18
February
2022
Consultant Debbie Kleiner asked viewers to consider what resilience meant to them in the first of four new GCMA wellbeing webinars... Are you resilient? In the first of her Wellbeing Workshop Series, expert Debbie Kleiner asked webinar viewers to explore that question, while giving them some keys to understand, explore, and improve it. Defining emotional resilience in the terms of Togage and Frederickson as “the ability to bounce back from negative emotional experiences and by flexible adaptation to the changing demands of stressful experiences”, she used the image of an elastic band as a metaphor. “If you have a nice fresh healthy elastic band and you pull it, it stretches. It doesn't break and then it bounces back into its original shape,” she said. “If you have a very old elastic band that's been in the sun perhaps for too long, you pull it and then perhaps it breaks or perhaps it starts to crack. That’s the way I like to think about resilience.” Debbie then revealed some key facts, saying the ability to become resilient was not a personality trait, that everyone could take steps to achieve it, and that it required honesty from ourselves about our strengths and weaknesses. She discussed the elements of resilience – physical, mental or psychological, and social – and looked at ways to build it: considering purpose, optimism and confidence and flexibility and connection. “Ask yourself, what does resilience mean to you and what daily tools do you use to build resilience? I want you to really think about, ‘when am I resilient?’ as well. “Purpose is really about defining your goals, understanding the direction you want to go in, understanding your failures and reflecting on those failures – and then just redirecting yourself and guiding yourself back keeping yourself on track. “But it's also about having goals. Those goals need to be specific and measurable and also achievable and realistic. They need to be time specific smart goals.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLOG16W7eq0 On optimism and confidence, she added: “A lot of this has to do with self-awareness and self-awareness is absolutely key to understanding. “Are you able to be more positive in your thinking? Are you able to have more self-acceptance? And finally, flexibility? Are you able to change the path that you're on when you need to and not see that as a setback?” You can view the whole of Debbie’s presentation in the embedded video above. Emotional resilience was the first of four sessions Debbie is staging in the second set of wellbeing workshop series staged by the GCMA. A workplace wellbeing consultant and trainer, Debbie helps HR directors deliver wellbeing plans and improves productivity with online wellbeing and mental health workshops. Details for the remaining trio of sessions, covering motivation, stress awareness, and technology are listed below… GCMA WELLBEING WEBINAR SERIES March 8, 2pm: Motivation - What is it? Why does it matter? How can I improve it? You will gain a deeper understanding into why sometimes it can be hard to... Please LOGIN to read the full article.
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