Building Resilience in Challenging Times presented to Erica Edmands of Potential Spaces to the SCOD forum.

1. Building Resilience in
Challenging Times
April 2010
Erica Edmands
Potential Spaces Australia
0438 389 083
www.potentialspaces.com.au

2. Our logo – Potential Spaces
About our logo - The Himalayan Blue Poppy
The Himalayan Blue poppy is a native of southeastern
Tibet.
Responsive to its environment, with the right balance of
water, light, air and soil this plant is extremely resilient
and adaptable and will produce the spectacular,
saucer shaped, bright blue flowers that make it such a
sought after specimen.
Its ability to adapt, its resilience, uniqueness and its
messages of ecological sustainability reflect the
values which underpin our organisation.

3. Overview of today’s session
 What is resilience?
 Why do we need to build our resilience?
 Aligning our core talents with our values
 Collaborative conversations on building our
resilience using World Café
 Harvest our collective insights
 Personal planning and coaching for resilience
 Workshop close

4. What is resilience?
 The ability to ‘bounce back’ from adversity, or
rise above a situation
 The capacity to handle challenges &
opportunities of work & life by doing things
which include:
– Recognising the signs & symptoms that for you
indicate your resilience is slipping - your stressors and
physiological responses
– Knowing the best way to ride life’s ups & downs for
you to stay well, feel energized and in control
– To act in a resilient manner

5. Resilience and Stressors
Stressors can have quite a number of different characteristics:
• External, physical stimulus (heights or a loud noise).
• An event, (loosing your job, divorce, starting a new role).
• An internal thought or worry. For example you suddenly
think that you forgot to turn off the stove – no event has
occurred but the stressor is real.
• Long term like a family member with an ongoing illness or a
debilitating injury or dissatisfying job, or it can be acute like
a sudden shock. It can be in the past (bereavement) or in
the future as an anticipated negative event, like a public
speaking engagement.
What are your stressors? Make a list of 5.

6. Resilience - Response
• We often respond whilst we are feeling the effects of the
emotional response.
• What does that look like for you? Think about how this
affects your behaviour at work and home.
• What sort of impact do you think this will have on your
teams/colleagues/family?
• We have a choice in how we respond. You may not be
responsible for the events in your life but you are in control of
your response to those events.

7. Where Are You Right Now?
THINK
I am having:
difficulty sleeping,
STOP
diarrhoea, constipation GO
I often feel anxious, I feel great, alive, full of
tense neck, shoulder, jaw
irritable, nervous, teary, frequent headaches life. I am on top of life’s
tired, steamrollered or challenges and
pounding heart
plain worn out for no heartburn, wind, bloating pressures.
reason or reasons with no I have good systems in
or indigestion
control. place to pace myself.
a cold or bug that lingers
I struggle to concentrate outbursts My life is pretty
or make decisions. balanced through a
loss of patience
I am relying on caffeine, no time for me daily exercise program,
alcohol, drugs, pain eating healthily, weight
people saying I am
killers or smoking too under control, not
working too hard
much. I am slipping into using smoking and having a
My health is deteriorating few drinks on the
drugs, gambling, alcohol
and I see no way out. * or smoking to get through weekend only.
the week
Potential Spaces
© mental health at work: Ingrid Ozols (mn@work, 2008)

8. Where Are You Right Now?
Potential Spaces
© mental health at work: Ingrid Ozols (mn@work, 2008)

9. Activity
Potential Spaces

10. How do we build our resilience – a
holistic approach?
The inner
work Physiological
(the mind, (the body)
the soul)
Building
Environment
Relationships

11. Physiological strategies
Our body is an excellent
communicator for how we are
Physiological feeling.
(the body)
 Breathing, regulation
 Yoga
 Review of diet/nutrition
 Exercise regime
 Increasing flexibility
 Getting adequate sleep

12. The inner work of resilience -
thinking strategies
One of the most effective ways of
The inner regulating how your thoughts may
work be impacting how you feel.
(the mind,
the soul)
 Mindfulness meditation
 Guided imagery
 Cognitive reframing
 Learning to problem solve
 Perspective shifting
 Reading & self education

13. The inner work of resilience
The inner
work
(the mind,
the soul)
Authentic happiness – Martin Seligman
www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu
Kevin Cashman, Leadership from the Inside Out: discovering your sweet spot

14. Resilience and being in-flow
Optimal happiness and
engagement is based on your
capacity to understand and
cope with the range of
positive and negative
emotions you experience at
work
We find flow when we find
equal balance between our
personal level of skill in
completing our work and the
challenge of work itself

15. Your core talents
Thing about the times when you’ve felt at your
best, when you’re energised and engaged. Now
ask yourself and respond to the following
questions and statements:
1) What gifts can people count on me for?
2) When I am making a difference, creating value,
my talents that “show up” are…
3) Other people tell me I make a difference by:
4) When I am working with others, and we are
most energised and engaged, I am
contributing…
5) In summary, my Core Talents – the gifts that I
have that make a difference – are:

16. What are your Core Values?
 What do you value most in your life?
 What are your key values?
 What are your passions?
 What makes you tremble?
 Why do you do the work you do?

17. Environmental strategies
Factors external to us can impact on
how we feel at work.
Environment
 Modifying, working hours
 Changing the office layout
 Modifying expectations
 Limiting, unnecessary stress
 Playing relaxing music
 Adjusting work flows
 Questioning organisational
structure – does enable resilience?
 Creating physical spaces
 Planning your ideal week – making
the time for you

18. Building resilience through building
relationships
 “a problem shared is a problem
halved”
Building
Relationships  connecting and sharing how we
feel with others provides us with the
opportunity to vent our feelings and
reconsider how we want to be
feeling about an issue
 when expressing our emotions we
do begin to feel differently
 others might also provide us with an
additional perspective on how we
feel – it’s not about judging you!

19. Building resilience through building
relationships
Conversational leadership
Building
 a leader’s intentional use of
Relationships conversation as a core process to
cultivate the collective intelligence
needed to create value
 It is a leadership praxis, an approach to
leadership that is embedded and
embodied in a leader’s very ‘being’
World cafe!
 true solutions and innovation lie not in
one leader or one viewpoint, but in the
bigger picture of an organisation's
collective intelligence

20. Choose a table host

21. I’m a table host – what do I do?
 Remind people at your table to jot down key
connections, ideas, discoveries, and deeper
questions as they emerge.
 Remain at the table when others leave and
welcome travelers from other tables when the
next question begins.
 Briefly share key insights from the prior
conversation so others can link and build using
ideas from their respective tables.
Potential Spaces

22. World café conversations
1) How do I build resilience in
myself as a leader?

23. Mini - harvest
What is the essence of your conversation?
Write up your collective essence, a word or a
short statement on the coloured paper on
your table
We will come around and collect it.

24. World café conversations
2) How can we support
each other in building our
resilience?

25. Mini - harvest
What is the essence of your conversation?
Write up your collective essence, a word or a
short statement on the coloured paper on
your table
We will come around and collect it.

26. World café conversations
3) How do we build
resilience within our
teams?

27. Mini - harvest
What is the essence of your conversation?
Write up your collective essence, a word or a
short statement on the coloured paper on
your table.
We will come around and collect it.

28. Personal reflection and planning
Let the following questions guide you to committing yourself to
practices that will enhance your energy and resilience.
 What can I do to improve the quality of my activity or reduce the
quantity to bring more resilience to my lifestyle?
 What can I do to improve the quality of rest to revitalise myself?
 What habits do I need to replace with more positive behaviours?
 What are my internal motivators for achieving more resilience?
 What is my vision for the more resilient life I want to live?
 How is my pursuit of wants vs. needs complicating my life and
taking away from my life vision?
 What is my plan to build more energy?
Identify one or two goals/challenges to work on moving forward.

29. Circle close
1) What has been a major learning insight for you
today?
2) What seed might we plant together today
that could make the most difference to a
resilient future?

30. Thank you for your participation and
thank you to the Upstairs Room
Erica Edmands
Potential Spaces Australia
0438 389 083
www.potentialspaces.com.au
sarah@theupstairsroom.com.au
The Upstairs Room