Personal Resilience
Resilience training is about maintaining your wellbeing in unfavourable conditions.
The positive news is that resilience is a learnable skill, not just something you’re born with (or not). Tough times will test your resilience but can also strengthen it so that you’re better equipped to meet future challenges. There are three main forms of resilience and many routes to it.
- Recovery: Bouncing back after adversity and regaining confidence.
- Resistance: Having the inner strength to adapt and keep going through tough times.
- Reconfiguration: Emerging post adversity with new skills and greater strengths.
Whatever you face there’s always different ways that a challenging situation can go. Resilience training can help you find a better way forward. Our courses and coaching equip you with practical tools to raise and recover your resilience so that you can keep going in periods of high stress, get back to where you were before and even benefit from the adversity – the transformational resilience known as post-traumatic growth. In a nutshell what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger. We offer sessions in resilience, half-day courses and full-day courses.
Half-day Resilience training: Resilience First Aid is a practical workshop originally developed for healthcare workers and can be tailored to suit any purpose. It’s structured around two forms of positive coping and will give you an insight into resilience along with a range of tools. Content includes:
- What is resilience
- Body and mind under pressure
- Mapping resilience factors
- Emotion-focused coping
- Managing emotions and emotional first aid
- Problem-focused coping
- De-catastrophising
- Optimistic explanatory style
- The ABCDE of cognitive resilience
- The self-help SSRI resilience toolkit (Strategies, Strengths, Resources, Insights)
- Grit and the Growth Mindset
- Self-compassion
- Action planning.
“A key reason for running Resilience training was to boost the resilience of staff on a sustained basis through significantly challenging times. Having worked with Miriam for five years, her feedback has always been of the highest standard.” Learning and Development team, North Somerset Community Partnership
“Amazing session. I have learnt so much about myself & my wellbeing. Thank you!” “I found the training informative and it held my interest for the day” “Amazing training session, will be really useful in work & personal life” “Very good day & thought provoking. Thank you” “I enjoyed this topic and would like to explore more” Group feedback
Full-day Resilience training: A one-day course can be structured around three key pathways to resilience.
1. Positivity: Experiencing positive emotions not only feels good, it does us good too. Positive emotions boost resilience by undoing the effects of stress and building psychological resources that help us maintain wellbeing.
- Emotions and energy – managing emotional energy.
- The broaden and build theory of positive emotions – how they broaden our thinking & building resources.
- Scientifically-grounded practices that generate positive emotions.
2. Strengths: Your strengths are your positive self. They are your inner resources that help you keep going through adversity and strengthen your resilience. Pre-work involves taking a brief strengths test, available for free through VIA.
- Discovering your strengths.
- Applying your strengths to strengthen resilience.
- Strengths coaching activities.
3. Optimism practices are at the core of many resilience programmes, preventing the downwards spiral into pessimism and building motivation to move forwards.
- Learning optimism – the 3 Ps of Optimistic Explanatory Style.
- The ABCDE of cognitive resilience.
- The SSRI resilience toolkit (Strengths, Strategies, Resources & Insights).
Our resilience courses moved online during the pandemic to address the need in the greatest challenge to wellbeing in the 21st century.
Miriam was very engaging from the beginning of the session and throughout, setting the scene and putting everyone at ease. Delivery of the session was perfect, informal and informative with a wealth of techniques provided in bitesize chunks making it easy for attendees to digest and apply. Participants got as much out of the session via webinar as they would have in person, if not more so as everyone was so involved. If the session had been delivered face-to-face to a group of the same size, I think that many people may have felt too shy to contribute. Feedback has been consistently positive since, I cannot recommend Miriam enough! Louise Bown, Diversity and Inclusion Officer, West Midlands Combined Authority.
‘An amazing session’ ‘Thank you Miriam. All very reassuring during this current time’ ‘ ‘Really enjoyed the session and took a lot away from it’ ‘I found the session really enjoyable and interesting’ ‘I found the session really informative, I will definitely write a playlist’ ‘Found it really valuable’ ‘Thank you, some good things to try, really great session’ ‘The session was very enjoyable and valuable. I’m adding the little book of happiness to my list’ ‘Thank you so much Miriam, the session was a gift’. Group Feedback
Miriam Akhtar MAPP is a resilience expert and has delivered training and coaching across many sectors including frontline workers in medicine and the military. She was hired to ‘train the trainers’ at the Defence Academy of Great Britain to deliver a resilience programme to senior leaders and has facilitated the renowned Penn Resilience Programme, an evidence-based course in resilience skills. Miriam’s books on resilience include Positive Psychology for Overcoming Depression and What Is Post-traumatic Growth.
We are fortunate to have resilience specialist Dr Chris Johnstone as one of our associates and consultants. He is the author of the excellent Seven Ways to Build Resilience,
