The Resilience Engine

Home Coping

Coping

Inspiration in three steps

You can find here all of our publications. In the following list, choose which filter you would like to apply:

inspiration in three steps

Ever find with your clients that their inspiration has dissipated somehow? Hidden because of the busyness of their world?

What about your own inspiration? Can you get hold of it quickly whenever you need that extra oomph in your day?

The power of inspiration is phenomenal.  And being able to get hold of it – whenever,wherever – is also phenomenal, and part of a personal resilience toolkit. People often seek inspiration from outside themselves as a primary method – people they admire; places that are lovely; books that lift the spirit. Or via social – stories that inspire; funny videos.

And yet there’s another way available to you, to your client. Right here, right now. Inside.

You have, at some point in your life, inspired yourself or someone else. You will have been operating near your best at that moment.  And to connect with that can re-inspire you.  That doesn’t mean rolling about it self-congratulation, but instead, accepting that for at least one moment in your life, you inspired!

Try it!

Make sure you give yourself a few minutes without interruption as you follow these simple steps:

  1. Recall one such moment when you inspired someone else, or indeed yourself.
    Maybe it was with one of your kids.  Or one of your team.Or with a friend.Or maybe it’s something you managed to do, to pull off.
  2. Bring it strongly into your mind.
    Who were you with? What were you doing?
    Just remember fully. The feelings, the thoughts, the pictures you may have of what was going on around you.
    Who were you in this moment?
    Remain in the memory a little while.
  3. Notice how you feel.
    You are likely to feel more energised. And if you have done this truthfully, a lot more energised! Your memories of when you inspire are a resource available to you, sitting inside. It’s just a matter of getting hold of them.Go help you and your client get inspired.


Author: Jenny Campbell, CEO of The Resilience Engine

Looking for inspiration for your own practice? Join the Resilience Engine Community of Practice, a learning community whose focus is to extend our understanding of resilience.  Join the next Resilience Engine programme starting the 5th February 2019. More info here!  Academy of Executive Coaching.

If you have an internal bank of coaches interested in building an internal resilience support capability for your organisation, please get in contact directly via info@resilienceengine.com.

The brochure can be found via our website.

 

 

Resilience Lens: Coaching Challenges

You can find here all of our publications. In the following list, choose which filter you would like to apply:

Resilience Engine, Resilience Engine Blog post, Not Coping

The Resilience Lens is where the Resilience Engine offers in-depth analysis of different coaching challenges, using our ten years of resilience research.

Here’s our first example.

Your Client Is Not Coping. What do you do?

You are running a workshop aimed to help enable change, and have some exercises that the participants will try out in small groups. Everyone stands up, gets into their groups, and go off confidently. But one person is still sitting. You sense something is wrong. You approach them kindly and ask how you can help. The participant starts to cry, and in a stuttering way, peppered by many tears, explains that they feel just overwhelmed. Other stuff spills out.

You only have ten minutes left before the other participants are due back. What do you do?

The participant is crying, and in a stuttering way, has explained that they feel just overwhelmed, that although this stuff is important to them and their teams (they are a senior leader in the organisation), they don’t think they can face talking about it all right now. They have shared all sorts of fragments of their story right now, both personal and work issues. They are overwhelmed, embarrassed, and stuck in what to do.

How can you help this participant be resourceful enough to make a good decision for themselves and how to make the right choice – whether to stay at the workshop or return to work, and if they stay, how they might be able to continue on with their day?

And with this in mind, how are you also able to continue working with the other participants in an appropriate manner?

 

The Resilience Lens

Let’s look at both of these clients through the lens of the Resilience Engine research.1

This is a resourceful person with a senior role; you don’t get to these roles without being resourceful in a pretty significant way.

The client is rendered unresourceful, because of their stress reactions: fight or flight, which we all know about, or freeze or appease. In this case it’s freeze. Gaining an understanding of these latter two stress reactions gives a resilience coach more in their toolkit to be able to help a client understand what the underlying problem might be.

The client demonstrates stuckness, and one that has been going on for a while. The client is stuck in many ways – even being physically stuck in their seat. This plus the fragments of their story, quickly highlights that they have been in Fragmentation2 for some time – a critical state of resilience depletion that demonstrates a strong risk of breakdown in the near future. The only way that person can become more resilient, and more healthy as a result, is to take time to recover their energy. The onus as a resilience coach, is to offer that set of resilience insights clearly and kindly. This means no rescue, no reassurance, no trying-to-get-them-to-feel-ok-enough-to-rejoin-the-others. As anyone who is Gestalt trained will will know, recognising the ‘is-ness’ of any situation allows for the space to shift it.

What really happened? Within ten minutes, the participant not only recognised where they were but they were grateful for the clarity of that understanding, and were able to re-join the group for the remainder of the day. In the few days thereafter, they also requested a leave of absence for a time to recover. They became healthy and happy again in that period, and returned into the organisation with a different set of priorities and work-life balance habits. No coaching was offered in that time – it was just that initial 10 minutes, which turned out to be critical for that participant’s wellbeing.

 

What’s the bottom line? Coaches need to learn more about how to judge the capacity for change of their clients. This is the heart of resilience coaching. To learn more about how you can become a Resilience Engine accredited coach, click here.

Author: Jenny Campbell, CEO of The Resilience Engine

 

 

 

Footnotes

  1. Resilience Engine accredited coaches will use The Resilience Dynamic® and Resilience Engine® models, based on ten years of research, within their practice. These help the coach ‘co-diagnose’ the client’s resilience level, understand the implications of that level very specifically, to know the key enablers for the client for that level that can be acted on at that time. Whilst resilience is dynamic, pacing the coaching specifically according to the capacity of the client brings about immediate resilience increase. And since resilience enables increased wellbeing and performance, this is only a good thing.
  2. Fragmentation is a state named and explained in the Resilience Dynamic® model, a map of what resilience is, and how it shifts.

‘No’ is your friend

You can find here all of our publications. In the following list, choose which filter you would like to apply:

 

 

Saying no is good for your resilience.

If you pay specific attention to your energy, get perspective and pace yourself well, your Adaptive Capacity increases. And that’s the fuel in the tank of your Resilience Engine. This means that your capacity for change increases – as well as your wellbeing and performance. Nice one!

 

To do this you need to be able to say ‘No’ well, appropriately, and often.
The opposite? Saying yes to everything, which is not a healthy habit. There are lots of reasons behind this:

  • If you are an adrenalin junkie, you will love feeling ‘busy, busy, busy’. And then it will catch up with you, and you will crash.
  • If you say yes to please others, that might be because you need to figure out why you are worthy of pleasing yourself.
  • If you say yes to rescue others, or indeed to stop them from becoming overwhelmed, you need to consider whose boundaries need bolstering. Yours? Theirs? Or both?
  • If you say ‘yes’ to avoid saying ‘no’ because you think it will create a conflict which you can’t handle, then think again. Too many yes’s only build towards tiredness and resentment. This can build like a volcano, ready to explode into real conflict. Not good!
  • Finally, if you’re saying yes to stuff because you just don’t have the time to figure out what you really should be doing, then STOP! You’re definitely on a fast, slippery slope to mediocre performance. Get off the slope, take some rest, and take the time to think about the criteria behind what you actually want and need to do.

 

Saying “no”. It’s all about boundaries.

Do you know what you need? If you do, do you ask for it? If you ask for it and it’s flouted, do you assert your needs?

“No”. Such a little word. Such a powerful word. Such a brilliant word for your resilience.

To discover more about how you can invest in your resilience, click here.

 

Author: Jenny Campbell, CEO of The Resilience Engine

 

Is Your Client Procrastinating?

You can find here all of our publications. In the following list, choose which filter you would like to apply:

Have you ever worked with clients who fully commit to actions identified in coaching, but they turn up not having done it? Maybe they repeat this a few times, so are they really just procrastinating?

Often, we as coaches will assume that it’s something about the client’s commitment or that the goals associated are not meaningful enough. So we will often invite reflection and enquiry around the goal itself. Logical, right?

But there is another reason why work doesn’t get done. Your clients may be procrastinating because they’re suffering from the stress reaction: Fight, Flight, Freeze or Appease, or indeed a mix of these. Procrastination consistently comes out of the Resilience Engine research as the top impact of stress.

There are two types of procrastination, both built from fear of failure:

  • In behaviours: someone will avoid having their ability judged by others. They believe that worthiness comes from their abilities, and if they fear that their abilities can’t be demonstrated, they don’t show their work.
  • In decisions: here someone is plain afraid of making errors, and so avoids making decisions.

The issue is of course, the double looping of procrastination. It causes more failures, and loss of opportunity. All this leads to unhappiness and eventually to ill health.

(Reference : Ferrari/dePaul University of Chicago; Research Group, Canada)

What can you do? Rather than help the client connect with all the skills of decision making or prioritisation, or defining what ‘good’ might look like for the work, consider instead the client’s resilience. Could their resilience be at a low ebb? If so, the focus of the work needs to change. Resilience coaching includes spotting the real barriers that stop the client acting on the changes needed in the coaching contract. Resilience coaching helps get to the nub of things more quickly.

What will enable your client’s resilience? Your client will probably know! The quickest way to discover more is to explore more about the client’s energy. Energy is a proxy for resilience; it’s not the same, but it does follow the same ups and downs. Help the client explore what drives the ups, and what drives the downs. Then, work on how the client can increase their energy.

This is a straightforward step towards helping the client increase their own resilience. And since resilience is a buffer to stress, it’s a great step towards decreasing stress and the reaction for procrastinating.

And if you’re caught in the same situation as a coach, why not try the same?

 

Author: Jenny Campbell, CEO of The Resilience Engine

To learn more about how you can become a Resilience Engine accredited coach, click here.

 

What is the definition of Resilience?

You can find here all of our publications. In the following list, choose which filter you would like to apply:

Resilience Engine, Resilience Engine Publications, Resilience Engine New Blog Post, What is Resilience

What is Resilience?Resilience is our ability to reshape ourselves. Or another way of saying it is our ability to successfully adapt to change. This definition is applicable at any level, individual, team, organisational right through to community.

It’s an unusual definition. Most of what is talked about on resilience is about either coping or about bounce back. Both of these are elements within resilience, but they do not capture all of what resilience is, or indeed can offer. In fact these definitions come from a deficit style way of looking at ourselves:

Coping

Coping is about not breaking down.

Coping is a state where things are held as much as possible at status quo. We resist change. Instead we look for the highest level of control. The state of coping is a rigid one, where we aim to deflect anything that will threaten us. We hold onto old habits and patterns because they give us stability. In this state our performance is at best satisfactory, but especially in a prolonged state of coping, performance is more likely to be at best mediocre, at worst poor.  That’s in any part of our life.

If coping strategies are successfully stopping a breakdown, coping is a great place to be. And it’s tough.

Bounce back

Inherent in the words bounce back is the notion of setback or even trauma. This time bouncing `back is great, if the alternative is coping. Bounce back means returning to something normal, and in doing so somehow absorbing the change necessary to do so, even if unwelcome change.

The return from difficulty feels good, but bouncing back has created a cost. There may be loss involved in the change. And often the total cost is expressed in our energy; we are often tired because of dealing with the setback, and that shadow of tiredness may last a long time. If affects performance. Our performance in this state is likely to be more satisfactory than at coping but it’s difficult to improve it.

Having to bounce back from several challenges wares us down. The Resilience Engine are seeing this more and more; more managers and leaders are having to face simultaneous difficulties, and it is this overlap that sends them back to coping mode. In the end, we may slip out of bounce back into something much more rigid and stuck, often coping, or sometimes, oscillating around in the middle of a kind of ok, static state where there is no change.

Either coping and/or bounce back give us ok.  Interestingly we notice how often organisations seek to get back to coping after difficulty – but in doing so not realising they are stymieing their own performance.

So Is There Anything Else? Introducing Breakthrough

What if there was another stage of resilience where deficit didn’t play a part?  Where in fact there was a high level of energy all the time. Where performance was sustainably high. Where even when things got tough, we operating from a surplus mentality, having enough understanding and confidence about how to whoosh back into high performance. All without cost. All of this no matter the domain, whether work or in personal life. Where bumps in the road were smoothed out long before they become a setback. Where we would thrive.

Doesn’t that sound great? And doesn’t it sound like those who operate at this level are really quite at ease in both home and work domains? It’s very attractive!

This state of resilience exists. It’s called breakthrough. When you are at breakthrough resilience, you are resourceful, adaptable and energised. If you know this level of resilience and do experience a tough time where your resilience slips, you are wholly confident in your abilities to go back to breakthrough, and the return is straightforward and quick. When at breakthrough, one particular setback, no matter how important, will not completely dominate our existence. We will have better perspective, and in fact still be able to experience joy in our lives.

This is when resilience is wholly about our abilities to reshape ourselves. It’s a strategic capability in business and organisations. It’s a strategic capability in our personal lives. When we operate with this level of resilience, our capacity increases immensely, our clarity of purpose and motivation and alignment all increase, our options for solving problems increase, our speed of decision making and action increases. It’s a great place to be.

The Resilience Engine® has been researching resilience since 2007. We have discovered these levels of resilience, and how dynamic resilience is. We are proud to offer  The Resilience Dynamic® as a simple model that helps people – individuals, teams, organisations – diagnose their own levels of resilience and  understand the implications.

Jenny Campbell,
Senior Executive Coach and Resilience Researcher

 

The Resilience Engine® then helps develop them develop it according to this initial diagnostic.
To learn more about our research and The Resilience Dynamic click here. Get in touch if you want to learn more.