How to Build Personal Resilience

• what personal resilience is and why it matters
• the characteristics of particularly resilient people
• what, if any, influence individuals have over their ability to be resilient
• whether personal resilience levels can change over time
• the biggest barriers to personal resilience
• an overview of the Nicholson McBride Resilience Quotient Questionnaire
• what else individuals can do to asses their personal resilience levels
• why personal resilience is increasingly cited as a key competence for managers and leaders
• the strategies leaders and managers can use to help them respond to issues and challenges in a more resilient way
• what organisations, leaders and managers can do to help boost employees’ resilience levels
• top tips for building personal resilience

Transcript

Female interviewer: The ability to face up to and overcome difficult or challenging situations depends in no small part on a leader or manager’s personal resilience levels.

In this interview we speak to author and psychologist, Dr John Nicholson: of Nicholson McBride, about what leaders and managers can do to assess and improve their personal resilience.

Could I start by asking how you would define personal resilience and why it matters in life and at work?

Dr John Nicholson: Well, I think that in ordinary speech, you know, if you ask people what resilience means, there’s a sense of bouncing back from whatever life throws at you, maybe even triumph in the face of adversity. And there’s a notion we have of intelligent tenacity, we call it, that’s keeping going in the face of, you know, considerable pressure to stop, but not in a kind of mindless or stupid way, but in an intelligent way. And if you look at what, you know, the great sort of experts have said over the years, because it’s not a new notion of course resilience. Churchill, he had this observation that success is not final and failure is not fatal, it is the courage to continue that counts. And I think that’s important. So there is this bouncing back, wising up, getting your shape back after it’s been distorted. That’s a, you know, a common parlance, common speech.

If you get into the technical side of the thing and analyse what resilience is statistically as we have done, there do seem to be five quite separate strands to it.

One is about optimism. We can… there is also something around individual accountability, that’s the sense that you can make a difference, you know, you are the sort of person who can fix things. And the third thing is linked to that and that is solution orientation. When things go wrong, your first instinct is to move very rapidly into solution mode and start thinking well something has gone wrong, how can we fix it, what can we do to put it right.

The other two strands, one is managing stress and anxiety because if you are terribly worried, it’s difficult to be resilient, it’s difficult to be creative and come into solutions if, you know, you are just conscious of the state that you are in. So that’s a fourth strand.

And the final strand, flexibility. So that’s the business of, you know, not just continuing to bang your head against the same bit of brick wall, but to try the responses, if your first instinct is wrong. And the openness bit that goes with that is being open to experience, it’s continuing to learn, learning from your own success, learning from your own failure, learning from other people.

So, it is quite a complicated picture of what it is. And as to why it matters, I think the key here is that no one is going to disagree if I say times are now unusually tough. I mean this is a pretty poor period we are looking at in terms of people’s experience and that’s pretty much everyone, everywhere. And linked to that, the cost of not being resilient, the cost of just giving up is probably higher than it has been for a good long time. And that would apply both at work and also more generally, in life generally, I think. Resilience really is one of the key attributes now.

Female interviewer: In your experience, what characterises highly resilient individuals from those who lack resilience?

Dr John Nicholson: Very resilient people, they remain open to new ideas. That’s a hugely important thing. They never assume, you know, that the qualities that got me to where I am today will be enough to take me forward or even to sustain my current position. They accept that as the world around them changes, they have to. It is not just learning new things, but just learning from what is happening around them.

Another aid to high resilience is a pretty good view of other people, I mean, assuming the best of other people rather than assuming the worst of them and assuming until they convince you otherwise that they will be able to support you pretty effectively. That’s another characteristic.

The third thing is that highly resilient people almost love, they certainly can live with change, I mean they always see change as an opportunity rather than a threat. They look back over their lives and they say, ‘When things have changed or there has been a great transformation, I am the sort of person who has done well. I can move effectively.’ So they enjoy that.

A final thing is that highly resilient people believe, and it is quite a well based belief generally, that they are people who can make a difference. So when, you know, when disaster strikes, they can see very quickly what has happened, what needs to be done and, you know, if no one else gets there first, they are pretty happy to be the person who leads the charge; ‘I will take command of the situation, I expect to be able to do that rather than looking around and waiting for someone else to do it.’

So, you know, in terms of just looking at very successful and very resilient people who have managed very difficult situations, situations in their private and personal lives as well as in their professional lives, those are some of the characteristics I think that they have.

Female interviewer: Would you say that our capacity to be resilient is something that’s pretty much innate or is it something that we have a bit more influence over?

Dr John Nicholson: There are two halves to that. In terms of proving that something is innate, you know, the genes are having a huge influence on something, neither we nor, as far as I know, anybody else, has actually carried out this sort of research where resilience is concerned. So I think that the jury is out.

But on the second point, is it something that we can have influence over, you know, the answer is quite clear here that virtually every aspect of…all the major aspects of resilience that we have identified and studied, you can influence them all. There are techniques that you can use. And also there is very clear evidence that how resilient people end up as, as adults, is or does appear to be affected by their childhood experience. There are various different patterns that link, it is not an absolutely straightforward matter this. But we carried out very detailed interviews with a couple of dozen people who we judged to be absolutely exceptionally resilient and a thing that we noticed about them is that very often they tell us that very… unusually early in life, they had to assume really sort of significant levels of responsibility, often for younger siblings, brothers and sisters, because something, you know, dreadful happened to their parents. So that sort of thing is quite a common pattern. I am absolutely clear that, you know, how resilient a person is, is certainly affected by their life experience, but equally, and this is sort of quite encouraging I think, there is no significant aspect of resilience that cannot be increased by appropriate techniques.

Female interviewer: And do you think that individuals tend to become a bit more resilient as they grow older; can we incorporate our experiences into our approach to being resilient?

Dr John Nicholson: Yes. We now know, and this is a matter of scientific fact because we have looked at quite large numbers of people and correlated their resilience levels with all sorts of demographics and certainly as far as age is concerned, overall we become more resilient, or we judge ourselves as being more resilient as we get older. We judge ourselves to be more resilient as we do more jobs interestingly and that’s regardless of whether it is all within one company or changing companies.

So, there are some general trends like that, yes.

Female interviewer: What do you find to be the biggest barriers to personal resilience?

Dr John Nicholson: I think one is ignorance of what can be done and people have been just blinkered by their own experience. I mean, everybody is familiar with the kind of person who has to bring everything back to what has happened in their lives and they find it very difficult to imagine or to show interest in, perhaps they are frightened by, you know, digging too deeply into other people’s experience. That, I think, is one barrier to it.

Also, lack of self-confidence, lack of belief that you are the sort of person that can make a difference. So that aspect of resilience is an important thing.

Both of these can be altered but they are barriers.

And lack of self-awareness. I mean just not knowing what would represent the best approach for you to a difficult situation. So in order to be really resilient I think you have to know what works for you and to accept that different things will work for different people.

And those are a few of the barriers to personal resilience.

Female interviewer: You have devised the Nicholson McBride resilience questionnaire to help people to establish their resilience quotient. Could you tell me a bit about this method for measuring personal resilience?

Dr John Nicholson: Yes. What happens is this, when a couple of years ago we really started thinking this resilience thing is important because life is getting difficult and in our coaching we observed more and more people really struggling with things. We surveyed all the existing sort of research and literature that there was. There was surprisingly little. And we also set about interviewing people who we could just see were outstandingly resilient folk and we put together a huge list, a sort of shopping list of attributes and aspects of personality, skills, what have you, that we thought could be important. We have ended up now in fact with quite a short, sort of 30-question instrument, which most people do on line and you get to your machine and then tap into testyourrq.nicholsonmcbride.com/ and that will tell you how to do this. So anybody can measure their own resilience quotient.

There is a book that we have written to go with this which is called "Resilience: Bounce Back From Whatever Life Throws At You." We have got an enormous number of people who have now done it.

We know that it is sensitive over time. People who are doing it find it useful and you get pretty immediate feedback which will tell you, not just what your overall resilience quotient is, but it will give you a score on those five major elements of optimism, of managing stress and anxiety, individual accountability, openness, flexibility and solution orientation.

So, you get a pretty good fix on where you are and a suggestion for where you stand in comparison with others like you and what you can do if you choose to try and become more resilient.

We encourage people at the moment to do it, say every three months or so. It makes sense to just check how you are doing, what impact it is having on you, whether you are shifting up a bit here or down a bit there, and then you are digging in to see what you can do to shift your scores when you need to.

Female interviewer: Besides the resilience questionnaire, what other ways would you suggest to help people assess their own resilience levels?

Dr John Nicholson: I think that there are two sorts of questions that you can put to yourself. One is just asking how you feel generally and being honest with yourself. I mean, how confident, how secure are you, and your own anxiety level? You will be aware or if you are not, you should ask, you know, your partner or your loved ones, are they picking up on changes in you? So those general kind of mood and those general kind of feelings in the areas which are important for resilience.

But also, the other thing to do is to ask yourself ‘What do I do when things go wrong for me; how quickly do I find myself focusing on what needs to be done as opposed to just saying, oh how awful.

How good am I at focusing in on the things that I can have a direct influence on and kind of not bothering too much about the things that are outside my control or sphere of influence?’

And the third thing here I think is, are you able to ride criticism, because resilient people are not too troubled by criticism. They don’t take it too personally. And linked to that, I think you need to ask, ‘How am I dealing with conflict?’ because when times get tough, people have strong views and this is not personality clashes, this is genuine differences of opinion and how comfortable are you with kind of sticking to your guns, of having a good debate and listening to the views that initially you disagree with?

All those things you can… you can just question yourself. I mean, you need to listen to yourself, you need to observe yourself and, you know, if there has been a big kind of bust up or a major encounter or a very important meeting at work, do spend a little time afterwards just assessing how resilient you think you have been given your understanding of what is involved.

Female interviewer: Resilience is becoming more common as a key competence for leaders and managers. Why do you think that is?

Dr John Nicholson: I think resilience is of more interest to people in a work context really because it gets tested more often in difficult times like those, we are now in. So, in the past, in the easier times, if you were terrifically good analytically or creatively, that might be enough.

But these days and for the foreseeable future, yes it will be very important to be clever and to be creative and to be good with other people, but it won’t be much use being any of those things if you just can’t cope, you know, you are so panicked, you are so anxious that you can’t function properly.

So, I think that’s why resilience has become, in some sense, a sort of a new kind of nirvana, a thing which people are very anxious to assess and to improve.

Another point here is that I think that the price of failure, the price of not being able to respond to failure, to come back from failure, the price of giving up is rising as unemployment rises, you know, you can lose your job, there are more people who are very hungry to take it from you.

So, for all these reasons it is in everybody’s interests that we should be understanding resilience, that we should be assessing it and where necessary, we should be reinforcing it and building it. It is a kind of a win-win situation I think.

Female interviewer: When tackling adversity, what strategies would you suggest for leaders and managers to help them respond in a more resilient way?

Dr John Nicholson: There is a series of things to do.

One generally useful thing is what they call reframing and that’s just the way you choose to look at the world. So, there is always a choice about how you look at a situation.

Or, again people get…often get stuck on the thought ‘Well, this is really unfair’ or ‘Why is this always happening to me?’ Well, when people say ‘Why is it always happening to me?’, invariably they are surrounded by other people to whom exactly the same thing is happening. As for fairness, I mean who on earth said that life had to be fair? You just need to get on and put things right.

So that… how you approach situations is hugely important.

A thing that people often do is remembering when things go wrong and trying to learn from that, but it is very important to remember when things go right and to use that, to visualise success and to remember it so you can encourage yourself next time you are tested there.

Another thing to do in terms of increasing resilience is certainly to boost your own self-esteem. I mean, other people may praise you a bit, but as you go through life and you go up in organisations, there are less and less people who would do that. You have to mark your own success, you know you store it away and you remind yourself of it when you are next in trouble there.

Also encouraging yourself to remember the situations in which…when you took control at work. So the confidence to take control is hugely important and to remember that everybody has been very effective somewhere and to conjure that up rather than the occasions when you are not.

Even something like optimism. We know from a lot of research now that if you choose to, you can become more optimistic and there are simple techniques for doing it by understanding what the basis of your beliefs are, why do you feel sort of glum when confronted by a task and what damage does this glum feeling have on you in terms of your being creative and finding ways of approaching it now?

So once you have understood those kind of things, you can then…you kind of have a debate with yourself. ‘How am I going to be honest, am I going to give myself the benefit of the doubt and have a crack at it because it might work? Or…decision-making is often a problem for people, particularly if they are very kind of, you know, data-based people who want to have every last bit of data in. In real life you have to get used to making decisions in a timely fashion so you don’t miss the boat, just on the best evidence available at that time, and accepting that some people get it wrong and not taking that as the end of the world.

Other things to do, I think that being willing to ask for help, not being too demanding on yourself or assuming that you are the only person you can call on, it is just not true. People do need to really sort of understand the resources available to them and to…not to underestimate other people’s willingness to contribute and help and that does seem to be something that people are willing to do if they are asked. Keeping learning is important.

But those are some of the kind of plans that you can use. It doesn’t matter what order you do them in, but if you have scored yourself recently and you have got, you know, if you have got some particularly low scoring areas, then that’s obviously a place to start.

Female Interviewer: And in terms of getting some kind of help, it would just be interesting to know some of the other interventions.

Dr John Nicholson: If you are talking about corporate life, most organisations and whoever does training and development, wherever it happens to be, will have or should have a range of approaches. Resilience is something that responds very well and quite quickly to one to one coaching, it’s true, but that’s not a particularly economic way of doing it. You can also do it in kind of short and sharp master classes if there is a specific aspect of a thing that you know a lot of people aren’t very good at, you know, they don’t make decisions quickly enough or they are… they are thrown by conflict. You can make progress quite quickly.

And in terms of how managers or leaders can help other people to become more resilient, because that’s also very important, they can do that by example and certainly people are enormously influenced, by their first managers, their early managers. And if they have got somebody who has a good sort of range of techniques to deal with trouble when it occurs, that sticks very often.

So you can lead by encouragement. You can’t actually make other people more resilient. It is like most forms of change. You can explain things to them, you know, it is like leading horses to water, you can take them there, you can make things available, but they have to do it for themselves. That’s absolutely clear. But that’s not to say that managers and leaders don’t have a role; they should.

They should encourage people to be optimistic, precisely because all the research suggests that there is no aspect of resilience that can’t be… that you can’t have some impact on.

And as in other areas, good managers, effective leaders, particularly when times are hard, they do need to remember to praise them and to spread good news. And encouraging people to go and look at others who are managing to change themselves who are, you know, finding techniques that work despite the trouble around them.

Female interviewer: Finally, as a leave behind for our listeners, what would be your top five tips for building personal resilience?

Dr John Nicholson: In no particular order, as a psychologist, I have to say that, you know, the first thing that would occur to me is to examine yourself and know yourself well enough, understand what works for you.

And the second thing, I think, is to make yourself learn from and remember your successes and not just to focus on the things that go wrong. And remember how you did it but also how it feels to get it right, because that’s hugely valuable to motivate yourself.

When you find yourself being pessimistic about things, you need to test your pessimism and to check whether it’s not just a thing that we call agglomeration, it’s not just a lot of little things being allowed to form a great sort of, you know, boulder sitting on your shoulder. So don’t feel constrained by pessimism; test it first and see if you can’t split problems into manageable, you know, sub-sets of things to do.

And likewise, I would say, don’t underestimate the resources available to you or other people’s willingness to help. We all have, if you are just prepared to think about it, you say ‘I know nothing about that’, but actually if you are then interrogated on this thing, very often you do know more, you have forgotten about it, you have forgotten how much you know, you have forgotten things that you have done, you have forgotten your own successes. So there is something around that, something around resources of all sorts just, you know, that’s not just things on screens, it’s people as well, and that brings in other people’s willingness to help. If you ask them to, very often you will be pleasantly surprised by people saying ‘Yes, I will do that for you, but you know, you scratch my back if I scratch yours.’ And particularly when times are hard, people do have a, you know, they have a need and they have a desire to cohere and to collaborate, probably more than you would expect.

And the last thing I would say is by whatever means, cultivate a sense of perspective. Are things really as bad as they seem and you can put it in the context of your own life, you can look at the terrible things that are happening elsewhere and I am afraid it’s, you know, there is always somebody worse off than yourself, is actually a very powerful motivator and it’s a very powerful corrector. It pulls you up in your tracks and makes you think ‘I must stop moaning because although this is difficult or this is bad or this has been going on too long, actually there are very many worse things that are happening to other people and I really must, you know, summon up more resources and have a crack on it again.’

Female interviewer: OK, well John, thank you very much for providing all that practical advice for our listeners. I am sure that people will have lots that they can take away from the session. Thank you very much.