What can individuals do to build their resilience? And how can organisations support their people to do this?
This was the focus of our recent event, where a panel of speakers shared some inspiring and impactful stories on resilience. We wanted to share the summary of Neil Trevena’s and Elke Edwards’ top tips on how to build individual and organisational resilience.
Individual resilience
We asked Neil to share the 3 things people can do from a personal perspective to build their own resilience:
- Identifying what your next step is that will take you towards what you’re trying to achieve. What is that one step? It could be simply to get up from your desk right now and sit in your garden for 5 mins. Don’t underestimate the value of the tiny 1% activities in making you more resilient.
- Be really curious and incredibly courageous to really get to yourself. And it’s not just knowing yourself in terms of ‘Hi I’m Neil, I’m good at this and I’m not so good at that’. What sits beneath that? What’s going on for you? And remember, your perspective is only going to get you so far in uncovering your true self; you’re going to have to speak to other people and get feedback. The moment you start to do that, you begin a journey of self-discovery and it’s completely life-changing.
- The third thing is about relationships. Simon Sinek said that a big contributor to the global mental health crisis is the fact that as human beings, we’re not very good at forming relationships – deep, meaningful relationships. So a big takeaway would be to review your relationships, look at who you’re surrounding yourself with and ask yourself the questions: what is it I want to get out if this relationship? What am I putting into this relationship? Is it serving me? is it serving the other person? Review where you’re spending your time and this will help you identify opportunities to get great support with your resilience.
Organisational resilience
Elke then shared her perspective on what an organisation can do if they’re keen to create culture of resilience:
1. One of the things we talk about at Ivy House is operating from a place of core strength, and what that means is knowing how you thrive. What kind of environment, job, work, makes you thrive and be strong because ultimately, resilience is strength. So I would say from an organisation’s perspective the first thing to focus on is enabling people to find that place within your organisation that makes resilience easy. When I was Creative Director at Ivy House, I was thriving in a sense that it was the right place for me to be and it made resilience come far easier. If organisations can help people to find that, it’s an easier place to start from.
2. Developing your people to be human leaders. This isn’t about everyone being super vulnerable all over the place – or what I sometimes call ‘emotional sneezing’. That’s not the thing that builds resilience. What does build resilience is having people you can talk to within the right process, structure and framework – people who are trained to support you. We need to enable our leaders to facilitate that kind of environment.
3. Having frameworks and structures that support the development and growth of resilience. Recognising that it is a learning process – we can get better at resilience. It’s not a failure if you’re not resilient, it’s how do you take that learning and step up to the next level – and the next level – so we need to build our processes and frameworks to support that.
Curious to know more? Watch the full recording of our event below.
