We Stuffed Your Mental Health So Lets All Work On Resilience

Resilience is the favourite buzz words of the corporate world theses days. Everywhere I look, it is all about “building resilience” or “creating resilient teams” or “leading with resilience”. I love resilience, it’s even one of my favourite keynote speaker topics. But I do not like the way the corporate world is using it.

If feels a bit like “We stuffed your mental health…um…sorry about that. Let’s talk about Resilience.”

Resilience can’t happen in a workplace without Trauma Informed Care

Firstly, ‘resilience’, can’t happen without adequate support and trauma informed care. Resilience only occurs when people have been supported to overcome difficulties in a way that includes safety, trust, collaboration, choice and empowerment.

For example, if someone has been bullied at work and now suffers from anxiety or depression or another mental health issue as a result, wheeling out ‘resilient’ courses, isn’t going to do jack. That person needed to be supported, validated, provided with alternative work arrangement options, have proper mediation and conflict resolution sessions.

The ‘resilience’ happens when the person is provided with choices and options about how they are engaging with their bully at work. Have they been offered coaching, mentoring or mental health support?

Resilience and compassion must co-exist

A huge part of resilience is compassion: compassion for others and self-compassion. If you have a workplace where people are routinely rude to each other, don’t help each other out, tear each other down rather than raise them up, then you are going to have a really hard time fostering resilience.

Practicing compassion with each other in the workplace, checking in on them if they are feeling down, offering a helping hand if they are stuck, or standing up for someone when they are being unfairly treated is what makes people feel strong enough within themselves to be resilient.

Self-compassion is also crucial for fostering resilience. If your head is filled with negative self-talk, that you aren’t good enough, or everything is your fault, then you can’t be resilient. All your energy is going into tearing yourself down with your own self talk.

If the environment you are working in is psychologically unsafe, doesn’t allow mistakes, makes your fearful of speaking up, has unrealistic expectations of you, then you are set up for failure, and that feeds negative self-talk.

Building resilience in the workplace is a great idea, but it needs to be done properly. There is no point in throwing resilience programs into workplaces which haven’t done the groundwork or aren’t willing to do the groundwork in fixing toxic culture.

Resilience is a fantastic trait to build in people. But remember, it will only grow if the soil is prepared before you plant the seeds.