Resilience Coaching
Resilience is sometimes misunderstood as the ability to be armoured against difficulty. It isn’t. It is the capacity to remain flexible in thoughts, behaviours and emotions when under stress. That stress may come from a one-off event, such as career setback. It can also come from being exposed to relentless demands over a period of time. The demands of being asked to do more, quicker, with less resource and with no end in sight. When flexibility goes, clients can report any of the following:
- Loss of self confidence
- Difficulty in decision making
- A changed outlook: optimists become pessimists, pessimists lose their counterbalancing perspective
- Reduced creativity
- Difficulty in managing their emotions
- Reduced desire for social contact
Resilience coaching focuses on what aspects of your resilience have been impacted, and the building of capacity.
How Resilience Coaching Works
Resilience can be measured by psychometrics. Those have a value, but they assume that you will act the same way in any situation. For example that if you score high on self-confidence you will always be self-confident. It ignores context which is an important part of resilience.
Resilience coaching is instead interested in:
- What is different for you about this situation
- The narrative you have created about yourself in relation to this situation
- The resilience gap
- Helping you address a new narrative that will address that gap
- Enacting that new narrative
