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?

Is this like a chicken or egg situation though?

To be an elite athlete, a personality strength would be resilience. So any extra teaching on this is really just building on the foundations that these athletes already have. An athlete that isn’t resilient is unlikely to be successful and therefore wouldn’t reach elite levels and wouldn’t have undergone this training so wouldn’t have been taught resilience.

Either way, whether you believe resilience can be taught or not, I think we could probably all agree that nothing meaningful for these workers is going to come from a half day seminar on how to be more resilient. All of the examples of resilience being taught previous posters have provided have been a sustained effort over a length of time and the participants have bought in and actively want the outcome - enforcing compulsory attendance at a one off session is not an effective method in teaching resilience.

Speak to your Occupational Health department. Yes resilience can be taught. There are strategies for this and this can be adaptable dependent on the individual so it can be taught as part of cognitive behaviour therapy or it can be through coaching

As an occupational health practitioner, it's ow concerning that this question is being asked here and not directed to the professionals in your organisation who can address it

Would that involve techniques for handling stress, emotions around not being able to save patients etc? Sounds a good idea to me

I believe a lot of it is actually related to moral values. The big issue with our society is that we're more and more about our individual "rights" rather than framing lifeline teams of responsibilities.

The more you jnstill in people/ children that their primary responsibility is to others not themselves, the more they understand that whatever their feelings they have a duty to get up and do the right thing. They have to visualise first the impact of their entourage of giving in, before considering any negative impacts to self of going forwards.

Quote your source.

Speaking to the first part of this, probably, but you'd be surprised how little sports psychology training was going on back in the early 2000's and still now! Which is why it's introduction was one of the marginal gains that took place that vaulted Team GB to so many medals, particularly in cycling, in 2012. Many sports people get to an elite level but never fulfil their full potential because they don't have the mental toughness to overcome adversity in a specific area.

Also, remember that elite can be anything from national to international to paid to play. Think Liverpool Vs Accrington Stanley both paid, but at different ends of an elite level spectrum.

Not every athlete has the bouncebackability to achieve to their highest level when faced with a problem, be it losing, injury, the weather etc.

Yes they might be elite level but they might not be gold medal standard due to, for example, their inability to get over a miss on goal.

Matthew Syed wrote a great book about this called Bounce - The myth of talent and the power of practice. He doesn't just cover sport in the book either, a fascinating read if you think that 10000 hours practice is 'all' you need to be elite.

The question was, can resilience be taught - the answer I gave was yes, I believe it can.

As to whether resilience training is a good use of the pot of money, I don't have an opinion on that (and Marcus Aurelius - Meditations 6.52 tells me that's OK!).

Hmm. I take your point looking at society as a whole. And it is good for the individual to help others too- one of the 'five ways to wellbeing' is 'give'. Really important for people with depression to have that opportunity. But it's a case of the 'golden mean'. The responsibility of helping others isn't shared around society, its all piled onto a small subsection: (mainly) women in caring roles. Nurses in NICU have generally been attracted to the career for altruistic reasons- its not for the money! They're not the ones who need a sense of responsibility for others instilled in them.

That's a good point too.

Children learn Resilience when they are supported and encouraged to learn skills like reading/football/piano. During this process they also learn to accept that progress isn't always instant and may include setbacks.

'Resilience' has been redefined to mean

'put up with being repeatedly, treated badly and suck it up'.

I suspect the kind of resilience you're talking about in the OP is the kind where you're expected to get used to lack of resource and delivering poor standards of care.

When I first qualified as a Nurse , I worked on a very busy acute medical ward. The ward had two senior Sisters. One used to put up motivational posters in the staff room and head tilt at the merest suggestion of occupational stress.
The other used to thank everyone for showing up for another shit show shift of epic proportions and would go nose to nose with any Doctor who dared to dump on her staff , not just nurses but everyone in the team including HCSW's and Domestics.
The fact that she recognised it was sometimes mostly shit went a long way to building resilience because you knew she understood and she had your back.

Be like the latter, and see the resilience of your staff improve. Decent tea/coffee/biscuits help too

in most cases, neglect lol