What difference does resilience training make?
The only real question that most L&D professionals want answering when I tell them about Resilience training is this: what difference does the resilience training make?
Besides being fun and interesting, and perhaps ticking a few well-being related boxes, what will it actually do for their team and for their organisation?
On a very basic level, the difference that resilience training makes is that it:
Brings awareness to the multiple components that contribute to resilience.
Upskills and motivates the team to develop these resilience factors.
Some of the aspects that resilience training can explore are:
Setting goals that hold personal and organisational value.
Enabling the process of goal attainment with a ‘Growth Mindset’.
Having acute awareness of personal strengths and the strengths of others in the team, and levering that awareness to produce better results.
Understanding and managing the emotions of self and others.
Accepting and navigating change.
Seeing things in a ‘joined-up’ way.
Communicating skillfully.
Using applied creativity to solve problems.
Building connections and strengthening relationships with others.
The resilience training we run here at Light Box Leadership is as much about personal development as it is about building professional skills. Our training equips people to deal more effectively with challenging circumstances and to achieve more.
And I’m not just talking about work, but this is also about personal lives.
Which I think is a real important point to make, as we all know how what’s going in one sphere of our life inevitably impacts on the other.
We arrive at work each morning as whole people, bringing the energy and emotions of the whole of the rest of our lives with us, and when we go home, work stress tends to follow us home.
Any career worth having, and any life worth living is naturally going to be full of changes and challenges.
Work life and personal life puts us to the test, and we’re sometimes going to be pushed really hard – right to the very edge of what we feel we can manage.
When navigated with confidence and skill, such challenges are the plant-food, the stuff-of-life, the raw material that accelerates growth. Growth of people and organisations. And these challenges are what makes life meaningful.
But… having to continually confront challenges when under-equipped and uncertain in our ability to break through can take its toll. It can diminish our ability to succeed over time.
Resilience training makes a difference. It enables us to:
Develop ‘meta-awareness’ i.e. the ability to think about what we are thinking, and notice how our organisation functions.
Choose the stories we tell ourselves (and others).
Exercise behavioural choice and strengthen our ability to respond to, rather than react to difficult situations.
By equipping people with strategies like these, resilience training makes a difference to organisational and personal success because it prevents challenges from becoming toxic and allows us to continually use adversity as rocket fuel.
What difference might resilience training make to your organisation?
Exercises that generate conversations and an exploration of ideas promotes open communication in the team, horizontally, across departments and vertically too.
With good communication, ideas can flow between interns and management as much as they can within teams. Diversity of opinion, different perspectives and richness of feedback, it all drives up quality and deepens work relationships.