This is the sixth and final blog in the series about the building blocks of personal resilience of staff needed to ensure that your organisational change sticks and benefits are realised.

 The previous blog outlined the first four principles, and this blog covers the remaining three.

 5. Be realistically optimistic: this concerns understanding the story one tells oneself about one’s life, and the choice one makes as to how to explain and make sense of our experiences of life. In this way, the stories that we tell ourselves mould and ultimately define who we are. Fortunately, optimism is a learnable skill.

6. Persevere by being open-minded and flexible: dealing with adversity requires sufficient perseverance on the one hand not to give up too easily, but on the other hand not to be so fixated on driving for action that it creates a blinkered approach.

Creative problem-solving in the face of adversity requires being open-minded and flexible, which enables considering different views and even changing direction. This is best achieved with creative rather than tense energy, and an optimistic rather than a pessimistic attitude.

7. Reach out to others: reaching out involves both reaching out to offer help and assistance, as well as ask for help and assistance. The roles we adopt of parent, committee member and manager often legitimise and facilitate offering help to others. This is in contrast with asking for help for ourselves which is commonly experienced as more difficult. Being in an organisational hierarchy can make this even more difficult, particularly if there are fears about how the request for help will be interpreted.

Nevertheless for whatever reason, both in and outside of organisations, people often delay asking for help longer than in retrospect they feel they should have.

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, resilience is more than just recovering or bouncing back from tough times. Our research found that successful coping with adversity results in enhanced resilience which in turn enables better coping with future adversity. The research showed that resilience is multidimensional and involves insights; thoughts, feelings and actions – indeed a way of positive living and even thriving which importantly can be learnt and enhanced.

Preparing staff for any large scale change such as new ways of working or to deal with adversity in the form of mergers and retrenchments by assisting them to develop their personal resilience, will result in their being more receptive to the change and better able to cope with the inevitable disruptions. This can be achieved by training using the framework of the resilience building blocks.

From this perspective, resilience is needed as much in the senior levels of the organisation as in the lower levels. Our experience is that personal resilience training is extremely well-received and staff report that it has a lasting impact over time.

The benefit to the organisation is enhanced project take-up assurance, less resistance, and quicker benefit realisation. The benefit to the staff is a life skill which enables them to cope better at work and at home.Isn’t that a double benefit worth creating?

References

1 Brooks, R and Goldstein, S (2004) The power of resilience: achieving balance, confidence and personal strength in your life, New York, McGraw-Hill

2 Fredrickson, B L (2001) The role of positive emotions in positive psychology: The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions, American Psychologist: Special Issue, 56, 218–226.

3 Hamel, G and Valikangas, L (2003) Quest for Resilience, Harvard Business Review, September

4 Maddi, S R and Khoshaba, DM (2005) Resilience at work: how to succeed no matter what life throws at you, New York: AMACOM

5 Meichenbaum, D (2005) Understanding resilience in children and adults: implications for prevention and interventions, Paper delivered to the Melissa Institute Ninth Annual Conference on Resilience.

6 Reivich, K and Shatte, A (2002) The Resilience Factor: 7 Essential Skills for Overcoming Life’s Inevitable Obstacles, New York: Broadway Books

7 Patterson, JL and Kelleher, P (2005) Resilient School Leaders: Strategies for Turning Adversity Into Achievement ASCD

8 Richardson, G E (2002) The metatheory of resilience and resiliency, Journal of Clinical Psychology, 58, (3), 307 – 321

9 Siebert, A (2005) The resiliency advantage: master change, thrive under pressure, and bounce back from setbacks, San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler

10 Tugade MM and Fredrickson BL, 2004 Resilient individuals use positive emotions to bounce back from negative emotional experiences, Journal of psychology and social psychology, 2004, Vol 86, No 2, 320-333.

This series of blogs was based in part on an earlier article by the same author:
Warner, R (2007) Staying the course: building personal resilience for successful organisational change Convergence Vol 8, No 2, 20-23

This is the fifth in the series of blogs about the building blocks of personal resilience of staff to ensure that your organisational change sticks and benefits are realised.

Following the research, models, principles and steps of personal resilience were identified. The first four of these principles are explained:

1. Connect to your purpose and meaning in life: a strong sense of purpose and meaning is the bedrock on which coping, healing and renewal after adversity is made possible. This principle of building personal resilience concerns the issue of why some are able to persevere when things get really tough rather than just giving up. People in our study described finding purpose, connection and meaning beyond themselves in areas of their lives concerning significant people, causes and faith.

2. Use your unique strengths: self-knowledge, and in particular realistic self insight into one’s own character strengths and vulnerabilities, forms the basis of the second principle. Most people are very aware of their weaknesses, and this is enhanced by organisational processes which focus on “performance gaps” and “personal vulnerabilities”. In order to balance this emphasis on weaknesses, an emphasis on understanding and using character strengths is necessary to build resilience. The people in our study gave powerful examples of using their natural character strengths to cope with adversity, recover and even become stronger.

3. Maintain perspective: perspective is important during adversity as we are programmed from our past with a survival instinct that focuses on and makes us more alert for the negative than the positive. This evolutionary bias does not serve us well in the modern world if persistent and negative thoughts intrude into our lives, variously described by our study participants as a “negative radio talk station” and “my mother in my head”. This negative focus is exacerbated when accompanied by a tense focus on narrow details, which is very different from the more useful open, creative and flexible thinking required to effectively cope with today’s adversities.

4. Generate positive feelings: whilst negative feelings are not bad in themselves, they do have the potential to overwhelm and incapacitate at the very times we need to have our wits about us. In addition, prolonged and intense negative feelings can lead to an oversupply of adrenaline and cortisol, which can be very harmful to our bodies. Generating genuine positive feelings, even in tough times, is an effective way of restoring balance in one’s life and eventually bouncing back from adversity.

The next and final blog in the series will cover the remaining 3 principles of building personal resilience.
 

This is the fourth in the series of blogs about building personal resilience of staff to ensure that your organisational change sticks and benefits are realised.

RESILIENCE STUDY
We recently conducted a study of resilience in South Africa. The aim was to examine how people cope with adversity and stress at work, with the view to finding out how to enhance personal resilience to enable better coping with organisational change. The research included a literature review, critical incident interviews and focus groups. The outcome was a clear understanding of what creates personal resilience: the role of personal meaning and purpose together with the importance of understanding yourself; how to manage your thoughts, feelings and attitude; and what to do in order to cope with tough times, and in particular how to emerge stronger and more resourceful.

Three domains of personal resilience were identified, each with its own set of constructs. In order to make these constructs easier to understand, we now express them as principles of building personal resilience.

As shown in Figure 4, the core domain consists of the principles of building resilience: Connect to your purpose and meaning in life and Use your unique strengths. The internal world domain consists of the building resilience principles of Maintain perspective, Generate positive feelings and Be realistically optimistic. The third domain is that of the external world, and consists of the building resilience principles Preserve by being open minded and flexible and Reach out to others.

              Figure 4: Personal resilience building blocks model

Each of these principles of building personal resilience will be briefly explained in the next of the series of blogs about resilience in the context of organisational and life challenges.
 

This is the third in the series of blogs about building personal resilience of staff to ensure that your organisational change sticks and benefits are realised.

Coping successfully with adversity has the great benefit of enhancing resilience which, in turn, enables better coping with future adversity. Thus the experience and application of resilience leads to further positive upward spirals of healing, recovery, growth and thriving, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Experiencing adversity with resilience

NEW PERSPECTIVE ON RESILIENCE

No-one wants to experience tough times and adversity, but for personal growth and development to occur, it is often necessary for one’s status quo to be disrupted – adversity achieves this and initiates change. Horace is reputed to have said “Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents which in prosperous circumstances would have lain dormant.” After a life-disrupting change, one cannot go back to how things were – one will become stronger or weaker; better or bitter.

This personal impact of the adversity on you is determined by you. You use resilience to deal with the adversity and its personal impact, which encompasses more than just recovery elements and processes.

With this understanding of the role of personal resilience, we define it as the life force to overcome adversity, heal and strive towards self actualisation and flourishing. The implication for organizations is that there is as much personal benefit for staff in enhancing their resilience, as there is for organizations in the further development of resilience at work. Good news for all!

But what differentiates the people who seem to thrive under pressure and difficult times, from those who in the same circumstances seem to whither and weaken? And what causes some resilient people to remain strong for lengthy periods, but then find themselves “battle weary” or “burnt out” so that their coping, dedication and productivity are limited?

This negative coping, with the consequent potential for negative downward spiralling, is shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Experiencing adversity with limited resilience

In the next blog in this series, we will look at a study on resilience carried out in South Africa, which produced some interesting findings.

In the previous blog, the first in a series of how to cement organisational change by building staff resilience, we saw that resilient people have significant advantages at work. This second blog explores the concepts further.

Fortunately staff can learn to be more resilient and thus make the transitions outlined below:

RESILIENCE AND ORGANISATIONAL CHANGE Gary Hamel, the well known strategist observed: “The world is becoming turbulent faster than organisations are becoming resilient.” People experiencing organisational change often experience a disruption of the status quo as uncomfortable and even threatening.

It’s now well accepted that to be successful, organisational change initiatives must be supported by people change support initiatives – to align people intellectually to the reasons and business case for the change; to engage them emotionally to deal with their past experiences of change; to acknowledge fears they may have about the implications of the change; and to train and reinforce new behaviours and processes to roll out the change.

We have found that over and above well crafted change support initiatives, individual personal resilience is needed to ensure the success of the change. Resilience involves dealing with those things that cause stress and is needed to cope with the “normal traumas” everyone experiences in life and at work. Moderate stress enables energetic actions and excitement; too much stress is debilitating.

The process of a resilient reaction to adversity still involves the person feeling hurt and pain, but what characterises resilient people is that they move forward, deal with the issues, learn from them and emerge strengthened and even more resourceful. The different reactions to a change are shown in Figure 1. Resilience and change readyness

             Figure 1: Resilience and change readyness

In the next blog, we will look at the personal benefits to staff of coping with resilience in the face of organisational and even life changes.

This is the first of a series on blogs on the topic of personal resilience as the missing ingredient in making organisational change stick. Read this series of six blogs, and learn how to make your organisational change work, and ensure the benefits are realised!

 "Baby Jake" Matlala has lots of it. Amy Biehl’s parents, Linda and Peter are the epitome of it. Caster Semenya demonstrates it. Even the JSE is showing signs of it. They all are resilient – able to deal with tough times and bounce back. Resilience may prove to be the single most critical personal skill for us as South Africans, as we reconcile with our past, cope with the turbulent present and prepare for the future.

 What is resilience? It’s certainly demonstrated by those who battle the storm’s fury to rescue sailors, or who tunnel deep underground to free trapped miners. Luckily, it’s not just confined to a select few heroes. It’s a widely distributed ability that we all possess.

 Resilience enables us to “bounce back” after experiencing stressful life events such as significant change, stress, adversity and hardship. Most intriguingly however, it incorporates the concept of emerging from adversity stronger and more resourceful.

 RESILIENCE AT WORK

At work, resilience is the ability to remain task-focussed and productive whilst experiencing tough times. Imagine your organisation staffed with people who have abundant inner strength and resourcefulness, which enables them to cope with mergers, new priorities, major change initiatives, new technologies and even downsizing. Wouldn’t that make a difference!

 Interest in resilience in the workplace has been increasing. Solid research has mirrored this interest, and over the last few years has shown that there are dramatically beneficial outcomes for organisations that enhance resilience in their workforce:

• Resilient people experience overall more hope, optimism and positivity and so are better able to cope with job demands 
• Resilient people are best able to get through tough times such as job loss and economic hardship 
• Resilient people are better able to learn new skills and knowledge when their existing set become outdated
• Resilient people are less likely to become mentally or physically ill during adversity
• When competing for a job or promotion, the more resilient person has a better chance of succeeding
• Resilient people are best able to turn adversity into a growth experience, and to leverage it into new experiences and ways of working and living

 The good news is that resilience can be enhanced and developed to achieve dramatic benefits for the individual and the work place.

 Learn more in the next blog about how to enhance resilience of staff to ensure organisational change is successful.

Time US, dated Thursday September 08, 2011, has an article with the above title looking back at the 9/11 Twin Towers attack, and assesses in retrospect the resilience what was learned. The article concludes that "the largest lesson for the mental health field is that when disaster strikes, practitioners should not get in the way of natural coping. Instead of trying to provide services to the entire population, they should, after a month or so, target the people who might need it the most and then tailor their approaches, taking individual and cultural differences into account."

The fascinating article reports that only about 15% of the World Trade Centre evacuees suffered from post dramatic stress disorder and needed psychological help. The rest of the people who went through the most harrowing experiences were resilient and have carried on coping without seeking the help of a medical health professional.

The full article is available here 

Everyone tells a story about themselves that helps explain, interpret and make sense of their lives. We tell these stories to people around us, but most of all, we tell stories to ourselves. The more we tell the same story, the more we come to believe it, and live it in the present. These stories can be happy or sad, humorous or tragic, focused on recent events or based in early childhood.

The stories are however highly selective and biased interpretations of our past. We select particular events and string them together and make interpretations of what has happened. Through this highly selective process we focus on a select few events while ignoring many, many others, and in this way we actually reinterpret and reinvent our past.

Recreating our past influences how we perceive ourselves and live our lives in the present. Resilient people make sense of their lives by telling stories to themselves and others interpreting the obstacles they encounter as steppingstones to new phases in their lives.

Steve Jobs, the extremely talented founder of Apple Computers, whose health has been the subject of recent newspaper articles, tells stories about his life in this way too. He refers to this as joining the dots”. He had this to say about his life in a commencement address at Stanford University in 2005 :

“I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

What is the story you tell yourself about yourself about your life — do you talk about obstacles or steppingstones?
 

The April 2011 edition of Harvard business Review contains an article describing how the U.S. Army is training its soldiers in the skills of building personal resilience. It is remarkable that not only is the Army undertaking what could be seen as "soft skills" and training for its front line soldiers, but also that they expected to train all their 1.1 million members in these techniques. Click here to go to the article.

What is also quite remarkable is that the program has been very well accepted, with some soldiers saying that it is the best training that they have received from the Army.

The training is being conducted under the auspices of Dr Martin Seligman, who also authored the article, and is arguably the most influential living psychologist today. He together with other well-known research scientists have identified five elements that go to make up resilience and train the soldiers in these five areas. Further details were described in my blog dated 22 November 2009.

The five areas are known as PERMA – positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning and accomplishment.

Our research on the building blocks of resilience in South Africa found these five elements and an additional two. We also offer training in these building blocks and have found that delegates report a sustained enhancement of their resilience over time — they find that you don’t have to do flounder in the face of adversity, but can deal with it and eventually flourish.

In these turbulent times resilience is fast becoming regarded as the personal competency to deal with tough times, to remain task focused and ultimately flourish. This is required as much in the Army as it is in everyday business.
 

Is resilience “mental grit”, tough mindedness or perseverance? The answer is that all of this but much more.

Most people understand resilience as the ability to “bounce back” and “stay the course” during tough times. And it is indeed correct that resilience is the ability to not buckle, but rather to persevere and recover from tough times. In this way, resilient individuals at work remain task-focused and productive in the face of personal and organisational difficulties.

But resilience is not just about fortitude and persistence. Resilience is also about healing, recovery and becoming stronger than before.

Now we all wish for good times; those times when we feel we’re on an even keel, when we can cope and when most things in our lives go smoothly. But we also know that personal development does not occur during good times. It’s at times when we are challenged, our resources stretched, and we have had to move out of our comfort zone to find new and different ways of coping and dealing with adversity, that we develop.

Abraham Maslow, the noted early psychologist, understood this and proposed that people evolve as they move through various states of being towards the highest level of personal development, which he called self actualisation. This theory has been further developed by thinkers like Richard Barrett, who has identified different values associated with each level of what he calls consciousness.

From these perspectives, the experience of tough times may have a benefit to us. Whilst not sought or welcomed, tough times can facilitate personal growth and development. When this happens, adversity, difficulties and real challenges have the potential to give us the opportunity to become better individuals, and live our lives more in tune with our real values. In this way, personal resilience helps us to heal, recover from adversity, and move on with our lives.

Thus a more comprehensive understanding of resilience is that it is the life force to cope with tough times, heal and move towards self actualisation. It enables living an authentic life, true to one’s values, and achieving one’s purpose.

With this broader understanding, resilience is truly a life force we all need!