Published in Kingstown College Coaching Magazine 2019/2020
… if you keep responding negatively to the same types of difficulties or hurts, then your resilience or capacity to recover is undeniably going to weaken over time.
Jane Perry is an Organisational Psychologist, Leadership Coach, Mindfulness Therapist and a member of the Kingstown College faculty. In this article Jane highlights the role of the coach to help individuals address beliefs and confidence to minimise those moments that require resilience.
Are there situations that are almost certain to send you into orbit? Are you sensitive to particular people, attitudes or types of behaviour? Do you find yourself reacting with a familiar negative or unhelpful response when something or someone triggers you? Feeling emotions such as anger, embarrassment, resentment, disappointment and hurt are part and parcel of being human, however, if you find your reaction to certain triggers become troublesome then it is worth exploring some ways to regain emotional control.
You know your emotional responses are not serving you well when you regularly feel anxious in certain scenarios or with particular people. You might excessively ruminate on conversations or events; lying awake playing a scene over and over in your mind? Or you may have regrets about how you reacted in front of others. When you respond in any of these ways you are seldom fully in control of your emotions.
Resilience is often described as the capacity to bounce-back from setbacks and challenges, however, if you keep responding negatively to the same types of difficulties or hurts, then your resilience or capacity to recover is undeniably going to weaken over time. At work, given the myriad of relationships, tasks, outputs and responsibilities that people generally are expected to manage, feeling confident and in control is important.
Difficult relationships were highlighted as the number one cause of work-related stress in a large study of UK employees. This is followed by ‘volume of work’ and then by ‘feeling criticised’. These findings are backed up by HSE figures which highlight work pressures and difficult relationships as the most common precipitating events leading to work-place stress. Anxiety, depression and stress account for almost 39% of all absences from work in the UK. In Ireland, even with a determined reluctance to report ‘stress’ as the reason for absences on sick certs, stress, anxiety and depression now account for 24% of noted illnesses. To put this problem into context, a recent EU Labour Force survey quoted a figure of €614bn as the annual cost of work-related depression across the member countries.
Resilience is far more than continuously bouncing back. Resilience first and foremost is about belief and confidence. We are resilient when we believe we are strong enough to deal with life’s difficulties. We are resilient when we feel in control over our lives and work and when we are confident that we can master our emotions and our reactions.
Like all personal change, the starting point is self-knowledge and self-awareness. When starting out on a journey of ‘self-knowing’, it is critical to go about it in a positive and constructive way. The process of analysing and evaluating ourselves must come with self-compassion, acceptance and a dose of positive intent. Whether we are trying to work it out for ourselves or with the help of a coach or other professional, the first step is to understand why certain scenarios trigger certain responses. If we can decipher this puzzle, we can then turn our attention to the purpose of our reactions? How is our reaction serving us? This can be a difficult process and what we learn is often quite a surprise.
When committed to change, we may begin the process of changing our relationship with the trigger or finding a workable alternative to the response. Understanding why we react as we do and having a workable alternative may be enough to bring about sustainable change, however, we are often reacting from a blind spot; an unconscious response or habit. Coaching can help to shine a light on our blind spots and help us change our reaction habits.
Mindfulness, when introduced into the coaching process, has the capacity to help create a tiny gap between the trigger and our response; an instant which allows us to pause and become aware that we are being triggered. This mini-moment can give us just enough time to recognise what is happening and to choose our new learned way. When we feel and believe that we are in control of our response, your confidence lifts and resilience is strengthened over time.
When you find that gap and learn to take control of how you respond internally and how you react externally, you will build on your resilience skills which, with practice, lasts a lifetime.
By Jane Perry
Jane Perry is a member of the Kingstown College faculty. Jane works with individuals and groups to help them thrive and fulfil their work related ambitions. She specialises in developing personal and leadership strengths and, in doing so, facilitates business owners, managers, professionals and teams to be self-aware, stronger, more confident and notably more effective. Her academic credentials include a 1st class honours MSc in Applied Positive Psychology and a Post Graduate Diploma in Personal Construct Psychology (Orgs.). She is a qualified Leadership and Executive Coach, Mindfulness Therapist, Certified Trainer, Accredited Strengthscope Practitioner, Certified Test User (Occ), BPS & EMCC Member.
