In this three part series, Jenny Campbell explores how to coach for resilience.
Part 2: Coaching for different levels of resilience
What’s your client’s resilience level? Is your coaching aligned to what they can actually take on, what they have capacity for? Resilience is about our capacity for change. It’s synergistic with wellbeing; you can’t have one without the other. Also it goes up and down daily.
Resilience is driven by two fundamentals: a person’s resilience potential and the day-to-day demands on resilience. Each have different landscapes and it’s important to know which one someone is in.
A person’s resilience potential is where transformative and deep self-development can occur. It’s about purpose, values and beliefs and ‘secure bases’. This is a psychological term for what brings a sense of safety. It could be tangibles such as people and places, or intangibles such as purpose and meaning (Kohlrieser et al, 2012).
The landscape around day-to-day demands on resilience, is to do with creating practical resilience-supporting habits, which can also transform.
It’s about managing energy, gaining perspective and pacing well.
Spot where each level is on the Resilience Dynamic® (Figure 1), our research model showing the continuous line between all stages of resilience.
Resilience level: High
This corresponds to Resilience Dynamic® levels Breakthrough and the Whoosh
At this level, often the domain of successful leaders, clients will be adaptable, resourceful and energetic, good learners, open, curious and prepared to change, yet decisive, clear and driven. They take care of themselves. They live life abundantly. Any normal ups and downs are absorbed easily; life will be pretty stable. If a bigger resilience drain comes along, they accept their resilience will be lower for a time, using their resources to return to high levels again with relative ease. We call this state Breakthrough resilience.
Leaders on the way towards high resilience, perhaps early in what we call the Whoosh (the long line between Breakeven resilience and Breakthrough resilience), have often honed their resilience to thrive in one or two main contexts but may come unstuck when they step or are forced outside of their comfort zone.
Resilience coaching goal: Support and extend consistency and alignment
Fatal flaws
- Ignoring the importance of clients at this level reconnecting daily with resilience-supporting habits, and often needing help to do so
- Looking for standard coaching goals – this is about aligning personal values to behaviour and daily habits to support purpose. It’s big!
Make it work
- Ensure your own resilience is at its highest. Pay attention to your own resilience-supporting habits. Learn what a resilience practice looks and feels like. Live it
- Hone your practice to support work on energy
- Learn about systems thinking; resilience is systemic
- Consider how to help your client widen their perspective.
Resilience level: Bounceback
Many define resilience as the ability to bounce back from challenge or trauma. However, anyone coming out of a challenge has changed in some way, so it’s not about restoration of what was, but coming to a point where resilience is no longer massively drained.
Bounceback resilience is often the domain of talent and of high performers. Organisations applaud those who punch through tough stuff. Why wouldn’t they? The ability to rise to the occasion, to grit your teeth and persist through to the other side is brilliant. And it has a tail effect, sometimes long. The energy graph (Figure 2 below) of someone who lives and works like this is really up and down; often they’re tired.
Resilience coaching goal: Stabilisation, then shifting upwards to something more at ease
Fatal flaws
- Getting caught in the client’s applause of gritting teeth/punching through/getting tough
- Becoming complicit in seeking the next ‘high’
- Thinking this up and down is just this time – it’s likely someone in Bounceback has drivers to repeat the pattern.
Make it work
- Help the client discover their patterns of energy, and explore the implications
- Help the client experiment with what they might stabilise – sleep, nutrition, learning how to pace themselves better?
- Once they are more stable:
– Help the client learn better. See Kolb’s learning cycle and the shortcuts (Kolb, 1984)
– Work on their purpose.
Resilience level: Coping
Being able to cope is the other main definition of resilience. Here, things are manageable but only just. It can be long-term coping, just-getting-on-with-it kind of coping. Or it can be fraught, holding-it-together kind of coping when under short-term or acute pressure. The negative stress reaction can show up much more in this state.
Coping is fantastic as an alternative to not coping. But as it’s a state of no surplus, even if someone wants to make a change, without increasing their resilience, they won’t be able to act on or sustain that change. That’s big news in coaching relying on the client’s capacity to learn in order to make changes.
Resilience coaching goal: Enable the client to increase resilience
Fatal flaws
- Rescuing
- Expecting change when there’s no capacity for it
- Getting frustrated when little seems to be happening!
Make it work
- Be able to easily choose your own state to match the one that most enables the client’s resilience
- Be patient
- Focus on two top enablers for resilience: being present and increasing the client’s energy
- Do nothing else. (Until the client is clearly creating or releasing surplus capacity.)
Resilience level: Not coping
Corresponds to Resilience Dynamic® levels: Fragmentation and Breakdown
Fragmentation and Breakdown are where someone’s capacity for change has really diminished while demands on them continue to be high and entirely unmanageable.
Breakdown coincides with clinical breakdown, with a catastrophic inability to access resources inside or outside. It’s a serious state, normally of great loss – of job, of relationships, of identity in some way – and where the person needs outside help to fill the resourcefulness gap temporarily.
It’s also a place of renewal and, once stable, the client can be helped to face the truth of their situation.
Fragmentation is where someone’s no longer able to cope. Things are out of control. Often, the person suffering from fragmentation will not realise they are in this state, they just want to get back in control. But often, they’re unstable and unpredictable, and their wellbeing is under threat.
Fragmentation, especially, but also Breakdown, can happen to those who once had high resilience. If this applies to your client, help them reconnect with resources that helped them before.
Resilience coaching goal: Coping
Fatal flaws
- Running a mile!
- Rescuing
- Being over-ambitious about where the client might end up. The most the client may get to is coping, and sometimes not even that.
Make it work
- Recognise the client’s vulnerability
- Be clear on your ethics. Ensure you’re qualified, well supervised and able to help contain the work of the coaching, so it’s doable and won’t lead to a further resilience drain
- Focus on acceptance by being present. And very gently, recovery of energy
- Be compassionate, including to yourself, so you can be warm, gentle, able to laugh – and focused.
Resilience coaching may not seem much different to normal coaching. But here, your clarity of intention, your ability to flex yourself, your deeply understood choices on behalf of the client, make for rigour and impact.
That means your client will have more wellbeing and be more successful in what they want to do. Fab work!
- To find out more about becoming an accredited Resilience Engine coach and join our community of practice, email: jenny.campbell@resilienceengine.com
References
- G Kohlrieser, S Goldsworthy & D Coombe, CARE TO DARE: Unleashing Astonishing Potential Through Secure Base Leadership, Chichester, UK: John Wiley, 2012
The Resilience Dynamic® model is from the Resilience Engine research: www.resiliencengine.com/research-method/ - D Kolb, Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1984
- P Hawkins, Leader ship Team Coaching: Developing Collective Transformational Leadership, London: Kogan Page, 2011
Figure 1
