R - Resilience (A to Z Tips)

“Resilience is the capacity of a system, be it an individual, a forest, a city or an economy, to deal with change and continue to develop. It is about how humans and nature can use shocks and disturbances like a financial crisis or climate change to spur renewal and innovative thinking” Stockholm Resilience Centre.

Resilience is important for a number of reasons; it enables us to cultivate methods of self-assurance to protect ourselves against events which could otherwise be overwhelming. It helps us to maintain balance in our lives during difficult or stressful periods and can also guard us from the development of some mental health difficulties.

Resilience in business offers the same level of protection. It ensures that the business is not overwhelmed by a threat. It provides the ability to adapt and bounce back when things don't go as planned, to learn from our mistakes and move forward, rather than wallow or dwell on failures. Being resilient in some situations can even build inner strength and boost confidence in many areas of life.

COVID-19 is causing commercial chaos throughout the world. Only those businesses with enough funds, or resilience, will survive. Throughout the UK, independent schools are merging, federating, and diversifying to ensure their survival. Businesses are reinventing themselves and staff are adapting to new ways of delivering their products and services. Teachers are remote teaching; pupils are remote learning; timetables have been rewritten and head teachers all round the country are starting to consider possibility of socially distant schooling. Resilience affords us the psychological strength to cope with stresses of change, a mental reservoir to call on to carry us through and prevent us from falling apart. Psychologists believe that resilient individuals are better able to handle such adversity and rebuild their lives after a catastrophe, but what is it that gives us an ability to cope with problems and setbacks?

There are five key stress resilience skills that result in the ability to recover quickly and easily from stress, upsets and setbacks. This skill-set can be learned and developed with the right tools and training and are based on managing the connection between mind and body (that is, the relationship between your experience and the biological processes in your body). This so that you can use it to work for you rather than against you.

Self-awareness: a prerequisite for choice and control. If your thoughts and feelings are operating outside of awareness, then they control you. If you want to control them, the first thing is to open up a window of awareness that is a chance to pause and consider before choosing, deciding and acting. Self-awareness is the foundation of all other resilience and emotional intelligence skills.

Attention – flexibility & stability of focus: focus can be trained and developed. Being focused means being in the here and now. If you are not focused, your mind tends to be either worrying about the future or regretting the past, and that is where you generally find stress and unhappiness. Mindfulness is a key tool for training attention and creates a present-moment awareness.

Letting go – physical: the process of relaxing, letting go of muscles tension. Calming the body to reduce restlessness and agitation.

Letting go – mental: separating yourself from your own thinking, creating mental space, so that you differentiate your thoughts and beliefs, from the world itself. This is acceptance in a positive sense, not just resignation – for example forgiveness is a kind of acceptance.

Accessing and sustaining positive emotion: most people are primarily occupied with getting rid of negative emotions, but positivity is not simply the absence of negative emotion. When you give your attention to positivity, it can start to naturally displace the negatives, so you don’t have to get rid of bad feelings first. Accessing positivity is a relatively distinct skill that can be trained and developed.

The seven C's of Resilience for children

Control: children need to feel like they have a degree of control over their lives and their environment. When they realise that they can control their decisions and actions, they are more likely to know that they have what it takes to bounce back.

Competence: when children in class display a particular passion for something or aptitude for a specific skill, activity or sport, let them know it has noticed and encourage them. Children need to be told when they are doing something right and to be given opportunities to develop specific skills.

Coping: children need healthy coping strategies to manage their stress. Some strategies involve engaging and disengaging such as breaking down seemingly impossible problems and challenges into smaller, achievable pieces, avoiding things that trigger extreme anxiety, and just letting some things go.

Confidence: the solid belief in one’s own abilities is everything. As we teach and nurture, we build children’s confidence. We need to be careful not to undermine confidence but develop it by pushing children to achieve and creating age-appropriate opportunities for experiencing success.

Connection: when children are part of a community (class, team, club) they know they aren’t alone if they struggle and that they can develop creative solutions to problems. Close ties to family, friends, school, and community give children a sense of security.

Character: children need an understanding of right and wrong and the capacity to follow a moral compass. A fundamental sense of right and wrong helps children to make wise choices, contribute to the world, and become stable adults.

Contribution: the experience of offering their own service makes it easier for children to ask for help when they need it. Once children understand the feel-good factor of helping others, it becomes easier to ask for help when it is needed – being willing to ask for help is a big part of being resilient. Children who learn to cope effectively with stress are better prepared to overcome life’s challenges.

Creating a resilient team is future proofing your school. It builds mental strength and a ‘can do’ attitude that ensures your team don’t just make things happen but support and guide each other through the tough times, making the most from the challenges ahead.

Growing resilience in your pupils is future proofing our world.