QED ROPES Resilience Toolkit

Resilience makes psychology practical in business and at home. Once you understand that resilience is a skill that can be developed, you can see the far-reaching affects it has on our lives and our performance.

Resilience pulls together the concepts around understanding yourself, your mental toughness (your ability to think in a way to get you the results you need), as well as your emotional intelligence which allows you to make choices about how you live your life, manage your emotions and look after yourself. It helps us to:

• get the best out of ourselves

• have really great relationships

• cope with whatever life throws at us.

Building the capacity to have the resilience we need, is what resilience is all about. Training ourselves to think in such a way that we can turn life events to our advantage. It's about having specific scripts that we can use to help train and develop ourselves to make the most of our own potential. What matters is maximising our potential relative to what we want to do in our life.

Resilience is very closely linked to the management of stress. Some stress is good but it becomes problematical when the hormone cortisol kicks in and we don’t process it fast so a physiological response in our body is produced. Resilience enables us to ask 'How do we manage our stress? How do we get in control of ourselves, our emotions and thoughts, so we can be the best that we can be? Building resilience allows us to bounce back more quickly from failure and make more effective choices when things start getting tough.

The QED ROPES Resilience Toolkit helps us build resilience through:

R for Regulation - our ability to know ourselves and be able to do something about that self- awareness. If you can’t chose how you feel, you will rarely feel the way you want to. You need to be able to separate out what a feeling, emotion, mindset or attitude is so you can make the right choices.

O for Optimism - this is linked to confidence. An optimistic and confident person is a good person to have around. You gain confidence by being good at what you do and building confidence over a period of time.

P for Purpose - the ‘why am I doing what I am doing’. Do I have a sense of purpose? Do I know where I’m going and am I clear on what I’m trying to do? Something is worth doing if it makes sense to you. The vision/mission/objective/strategy/tactics framework has worked in economics for many years, but some companies and individuals seem to have lost that vision.

E for Energy - you have to have the energy in your body and mind/brain to optimise yourself and be resilient. We often neglect our energy and then when things go wrong don't have enough. We need to energise, oxygenise and optimise to ensure our brain and body can deal with the stress and pressure life throws at. We need to recharge and renew to regenerate and enhance ourselves.

S for Stamina - it's about weathering the storm and getting on with it. We need stamina to focus on making choices about what we do and don't want to do. It also helps us deal with change more effectively. The more we multitask the less efficient we are.

Resilience is also about surrounding ourselves with people who add to and stimulate each others energy. There will always be differences in people and conflict will always occur. Resilient people constantly challenge each other without getting bent out of shape. If you are good at taking feedback and managing your emotions, you won’t get stressed out about it. If you haven’t developed your resilience, you will find it more difficult to take feedback, failure and criticism which will dramatically affect your confidence and performance.

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