Resilience: How to be your best self

Structure

• The course comprises 8 sections delivered over a single day and it’s a combination of practical activities underpinned by a scientific evidence base. You will receive additional resources, links and further reading to support further self-exploration when you’re finished.
• The course will follow an agenda, but our facilitators will adapt the focus to meet the personal needs of the group.
• During the course you will learn practical skills and reflect on how you will use these to contribute to the development of your own personalised action plan.
• We limit numbers to a 1:8 facilitator:delegate ratio to ensure that participants receive a high level of personal attention and support.

The primary objective of this course is to learn foundational skills that will help you develop personal resilience in the face of challenge.

Agenda

In every session during the day we’ll explore resilience through different topics, as well as provide practical skills to equip you with tools to apply in your everyday life and work.

The agenda below shows you core session content. The agenda shown below provides the core session content, but we always tailor courses to exactly what you need and knowledge you may already have.

Due to the nature of the course, there is no course assessment. You will be asked to develop personal learning objectives which will form the basis for reflection at the end of the course.

For each day:

The introduction is designed to get you thinking about the nature of resilience. What does it mean in your life and work? We’ll help you start to develop your personal learning objectives for the day.

• A Model for Resilient Performance This session introduces our own model for resilience; a framework for lifelong learning and development into which the content of the rest of the course is placed.
• “Life can be Hard” This session explores how our evolved minds and basic physiology struggle to cope with the demands of a twenty-first century, ‘always on’ environment. The impact of major life events is explored through this lens to help you realise that whilst we cannot avoid many of life’s demands, you can learn more effective ways to work through your mind and body, to cope more effectively.
• How to Tune into What’s Really Going On We’ll introduce you to a model that can be used to focus awareness on our moment-to-moment ability to cope and manage. This provides a systematic framework for helping you explore sensing, thinking, feeling and taking action.
• Mindfulness Skills This session introduces some practical mindfulness skills which form a basis for awareness and management of the situations that cause us stress, linking this to the model introduced in the previous session.
• Stepping into Safety The ability to calm our minds and bodies, when everything around us feels overwhelming, is a core skill. Participants will explore the physiological theory and evidence for a number of simple practices and try these practices for themselves.
• Positive Feedback Loops Understanding how positive feedback loops shape our lived experience is crucial to understanding and improving your wellbeing and performance. This session reviews the theoretical underpinnings and encourages you to explore how you create and fuel both helpful and harmful loops in your lives, together with presenting some simple strategies for change.
• Changing Channels – Introduction to Cognitive Distortions Understanding that our thinking can become distorted is a core tool in reducing our distress. This session shows you basic ways in which we distort our thinking and tools you can use to challenge it.
• Respecting & Supporting Ourselves We can often be our own worst slave-drivers and critics. In this part of the course, we explore the concept of supporting ourselves in a healthy, compassionate way, showing you a variety of techniques to access your compassionate self.
• Reflect and Close The day will close with a practical reflection exercise that encourages you to embed the learning and insights from the day, together with developing a supportive mindset and inspiring action to apply the tools and practices to everyday life.

Tutors (tab) About 200 words each (bios on website)

Liz Clark, Jonathan Katz and Alastair Duns

Benefits

On completion of this course, delegates will:

• Gain insight into how our thinking and physiology has not kept pace with ‘always-on’ 21st century life
• Be able to use practical mindfulness and imagery tools to manage mood and emotional state
• Understand how to build positive feedback loops that support a resourceful state and interrupt negative thinking patterns
• Be aware of how our thinking can be distorted and have simple tools to tackle such thinking
• Have explored and developed a mindset which enables them to be their best self in challenging times