Resilience

What is Resilience?

Resilience is what helps us to cope positively with stress, maintain our wellbeing in unfavourable conditions and recover after setback or burnout.

Whatever you face there’s always different ways that a challenging situation can go. Resilience training can help you find a better way forward and equip you to meet future challenges. Resilience is a set of learnable skills that can make a difference with practice to your wellbeing.

Resilience is much needed in workplaces where stress levels are high and people feel overwhelmed and underresourced. Burnout was rampant even before the global pandemic. Organisations are resilient when they are able to cope with shocks, periods of uncertainty or find their way back to stability after episodes of disruption.

Our Resilience Workshops and Coaching offer you practical tools to strengthen resilience and futureproof your wellbeing. Below are some workshops we run and we can custom design resilience training to meet your needs. The workshops can be delivered online or face-to-face in the UK. Please get in touch to discuss. 

Resilience First Aid is a practical half-day workshop originally developed for healthcare workers. 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 resilience toolkit
  • Self-compassion

‘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

Practical Resilience: A one-day course structured around three pathways to resilience from positive psychology.

1. Positivity: Positive emotions boost resilience by undoing the effects of stress and building psychological resources.

  • Emotions and energy – managing emotional energy.
  • How positive emotions broaden our thinking & build resources.
  • Scientifically-grounded postivity practices.

2. Strengths: Your strengths are the inner resources that support you in adversity and strengthen your resilience. Pre-work involves taking a brief strengths test.

  • Explore your strengths.
  • Try out strengths coaching.
  • How to use strengths to strengthen resilience.

 3. Optimism practices are used to challenge pessimism, prevent the downwards spiral into pessimism and encourage more optimistic thinking to move forwards positively.

  • Learn Optimistic Explanatory Style.
  • The ABCDE of cognitive resilience.
  • The SSRI resilience toolkit (Strengths, Strategies, Resources & Insights).

“Thank you Miriam for an inspiring day.  I arrived to training feeling a little preoccupied and left feeling that my thoughts were energised.  I would highly recommend you as a facilitator and would give your skills from the training day as being knowledgeable, talented, clear and easy to understand and personable. We very much look forward to continuing to work with you to so more of our staff can benefit from resilience training and positive psychology” Kemi Oladapo, Head of Learning & Development, Healthcare Organisation

Resilience at Work: We can custom design a half-day or full-day workshop with knowledge and tools tailored to your team’s needs. The content typically might include some of these elements.

  • What is resilience
  • Understanding stress
  • Emotion-focused coping: Managing emotions
  • Positivity practices that help you feel well.
  • Problem-focused coping
  • Optimism practices and the ABCDE of cognitive resilience
  • Psychological capital
  • Strengths to resource resilience
  • Grit and the growth mindset
  • Body-mind practices such as breathing
  • Action planning.

“Thank you so much Miriam for your excellent training session on resilience as part of our team day.  It was packed full of interesting and enlightening professional insight as well as thought-provoking interactive exercises that created plenty of discussion at each table.  On the feedback forms staff overwhelmingly voted your session as the thing they particularly liked about the whole day.” Alida Turner, the Environment Agency.

Miriam Akhtar MAPP is an expert in resilience and experienced trainer, who has developed resilience programmes for clients including Imperial College NHS Trust leadership programme in London and for North Somerset community healthcare teams. Other clients include the Environment Agency, MOD, BBC, West Midlands Combined Authority, McCormick Foods, CABA and the Gulbenkian Foundation. Miriam is a trained facilitator of the world-renowned Penn Resilience Program, which is the basis of the Comprehensive Soldier and Family Fitness Program in the American Military. She has delivered resilience training at the Defence Academy of Great Britain. Contact Miriam. Some feedback from previous resilience sessions.

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

‘I really enjoyed the in-person Resilience training delivered by Miriam.  Her warmth, enthusiasm and experience put us all at ease and being able to be together in a room, to move around and engage in the simple, fun activities really helped to strengthen the learning experience. It was a great opportunity to discover and understand more about my colleagues and myself, and the easy to use tools and worksheets are a brilliant aid to put what I’ve learnt into practice.’ Participant, Cruse, Wales.

Miriam Akhtar MAPP is an expert in resilience and experienced trainer, who has developed resilience programmes for clients including Imperial College NHS Trust leadership programme in London and community healthcare teams in North Somerset. Clients include the Environment Agency, MOD, BBC, West Midlands Combined Authority, McCormick Foods, CABA and the Gulbenkian Foundation. Miriam is a trained facilitator of the world-renowned Penn Resilience Program, which is the basis of the Comprehensive Soldier and Family Fitness Program in the American Military. She has delivered resilience training at the Defence Academy of Great Britain. Contact Miriam.

“A big thank you on behalf of the Defence Leadership Centre, and in particular the Intrinsic Leadership and Behaviours Team, for the Positive Psychology training you provided. It was perfectly pitched and practical. The entire team really enjoyed the training and we certainly got a lot of very useful knowledge and learning out of the sessions; and which sets us up nicely for delivering the Senior Leaders Mental Fitness and Resilience Training. Thank you for your professional approach and the way you adapted the training to meet our needs and maximise our understanding.” Commander K Santrian MA PGCE FCIPD Royal Navy, Defence Academy of Great Britain

Dr Chris Johnstone, one of our associates, is our go-to on resilience. His resources including the online Personal Resilience in 1 hour and the book Seven Ways to Build Resilience.