Resilience
Resilience Coaching teaches you the skills you need to remain tough-minded, clear-thinking, decisive and able to call upon a wealth of coping strategies, no matter how bad the problem. Borrowing from Positive Psychology we also assist you to develop optimism and an attention to your strengths rather than your weaknesses. Resilience empowers you to face down adversity: conflict, performance issues, financial problems and career change amongst just a few.
The phrase 'stress management' has now gone out of fashion, partly because 'stress' is a fairly meaningless word and partly because the difference between people who handle setbacks well and those who don't is of more interest. Modelling resilient people is one of the keys to success.
The salient traits of resilient people are:
Social skills: The key here is that the person can draw on the support of friends and family in hard times. To do that they spend a lot of time investing in those relationships. From that it follows that they have empathy, good communication skills and are ‘there’ for other people.
Problem-solving: Problem-solvers look carefully at the facts, make close decisions based on those facts and always, always, keep the end in view. They are also good at getting other people to look at the problem and come up with fresh ideas.
Self-reliance: The independent person does not depend on what other people think. Instead they follow their own ideas, trusting in their own thoughts, emotions and intuitions in order to find their way in life. As such they are good decision-makers.
A ‘can-do’ attitude: This is sometimes called ‘Optimism’ in some manuals but it is not really a matter of seeing the best in situations. Rather, it has to do with pro-actively looking for ways to make a bad situation better, or a good situation better still, focusing on what the person can influence rather than on what they can’t.
Emotional intelligence: Supports the other four skills. High EQ people are good at reading others, avoid dramatizing problems, trust in their own emotions and focus on what they can influence rather than wasting time on fantasies.
Humour: This is one characteristic that almost never appears in the list of traits resilient people are meant to have but in my view it is the most important. Resilient people quickly get the joke about personal delusions and don't take them seriously.
I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can't see from the center
Kurt Vonnegut
You can take an Optimism test here.
