Co-Workers

As we did in the last blog, I presented a challenge from the card game called “Bounce Back” that is a tool that we have been using for teaching the skills and the attitudes of resilience.  This is a “serious game” that asks you to apply the skills and the attitudes of resilience to a specific challenge and describe how you would respond to that challenge using these skills.  Just like life, we don’t know what challenge we will be dealt.
Here’s one that relates to co-workers.
You’ve never gotten along well with one of your co-workers.  Your job has changed recently and now you must work with this person each day.
How can you use the skills and the attitudes of resilience to deal with this person and manage this situation?
Take some time and think about this and about what skills and attitudes you might apply in this situation.  We would assume that you may need the job and you might not want or be able to just quit.
Here are some of our suggestions about ways that you might deal with this situation.  Again, these are only suggestions.  Every situation is different, as is every person.
First of all, we would think that you might want to do a lot of communicating and talking, perhaps, with your supervisor about the problem and with friends and family about what suggestions they might have for you in dealing with the situation.  So we would assume that connecting with others and communication would be critical.  We would also assume that perhaps trying to talk with this person would be a good idea too.  This might require you being flexible and being willing to do something that doesn’t come easy, perhaps getting outside of your comfort zone doing this.  We would also assume that you would need to deal with the feelings that you may have developed over time regarding this person.  Otherwise, the feelings may get in the way of you being able to find a solution.  We would assume that doing some problem solving talk with others might help you to develop a plan for managing this situation and being able to make life more comfortable for yourself and for your co-worker.  We’re sure that there are other ideas that you may have or others may have about how to deal with this situation and how the other skills and the attitudes of resilience we haven’t mentioned might apply.  We would encourage you to think this through and to talk with others about how they would deal with a similar challenge.
We have found over the years in using this game that it encourages people to really think about what they would do in a specific situation and requires them to actually demonstrate how they would apply the skills and the attitudes of resilience to the challenge.
So talk about it with others.  Ask them what they would do and, if you value their opinion and their direction, ask them to coach you.  We’ll present another challenge in our next post.



Ronald L. Breazeale, Ph.D.