnect with their resourcefulness and work from that point.

It’s a very different story for Client B.

Client B is also a senior leader, fantastically clever, systemic in their thinking, also on the way up in their organisation. They have recently presented an organisation –wide vision for a new way of doing business in one whole business sector. It crosses over many other areas, joining and leveraging them. Client B is granted the remit to lead this. But they are immediately up against other leaders, who sit in authority positions and control how the business is done with suppliers and partners.

Most of the resilience coaching work is enabling the client to understand options, work through flexibly how to influence, how to establish their authority and credibility. But nothing works against this one particular leader who refuses to engage, and indeed actively undermines the new vision.

The client has a particular difficult interaction with this other leader. They write it all down. They show an email to me that they wish to send. It’s full of wanting to please, capitulation, and does not affect any kind of leadership on the situation.

In the coaching session this one email unravels how Client B really has no idea how to deal with people. They are intellectual in their approach with everything. They plan, decide and act from the mind, cognitively driving any sense of mirroring or matching others. They have little bond with others. Bonding is the basis of secure based leadership, which is in itself resilient leadership.

So again this resilience coaching unlocks a massive truth about how it is that such a senior person can have ‘learnt how to act’ around people, without actually integrating this into who they are. They are in fact detached from a part of themselves, and this detachment, it turns out, is a strategy they have learnt very young because of issues with their parental relationships.

Now this is big. I mean really big.

In uncovering this during the session, the client joins up who they are with how they lead. Or cannot lead. They are overwhelmed as a result. And they are not resourceful as a result, they are indeed lost inside. The resilience coaching thereafter was all about the very pragmatic, practical steps they can take to make changes, using the NLP model Logical Levels of Change. We contracted in the short term at least, that all the beliefs, values and identity conflicts that were driving the results weren’t going to be the focus of the coaching. They can wait. Change can happen in easier way. So we will concentrate on skills.

The choice is all because the resilience of this client, client B, was never fully resourceful. This leader had been stuck in Bounceback¹ for a long time – able to perform within a particular context, but unable to transfer out into a different context because of these underlying deep and personal issues. This is deep work. Potential therapeutical work, and not coaching at all. So the resilience coaching, whilst helping to name the issues, also bounds the issues into something safe.

Both extraordinary clients. Both sessions extraordinary sessions, with very deep satisfaction of real, impactful and paced work. That is what resilience coaching is all about.

Seeing the truth

February 20, 2019

Helping your client understand for real the ‘resilience data’ of any situation they find themselves in – under the cosh, in crisis, or with complex opportunities to navigate – is a fundamental of resilience coaching.

Resilience is your capacity for change. So it is with someone’s resilience that the following, similar to Timothy Gallwey insights from his Inner Game Series,

Resilience today (ie capacity for change today) = Resilience Potential – Resilience Demand

To therefore see what within the coaching can enable change, you need to help the client understand the ‘resilience data’ of their situation. You as the coach need to be able to read this also, and make informed choices of what you offer the client in the coaching session, since the client may not have capacity for some of what you have planned. Since resilience goes up and down, it’s about honestly assessing the conditions for what drives the ups, and what drives the downs.

But your client – and indeed you – might be in denial. Dr GlebTsipursky, a behavioural scientist of Ohio State University who researches denialism talks about an interesting dynamic that happens:

Someone is in denial. They may exhibit the Ostrich effect. They refute the facts, or indeed, may spread mistruths.

If your instinct is to help them address the facts of the situation, you can get what Tsipursky and others of his profession call the ‘ backfire effect’:

“Research on a phenomenon called the backfire effect shows we tend to dig in our heels when we are presented with facts that cause us to feel bad about our identity, self-worth, worldview or group belonging… In some cases, presenting the facts actually backfires, causing people to develop a stronger attachment to incorrect beliefs. Moreover, we express anger at the person bringing us the message, a phenomenon researchers term “shoot the messenger.” GlebTsipursky from The Truth Seekers Handbook

What Tsipursky and his colleagues talk about is that it’s not the facts that are the issue. To change the situation or outcome, you need to address the emotions that lie behind facing the truth.

The Interference Effects

There could be a number of drivers at play that mean the client denies the truth.

There is confirmation bias.

Imagine that your client sees themselves as a person who always gets through challenges. Then the resilience demand rises and rises. The client buckles down, determined to succeed. This goes on, and on, and despite the client struggling – with the ensuring dangers of performance and wellbeing drops – they continue. They can’t see what’s happening and continue to assume they will be ok. It’s the path towards burnout unless something shifts.

The client’s confirmation bias told them that they always got through challenges. To be open to accept that they couldn’t get through all the challenges in their normal way required a flexible response – seeing the truth of the matter and calling in for help, or saying no to a number of things. Not accepting the reality of situation can lead your client to not coping, and that can lead into unwellness.

There is the sunk cost fallacy.

There is the denial that a past decision was not good, and instead, you keep with the same solution, denying that it’s not working. Tsipursky has a brilliant example of what he and his behavioural science colleagues call this ‘sunk cost fallacy’:

“In another example at a company where I consulted, a manager refused to acknowledge that a person hired directly by her was a bad fit, despite everyone else in the department telling me that the employee was holding back the team. The manager’s behavior likely resulted from what scholars term the sunk cost fallacy, a tendency to double down on past decisions even when an objective assessment shows the decision to be problematic”.

The client may genuinely have not experienced another way.

Your client is a high performer, or at least on the way up. That means working long hours, working weekends, taking on more projects, saying yes to the tough stuff, being flexible but also tough. Right?

The models around your client – what’s in the system, what’s in their family expectations, the way things have always been, may just have carved a path that is a one-way ticket to overload. Despite all the management or leadership programmes, or books on how it might be otherwise, this engrained groove in the client means a singular perspective only. Without another perspective, how could they consider anything different?

Being resilient means assuming always there is another way.

All of these factors, the confirmation bias, the sunk cost fallacy, and just the sheer lack of experience, end up with a denial about the truth of a situation, and all are in order to avoid experiencing the emotions that the truth will entail. The fact that someone is not flexible enough to take account of changing circumstances or indeed mistakes – is in itself resilience data.

The Bottom Line of Truth

Helping the client face the truth of their‘resilience data’ is a massive leveller. It’s the first step towards acceptance, and that in turn opens out the possibility of change.

How can you approach this in your own practice?

The Resilience engine Community of Practice have all embedded this skill of seeing the ‘resilience data’ in their practice. To become one of the community o this kind of thinking into your practice, see our accreditation programme which is both public via the AOEC or can be run inhouse.

Author: Jenny Campbell, CEO of The Resilience Engine

Coaching with intention

January 19, 2019

Is your client brimming with New Year resolutions and goals that sweep both of you up into an (potentially over) optimistic view of their capacity to enact on these changes? New Year resolutions can be great, if they’re doable and motivating. They really can help.

But with many clients, they just say ‘humbug’ to all that, because repeated attempts at the same kinds of thing – getting better worklife balance, nailing that career change within the company, or becoming more healthy through weight loss and exercise – haven’t worked in any of the previous years! And so the client would rather not look at their failures, but instead avoid these goals, and just carry on as is.

Ironically, whilst New Year resolutions are helpful for some, they can set up a kind of field of resistance, which hangs out in the background, negatively draining your coaching. It’s maddening!

What do you do as their coach?

What about helping them go behind a specific goal, and get hold of an intention that is actually really meaningful for them? Supporting your client to live intentionally can be a whole lot more effective.

Curious about what this means?

Intentional living is where you seek to create the conditions for something to come about, to come to fruition. It is about living with a deliberate vision for some area in your life – work or home life – and seeking the opportunities to move towards that intention. It means letting go of the need to achieve specifics; it means letting go also of the control around everything related to the intention. It is instead, a more open, evolving way of living.

It’s very helpful when either goals are difficult to achieve, or they are so complex you can’t tell what specifics are actually needed or doable. Living intentionally instead, you set out just to undertake the first step and aim just to explore towards that – then see where else you might go once you arrive there. There is no pressure per se – it’s really just all about discovering what this intention really means, beginning to live it, being energised by that, and so it goes. The core attitude at the heart of living intentionally in this way is not ‘what should I do’ but rather ‘what can I do’. It’s very motivating!

Why not try it for you and your client?

Start off with you. Take a particular client you are working with right now. What is your intention for them? How does that inform the way you are working with them?

Intentional coaching is one of the most transformative principles of resilience coaching. Yes of course track where you are in the coaching contract, and what you might offer next. But instead of getting into detailed plans, become clear on your own wish for your client, and work to create the right state that will enable that. Within that

1. Deeply consider what you would wish for your client.

2. Consider the state the client needs to be in to achieve that wish.

3. Model that state. For example, if you wish your client to feel more at ease, then having an easy session next time is what you need to plan.

Are you helping clients navigate such hard or complex stuff where goals are difficult to set and neither of you are convinced you will be successful? Why not shift your thinking and consider resilience coaching, so that you can unlock the conditions for navigating this complexity?

We’d love you to join us. We are a strong and growing Community of Practice who are experts in resilience. Our next Accreditation Programme starts on the 5th Feb: Got a question, get in touch.

Author: Jenny Campbell, CEO The Resilience Engine

Resilience Coaching

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