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.
 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?
 

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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.
 

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We have all heard of that saying, but is it true?

In a study published in the latest issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Dr. Seery reports that people who had experienced some misfortune over the course of their lives, were more content with their lot in life and reported better mental health, then people with either a history of great adversity or having experienced no adversity at all.

It seems that a certain amount of adversity and tough times is necessary in order to develop our coping mechanisms. High levels of adversity however, overwhelm our coping ability and the result is a feeling of hopelessness, loss of control and mental health problems.

The conclusion of this study is that we all have enormous capability to develop our resilience and be resilient. This is in line with the research that we have carried out, and supports our findings that people can develop their resilience so as to not only cope better with tough times, but also to live their lives with zest, joy and happiness. This is encouraging for us all.

Reference:
Seery, M. D., Holman, E. A., & Silver, R. C. (2010, October 11). Whatever Does Not Kill Us: Cumulative Lifetime Adversity, Vulnerability, and Resilience. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Advance online publication. doi: 10.1037/a0021344

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Myth 6: Resilience is enhanced by rigorously thinking about your problems and difficulties.

It is commonly believed that in order to solve a problem or deal with an unhappy situation, we need to thoroughly understand all aspects of it. The better we understand it the better we are able to deal with it.

Whilst this is certainly generally true in most situations, a specific myth about resilience has developed from it. The myth and misunderstanding is the belief and practice that frequent rehashing and rethinking about the circumstances and events of things that made you unhappy and lacking in resilience, will enable you to become happy and resilient. The problem is that very often this kind of thinking simply leads to reliving the problem in your mind, and bringing up the emotions associated with the problem, which results in experiencing the negative emotions and helplessness all over again.

This type of thinking pattern is called rumination. Rumination is the constant reliving of unhappy events and conversations and feeling the associated negative emotions. In rumination, one dwells on the problem and feelings rather than the solution. This approach can actually lead to increasing negative emotions and leads to downward spiralling of the thoughts and emotions.

Resilient people are able to quickly break out of negative spirals of thinking. This can be achieved by reframing the negative experience and then going on to what can be done to cope and deal with the adversity.

This is the last of the six myths of resilience. I hoped that you enjoyed reading about them!
 

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 Myth 5: Understanding your character weaknesses is key to being resilient.

The central idea of this myth is that if you can understand what’s wrong with yourself, you can then work on those defects and make them strengths in order to become “balanced” and an "all-rounder".

This myth has its origins at school and extends to business and almost all walks of life. The idea is that everyone, and in particular leaders in business, must be "well balanced". The problem is that very few people start off life as an all-rounder in terms of skills and personality strengths.

Therefore to be an all rounder with balanced strengths and a balanced leadership style, deficit areas or weaknesses need to be developed to the level of our strengths.

This belief is deeply flawed. Firstly, it’s extremely difficult, if not impossible, to develop all one’s skills and character strengths to an equally high level. Secondly, when confronting and dealing with adversity, dramatic change and generally tough times, it’s a lot easier to use your natural character strengths to cope than it is trying to use your weaknesses.

In addition, in order to fulfil your life purpose, you must have been provided with the wherewithal in order to do so. The provisioning for this journey is in the form of your particular character strengths — not your weaknesses.

When we use our strengths we feel effortless, our work is easy and enjoyable, and time seems to stand still while we have fun. When we rely on using our weaknesses on the other hand, it’s difficult. Work is experienced as heavy and we are left feeling tired and depleted.

Resilient people cope with the adversity by using their natural character strengths. This enables them to cope quicker and better than less resilient people. This enables them to recover, heal and move on with their lives, focusing on growth and self-fulfilment.

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 Myth 4: Resilient people stay resilient over the normal passage of time.

Some people think that if you are resilient you should be able to remain resilient over long periods of time.

This is not the case however. Even resilient people experience down periods in their lives – they experience hardships, difficulties, betrayals and bereavements just like anyone else. At difficult times like these, their resilience slips and they too experience negative feelings of fear, disappointment, frustration and anger as everyone else.

Resilience is not a magic potion that makes you immune to the problems of life. What sets resilient people apart and makes them resilient, is the way they react to and cope with challenge and adversity. They will tell you that bad times don’t last forever. Resilient people will say that one needs to persevere through the tough times, not give up hope that things will get better. They intuitively know and believe with great conviction that there are ups as well as downs in life and that the downs don’t last forever.

Resilient people experience the same bad things and tough times as people who are less resilient. The difference is the way resilient people cope with the tough times enables them to experience less negative effects and to recover quicker.

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