Can you teach resilience? What makes one person more resilient than the next?

[Lanzarotelady]

Genuinely interested in this, what makes one person more resilient than the next?
Two people go through the same, ie nurses working in covid ICU, what makes one person cope better than the other?
Can resilience be taught?
I am asking as we have a pot of money to use at work ( NHS ICU ) and people have asked for resilience training, but I can't help but think, you can't be taught it?

@KabukiNoh it was frequently requested by workplaces, lots of teachers and people in other high stress industries would readily come along and the feedback was always that they found it insightful and useful. Lots of self reflection and action planning involved, it was a good little course.

I'm not sure if there's a standard way to teach resilience: there are too many variables and certainly it is a lot more complex than the standard responses you will get on here about young people being pampered and cossetted.

But it depends on so many factors: your underlying genetic disposition, your upbringing, your general mental health, what you have on your plate.

One variable is that people are so different in the way they respond to challenge. Some people embrace this and see it as an opportunity to step up whereas others regard it as terrifying. Look at the way people respond to stress at work: some people love it, others can't function with it. An incident which one person could perceive as an opportunity could trigger a near meltdown in another.

There's a golden mean between empathy and support on the one hand and making clear that you have to face difficult things on the other, but where you draw that line will still change massively from one person to another.

I think learning some well researched CBT techniques can help. If work pressures or events are leading people into automatic negative thinking patterns for example, then learning to recognise that and some approaches to reframe them.

My own biggest resilience builders were experiencing some awful situations at work and surviving them. But I had a therapist who helped me see that I hadn't been broken by the experiences but had grown. I still draw upon that 20 years later.

I believe it’s a skill learned from very early childhood and also partly a personality trait. Some nurses do well in high stress environments and some don’t. There are plenty of options for those who prefer a slower pace or more predictability.

In answer to your question ( I worked on the shop floor of the NHS for 30 years), the support staff receive from their seniors is derisory. They have to rely on colleagues in the same situation who are equally frazzled.

I volunteer with the Samaritans and after each shift it is compulsory to debrief on the phone with an experienced Samaritan. As well as briefly discussing the calls we have dealt with the emphasis is on more importantly, how are you. We leave feeling cared about and without feeling burdened by the sometimes very traumatic calls we have had. If we need more support it s freely available.

I think it’s a model the NHS could and should consider and I believe it could dramatically reduce the sickness rates and increase staff retention.

But what do I know?

If you praise kids for effort rather than achievement, it makes them less likely to give up when they hit a barrier.

We've all seen the very able child who unaccountably gives up when their natural ability reaches its limits and they experience a setback: "I could do it, I just don't want to..."

That's a kind of resilience.

My own biggest resilience builders were experiencing some awful situations at work and surviving them. But I had a therapist who helped me see that I hadn't been broken by the experiences but had grown. I still draw upon that 20 years later.

This is a really interesting point. I have also benefited from having been through difficult situations: I'm lucky enough to have been able to reframe them and learn from them but not everyone is able to do that. Sometimes people become "stuck" on something that's happened to them and never really come out of the other side. It's hard to know why one person will use adversity to build a positive experience in the future and another will experience it as a spiral which they can't recover from.

Therapy does help, for sure.

In my experience, you cannot teach resilience, empathy or compassion. You either have it or you don’t. If you are working in a NHS ICU environment and you are asking for resilience training - I would suggest you may need to think about a career change.

I think innate resilience comes out of (probably mostly early) life experiences. You can’t teach it as a skill the way you teach, say, project management.

BUT I do think people are more or less equipped to tap into their innate resilience and how to do this can be supported (not sure taught is the right word). I think the stress bucket analogy is helpful here. We all have our our stress buckets with whatever capacity they hold. We pile stuff into those buckets and eventually they overflow and we breakdown with complete overwhelm or we develop a chronic illness or we misuse substances to cope, whatever. This will happen at different points for different people. You can’t prevent things from being added to that bucket in life, but what you can do, is teach people skills for how to manage what’s in the bucket and their responses to it, before it all overflows.

I personally haven’t done resilience training, but I expect some of it works around that approach. That said, I know someone (Josh Connelly) who have taken classes with who does corporate resilience training and seems very highly regarded in that area.

I don’t necessarily believe the saying ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’.

People that have had trauma in their childhood, such as losing a parent as a child, abusive parents, or adults who have have children with disabilities and have to live with constant stress and worry about their children etc…. Already have to deal with more stress than the average person. They can’t offload their stress as it’s part of their life. It’s chronic life long.

The above examples aren’t the same as losing a job etc…because these circumstances can change so it’s not lifelong.

When someone is dealing with chronic stress that can’t be taken away and it’s not just a period of time, then they often can’t cope with anymore everyday stress because their stress levels are already sky high.

When someone’s under constant stress their fight/flight mode stops working properly basically and they can’t take any more.

Am I the only one who finds it hilarious that the only poster so far who thinks that you can teach resilience is someone who has been teaching courses in resilience?

I used to work at a charity (life limiting condition ) some staff were struggling and asked for resilliance training. I think samaritans ran it for us. As described by another poster you looked at your own resilience levels and possible tools that help people cope, plus things to introduce into the workplace that could help.
Reviews were mixed and in my experience increasing more relaxed oppertunities where colleagues can talk to each other and having an understanding manager made the most difference to having an emotionally stressful job.

I agree- Resiliency can’t be taught to adults ( or even children- I think of it an an innate character some people have in extreme circumstances to survive and to encourage others ( like a shipwreck or on a War situation.

It was surprising to read how no NHS Nursing staff had coffee or tea provided- I’d spend the money on that.

And as you say, some decent biscuits.

Or specific counselling of people are upset by what they see - because working in ICU or a burns unit must be very stressful for staff.

Thanks for everyone's contribution
I will be honest I don't think it can be taught.
Better working conditions, better staff to patient ratio, time off between shifts and a supportive workforce means more than a half day course.

It might be an idea to spend the money on self care and mental health. For example, how to spot the signs of burnout, the importance of taking breaks, good sleep hygiene, having good support networks, dealing with trauma, available help etc

Until I had 3 solid years of terrible troubles, you would have thought I was indomitably résiliant. Now: not so much. Things that have never troubled me before push me over the edge.

I think resilience is an outcome of many other things.

if you have money, how about spending it on some sort of supervision programme for tour staff - a sort of professional counselling-cum-support? I think that could be genuinely supportive, and well supported people do have more capacity - and therefore resilience. Focus further back down the chain.

But will any pot of money be big enough to fund self care for 250+staff?
Say the budget is £5000 ( I can't remember the exact amount ) £20 each. How is that going to improve my mental health or anyone elses

Eminently sensible, Lanzarote!

A Half day course??!

What good would that do!

Utter waste of money.

Glad you are sensible in spending this money!

I misunderstood, I thought you wanted to run a half day course not provide individual care for 250 staff.

I think resilience is formative, and happens in our young childhood. You learn to shake yourself off and try again. You are given the opportunity to try risky things safely and then apply those learnings to other areas of life. You are raised to have faith in your own abilities and that your voice and opinions matter. Those things are cumulative and set you up to view future difficulties in a more positive light than those that were brought up in a less resilient way.

In terms of improving resilience in the work place, less overwork, breaks and lunches and contracted work hours valued. Allowing for more downtime, relaxation and processing the day. To leave in a better state for the next shift.

Where are the pinch points my work found waiting for kettles to boil or access to the microwave was eating into people's lunch breaks so coffee machine / hot water tap and another microwave meant that people were able to relax more at lunch. We only had 2 female toilets so there was always a queue and you'd often not get to go before the next lesson so the built some more toilets.

I don't think I am important enough to be given control of the money.

I was interested in the debate as I don't believe it can be taught, I think a lot of it is down to childhood experiences and your life away from work.

I think its an easy solution to send people on a course, its like giving anti depressants to someone with Shit Life Syndrome, the tablets are not going to cure the life that is causing the depression.

It’s a combination of things.

An understanding of self care- that those things directly contribute to your resilience, and ways to engineer them into your life.

Relaxation protocols whether that’s yoga, meditation, tai chi… they won’t stop you being stressed about the patient in cubicle 4, but they will lower your stress response across the board so that you have more capacity for unavoidable shit.

Reframing skills.
NLP has some good concepts that really help reframe the situation into something you can manage. They are catchily phrased but mean things like ‘you can’t control other people. You can control yourself’ so you spend energy on things that are in your control rather than stressing about things you can’t change.
There are lots more of these that I find really helpful, if you google ‘principles of NLP’.

I probably didn't phrase it well

There is a pot of money and resilience training has been mentioned, I wanted to garner opinions and satisfy my own understand about resilience

This isn’t a bad summary. I’m not recommending NLP, just saying the presuppositions are useful for reframing situations and finding different approaches to overwhelming situations.

sarahmerron.com/the-14-presuppositions-of-nlp-practice/

Some people are blessed with an upbringing that makes them resilient. Others have to learn as adults.
It absolutely can be improved. Otherwise I’d still be a useless gibbering wreck.

I agree with this. If you expect your DC to stick at things for a reasonable amount of time, especially team activities where bailing out will impact on others, DC in my experience cope with things better. They keep going and get a sense of achievement. If they’re nervous about so thing but have to do it and all works out well, that’s a big learning experience which DC who are allowed to bail out don’t get.

Thinking back on DS2 sports day, I should have made an exception in that case as his lack of sporting ability was not going to improve by taking part and there weren’t team events. The whole thing was terrible and ended in him being very upset for three years in a row. I wish I hadn’t done that. But overall I’m glad I insisted that both of mine stuck at things they’d volunteered to, as both of them are able to stick at things now.