​Resilience Training—Ways To Overcome Life & Workplace Challenges

Ever wondered why some people at your workplace handle challenges smoothly while some are unable to do so? That is because their resilience power is their backbone in handling any situation. In the current era, people have to deal with not just their job’s responsibilities but, on top of that, there are other factors too weighing on their minds.

In addition to the jobs that they do, they have to grapple with the ongoing pandemic and its implications both at the work and home fronts, the climate change, political polarisation and the daily stressor of work-life balance. As per a news report, about 20 per cent of the adult populace suffers from anxiety disorders. Therefore, resilience is a very crucial factor these days to tackle all these situations in life.

What Exactly Is Resilience?

Resilience can be understood as the ability to endure adversities and spring back from complex life events. At the same time, it is not true that resilient people don’t experience emotional upheaval, suffering or stress. Generally, people think of resilience as mental toughness. But the demonstration of resilience includes functioning through suffering and pain.

Resilience cannot be seen as a trampoline, where one moment you are down and in the next moment you are up. Rather, it is like a mountain-climbing activity but without having a trail map. It will take time, help from the people around, strength, and you will probably also experience setbacks on the way. But in the end, you will reach the top and can see for yourself how far you have come.

Why Is Resilience So Important?

It is resilience that gives people a ray of hope and emotional strength so as to cope with adversity, trauma and hardships. Resilient people use their strengths, skills and resources to overcome challenges along with deal with setbacks.

People who are not so resilient are more prone to feel helpless or overwhelmed. Then they eventually rely on certain unhealthy coping mechanisms such as isolation, avoidance and self-medication. In a study, a common thing shown by the patients who attempted suicide was found to be the lack of resilience as compared to those who had never tried to commit suicide. They had scored lower on the resilience scale as opposed to the ones who had never attempted to commit suicide.

Resilient people accept the situation as it is and adapt to it, as they know that this process is important in order to move forward in life and carry on with normalcy. Resilience is the reason why some employees thrive by whereas others barely scrape through. The difference between these employees is that some are capable of recovering quickly from the challenges.

There are many resilience training programmes that are organised at the workplace in order to train the employees how to deal with any tricky situation in their lives.

What Entails In Resilience Training?

Resilience doesn’t come by nature in most people; it is a trait that gets developed when a person faces adversity. And because it doesn’t come naturally, it needs to be taught. The father of positive psychology Martin Seligman’s resilience training program is based on his 30 years of research. The programme’s aim was to reduce the number of people who struggle after a traumatic event and increase the number of those people who grow.

Seligman’s programme has now become a foundation for many resilience training programs in the workplace. It is based on five chief factors.

Positive Emotion: Seligman said that having a bank of positive feelings helps a lot. He says that one should be grateful, mindful to truly savour the present and appreciate it and optimistic to create positive feelings for the future as well. In this way, one can increase their bank of positive emotions and bank upon it in their hour of need.

1.Engagement

This means that a person who is completely immersed in the current task at hand and uses all their energy to complete the task ends up feeling, contrarily, energised, instead of drained. They feel satisfied and happy with the work they have done.

2.Relationships

Relationship-building at workplaces can prove to be your asset when you need your support system—friends, family, mentor or a compassionate senior.

3.Meaning

The purpose behind doing any task can set people into action in their daily lives. The sense of a higher purpose gives people the ability to keep ongoing. Therefore, it is essential to show them the ‘big picture.

4.Accomplishment

When we complete a goal, we get this rush of feelings of pride and accomplishment. These feelings improve our overall well-being, serve as a reminder to keep going in the future adversities and increase our sense of the self.

Workplace Resilience Training

Corporate resilience training can help employees to recover from stagnation, failures and other such problems which ultimately lead to poor performance leading to stress and anxiety. Employee resilience training programmes can improve the employees’ well-being and performances, which directly impacts the ROI of any company.

Let us look into a few practical ways of practising resilience at workplaces.

Focus On Quality

Training programmes need to be drawn from the expertise of leaders from mental health, spiritual and entrepreneurship backgrounds. They can also give leadership resilience training for the top-ranked people of the firm. The speakers at the forum can share their personal experiences of how they dealt with severe adversities, which will inspire others to act accordingly.

Make Programmes Accessible To All

As psychologist Susan David says, many people respond to change via resistance. Therefore, such programmes should be made available for all levels of employees—from the CEO to the interns. Making online modules can also ensure wide accessibility by all to reap its benefits.

Offer Flexibility

Because resilience doesn’t come overnight, microlearning solutions enable employees to engage with the training as per their convenient timings. For such purpose, there are personal and individual resilience training program too, for the use of people in their own time and space. Companies should encourage the employees to keep taking this training from time to time.

Measure Success

Companies need to make their own ways to organise a survey to measure the impact and effectiveness of these programmes. They can do this by using platforms like Survey Monkey or Connecteam.

Future-Proof Your Employees With Resilience Training

A business’ strength lies in its employees’ health and safety. Therefore, if you invest in resilience training programmes today, you will reap its benefits tomorrow. You can pass on the baton to future leaders with full confidence that your employees can weather the corporate storms by being resilient.