building resilience

A year ago the Office for National Statistics revealed that the health and wellbeing of the UK significantly deteriorated in 2020.  It was the highest decline since the ONS started measuring wellbeing.  Were you surprised?  I wasn’t.  And I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see an even greater deterioration in the last twelve months.  As practitioners what can we do to counteract that decline and help our user community, patients, clients to build their resilience?

We will each have our own models that we follow depending on our training and backgrounds.  Most of these studies focus on the ‘average’ not the outliers which reduces our capacity to think differently and thus to respond appropriately.  You will get some that proselytise about their particular approach, forgetting that we are dealing with individuals, with their individual experiences, their individual circumstances, their individual neurodiversity, and thus no single approach will work across the piece.

Remembering the outliers
I believe that we need to be flexible in what we offer to those who come to us for aid.  Flexible first in our assessment of their needs, doing our best to question our own assumptions about what we are hearing and seeing.  Then to be flexible in what we can offer in terms of our own practice, making the best fit we can to them.  Lastly we need to be flexible about our own beliefs in what ‘works’ so that we can easily and effortlessly pass people to others if we genuinely don’t believe we can offer the best approach for that individual.

I do a lot of work for the NHS Leadership Academy and one of the mantras is line of sight to the patient.  Everything has to go to the line of sight.  What is best for the patient.  What assumptions are we making, what systems and processes are supporting or hindering doing the best we can for the patient.  For us as practitioners in our own work, whether that be with health, with businesses, with individuals, we too must keep that line of sight – pay attention to the person who is thinking and speaking.

From thinking to resilience
When it comes to resilience then what do I do as a practitioner to help my clients, should this be the main presenting issue for them?  There’s a host of self-assessment models so people can understand their patterns of behaviour  Managing your energy not your time is one and their mindsets, this talk The happy secret to better work by Shawn Achor is another.  The anecdotal findings of implementing a Thinking Environment, one of my preferred approaches, where individuals are given the space to think, a partner who pays them full attention and doesn’t interrupt, who treats them as equals, is at ease with them, show that stress levels are reduced. 

They are given the space to allow their brains to work as they are designed to work, to look at situations afresh, to challenge their assumptions and limiting beliefs.  In the presence of a thinking partner they are more easily able to find solutions and to build resilience.  Having someone travel that path with them, even when that partner is silent, dramatically improves their ability to increase resilience levels.
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So, as we are facing more challenges ahead of us, challenges for us as individuals, our families and our communities, now is the time to build our own resilience and help others build theirs.