Resilience Building Workshops and Coaching

Personal mentoring

Other aspects of my professional work

Psychometric assessment


Building Resilience Workshops and Coaching

Resilience is the ability to stay positive and effective in difficult or challenging times while remaining optimistic about the future. 

It is not difficult to see the relevance of Resilience in the current economic climate.  In addition, the increasing speed of change and the volatility that seems to be the hallmark of the 21st century make personal resilience critical for everyone. 

We cannot change the world as we find it but we can change how we think and act in relation to it. 

The Building Resilience workshops have been constructed around the scientific findings on well-being, happiness and life satisfaction currently being produced within Positive Psychology. The Workshops not remedial for those who are suffering. Instead it is designed to help the strong get stronger. 

The workshops vary in length from half to two days (usually with a three month gap between Parts one and two).
 
It is a whole person approach rather than just focussing on the person at work or in a work role. It si not a system or package. Each person decides what works best for them, and focuses on practical tools that will meet their needs in buiding resilience. 


Typical Objectives

 →  Develop an understanding of the nature and importance of resilience and how it can help us face the challenges in our lives and in our work
→  Experience proven tools to increase personal resilience
→  Develop a Personal Resilience Plan to use additional tools, set targets and monitor progress
→  Stay linked together by area of interest
→  Discuss implications for our roles as managers 

5 DRIVERS OF RESILIENCE

→   An Integrated Life Strengthens Resilience
→   Positive Emotions Build Resilience
→   Using your Natural Strengths and getting into Flow builds performance and satisfaction and the resilience that follows
→   Creating Personal Goals based on core values builds resilience
→  Creating a Resilience Building Plan with Rituals to trigger the   small actions that yield big results


1. An Integrated Life Strengthens Resilience

 Participants are guided through a structured discussion with supporting checklist to carry out a self-assessment of their potential resilience in each of six key areas that research tells us has a direct and powerful impact on our general well-being.

The Building Blocks of Resilience are 

→  Physical Activity
→  Sleep
→  Nutrition
→  Positive Emotions
→  Growth/Engagement
→  Meaning/Purpose

Weaker building blocks undermine the ability of the others to contribute to well-being and resilience. The weaker blocks indicate where to start.

2. Positive Emotions Build Resilience
 
Participants discuss, experiment with and try out proven tools to assess and improve the average level of positive emotions in their lives which makes them not only more effective in the present but builds their capabilities for the future. 

3. Using your Natural Strengths and getting into Flow builds performance and satisfaction and the resilience that follows


 Participants discuss, experiment with and try out proven tools to assess and increase the level of personal growth/engagement in their lives through Flow and use of natural strengths. 

4. Creating Personal Goals based on core values builds resilience 

Creating personal goals that are intrinsically motivated, especially those that involve helping or contributing to others, as part of a journey through a meaningful life, make a significant contribution to well-being and the resilience that flows from it.

5. Creating a Resilience Building Plan with Rituals to trigger the small actions that yield big results 

Participants work with each other to formulate a three-month plan with targets, enablers and rituals. Rituals can be very straightforward or can be quite creative as a result of shared brainstorming. 

Variations

Building Resilience Workshops For Managers 

The same structure is followed where the participants looks at themselves and their lives as a whole. The focus then shifts to a discussion of implications in their role as leaders, how they manage people, and their own teams.


 Building Resilience Workshops for Teams 

The same structure is followed where the participants who are all members of the same team looks at themselves and their lives as a whole. The focus then shifts to a discussion of implications for the team and how the team interfaces with others. 

The one-day Building Resilience Workshop plus a half to one day Sustaining Resilience Workshop 

This is a powerful resilience building process. It consists of one day which is devoted to self-assessment, selection of tools to use, and practice at using them, and the creation of a two-to-three month Resilience Plan. This is followed by a two to three month period during which the Plan is put into effect, supported by contact with other participants working on similar issues. The second day is devoted to review of progress, strengthening understanding of existing tools and learning about new ones, followed by renewed commitments/plans to Sustain Resilience.

Personal Resilience Coaching

 This can be provided on a one-to one basis for senior people whose time is at a premium. 

Positive Psychology

The aim of Positive Psychology is to catalyze a change in psychology from a preoccupation only with repairing the worst things in life to also building the best qualities in life. For last 50 years the vast proportion of psychology’s scientific endeavor has focused (admittedly with considerable success) on the accurate description, diagnosis and treatment of human problems such as anger, anxiety and depression. It has paid scant attention to researching and understanding what makes us stronger, happier, fulfilled as human beings.

Positive Psychology is the scientific study of

•   Human flourishing
•   Optimum human functioning
•   What makes life worth living 

With a focus on 

•   Positive emotions, e.g. joy, humour, awe
•   Positive emotional characteristics, e.g. optimism
•   Positive institutions where people can use their natural strengths and feel authentic
 
Since 1999, following the Presidential Address to the American Psychological Association by Martin Seligman, a quiet revolution has been taking place, with a renewed emphasis on the investigation and understanding of the positives of human functioning.

Leadership Resilience in Troubled Times

It is easy to run a successful business or organisation when times are good, the economy is expanding and people feel confident about the future.  Even poorly led and badly managed companies can survive, and can even prosper, as the economy gathers pace and grows without any effort on their part.  Customer relationships, quality, value for money, employee engagement all seem to matter less, though it is true that organisations that do these things well, tend to do better over time than their rivals who ignore or put less value on them.

It is entirely different when the economy is in crisis, people are fearful for their jobs, and feel they have less money to spend.

This is a time when people in leadership roles, (organisational, functional, departmental, or of direct and indirect teams), need to be at their best as leaders.  This is a time when the courage to do what is right, to  balance the needs of the present with a the longer term view, to be as open and as honest as possible, to be a role model to encourage others, and to be disciplined, fair, and supportive all become more critical.  

What characteristics would I be looking for in organisational leaders in today's challenging times?  Here is my list:

1.  The courage to say and do the right things
2.  Openness, Honesty, Integrity 
3.  Resilience
4.  Objective, factual, logical decision making
5.  Perspective-taking (multiple viewpoints, long and short-term)
6.  Social intelligence
7.  Emotional intelligence
8.  Empowerment and support
9.  Powerful team building
10. Urgency

But the challenge for people in leadership roles is that this is asked of them at a time when they themselves might be fearful, confused and uncertain.  They may begin to lose confidence in their ability to cope. They may fear that confiding their true feelings will be taken as a sign of weakness.  They may feel they have no-one to talk to who would understand the complexities of the challenges they are facing.

This is where personal mentoring can help.  Mentoring is different from coaching where usually there is a planned transfer of knowlege and competence from the coach to the coachee.  Good coaches will incorporate elements of mentoring into the process.

Mentoring is more of a dialogue with a loose structure to ensure that the individual's needs are being met.  Mentoring for Leadership Resilience in Turbulent Times involves a number of key elements.  

These can include:

 - Describing current reality and creating a context, looking forward
 - Examining the nature and role of negative and positive emotion
 - Assessing the balance and the causes of imbalance
 - Going with strengths and managing limitations
 - Techniques to increase levels of well-being in oneself
 - Well-being and the leadership role, impact on others
 - Identifying areas for change
 - Creating rituals to move from conscious effort to automatic habit

Depending on need psychological questionnaires of personal style and/or personality may be used.  The mentoring can be delivered face to face or remotely. This is a highly personalised service delivered by Michael Pearn.  Typically, two to three sessions of about one and a half hours meet the needs of people facing complex decisions or dilemmas, but more sessions may be required in some cases.   This process is NOT counselling or therapy.  Accordingly, six sessions are normally sufficient.  Costs therefore range from €1,500 to €5,000.

Contact Michael Pearn  to discuss,  in the strictest confidence, how you might not only cope with but also thrive in turbulent times through personal mentoring. 

Other aspects of my professional work

•  Executive Selection based on in-depth interviewing (and psychometric assessment if required) for appointment to Board and senior roles
• Development Dialogues for Leaders (with or without psychometrics) leading to career and personal development plans for senior executives
• Coaching for Leaders on specific leadership skills 

Psychometric Assessment

• Realise2 - the innovative strengths questionnaire produced by CAPP, the Centre for Applied Positive Psychology
• FIRO Elements (B, F, S)  - personal relationships, feelings and self-concept, very powerful to gain personal insight and understanding
• Myers Briggs Type Indicator Steps 1 and 2 - the well known, and possibly over-used, typology based on Jungian theory
• Type Dynamics Indicator - a variation of the MBTI  that makes a clearer distinction between what you are and what you want
• Management Team Roles Indicator - Jungian types applied to teams
• Wave Professional Styles Questionnaire - a very powerful new series of instruments from Saville Consulting, representing the latest developments in psychometrics.  Measures style, not personality, though the two do overlap
• Hogan Personality Inventory - measures of the Big Five personailty factors and a bit besides, powerful predictor when you have large numbers to play with
• Hogan Development Survey  - measures the darker side of personality and  eleven potential derailers when we overplay our strengths
• OPQ - SHL's long-established but little changed workhorse
• Cattell 16PF - still has its uses