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The Guide to Personal Resilience

Introduction

Professor Derek Mowbray has created a new Guide to Personal Resilience. This guide will help you boost your resilience. It’s about YOU.

Resilience is a process of getting a robust attitude in the face of challenging and threatening events. It’s also about becoming a stronger person as a consequence of facing up to and overcoming challenging experiences.

Living is often about tackling obstacles that stand in the way of what we want. Tackling one obstacle after another can be quite soul destroying, particularly if the light at the end of the tunnel seems pretty dim, if not dark. When we feel this way we need a lot of inner strength and determination. We, also, need a strong attitude for less extreme situations, for when we need to confront a new and potentially positive experience or something routine when tired, in a dull mood, or simply fed up with everything. This is where this guide comes in.

To accompany the guide, Professor Mowbray has made a few short videos to explain the 8 elements of resilience that are covered in this new guide. The guide itself provides tasks and exercises to complete, which, when taken together, will boost overall personal resilience.

For further information about the guide, to purchase a copy or to enquire about having a branded copy to distribute within your organisation, to improve the resilience of your workforce, Call us now on 01242 241882 for further information or contact us by email

An Introduction to the Personal Resilience Guide

Professor Derek Mowbray discusses some of the key issues concerning Personal Resilience covered in the Personal Resilience Guide:

Self Awareness
Determination
Vision Organisation
Relationships
Interaction
Problem Solving
Confidence

Self awareness

Resilience comes from understanding your own achievements, successes and where you’ve come unstuck before. Understanding yourself and your boundaries for coping enables you to weigh up each challenging situation, and helps you to form an attitude towards the challenge - hopefully an attitude that enables you overcome and benefit from the experience.

Determination

Knowing what drives you helps to explain why you take the kind of decisions about yourself that you do. Such decisions may puzzle your family and friends, but you find yourself driven to make such decisions. This is due to your core values Your core values are, also, your core drivers.
Once you know what drives you you’ll find that your determination to see certain things through to the end will be compelling. When this happens your resilience against adverse events will be very strong.

Vision

People who have worked out what they wish to achieve with their life can tolerate more easily the ups and downs of daily life that seem designed to divert attention away from the longer term aim. Once you have achieved what you want from your life so far think of something else to achieve. Having something to aim for, or having a purpose in life, is a central aspect of psychological wellbeing, and is a major boost to personal resilience.

Organisation

Many people at work find themselves responding to demands all the time, and find it difficult to set aside enough time to concentrate on important tasks. Some may think that a full diary is a sign of achievement whilst finding it impossible to think. Resilient people know how to manipulate a chaotic into a structured day where the achievements of the day can be clearly recognised.

Relationships

We need relationships to assist us achieve what we want, whatever that might be. In the workplace we need relationships that help us achieve success and happiness at work. We don’t want relationships of high maintenance for low impact no matter how much fun they may be; nor do we need the relationship from hell that preys on our mind for ever, and helps achieve absolutely nothing.

Interaction

Interaction is the way in which we survive. A resilient person will understand that interaction is the process that leads to others doing what we want them to do. This is also known as persuasion. People who are good at persuasion understand the self interest of others, and pander to that self interest, on the basis that if someone feels their self interest is being served they tend to reciprocate and serve your self interest. Truly resilient people never cause others psychological distress in their interactions, whilst managing to be assertive in their approach to persuasion.

Problem solving

Working out how to solve problems is part of everyday life. For some it is a challenge in itself, but for those more resilient the opportunity of disentangling a problem and solving it becomes an achievement that adds to the reservoir of our resilience.

Confidence

Confidence comes from controlling our own anxiety that may be caused by new experiences. Knowing how to control anxiety enables confidence to be boosted, so that once a new experienced has been successful it is added to our reservoir of resilience, making it easier next time to experience something similar.

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