Wednesday, May 13, 2015

How resilient are we really?

I’ve been doing workshops in resilience since 2007. I have often found that when we present the skills and the attitudes of resilience, most people can immediately identify with them and many people indicate that, yes, they can and do apply the skills. No problem, they say. But applying the skills and the attitudes of resilience involves more than just being able to list them and define what they are. It means being able to apply them to specific situations.
As I have indicated a number of times in these blogs over the years, we have used storytelling as a way of teaching the skills and the attitudes of resilience. A novel, in particular, can be an excellent tool for teaching these skills, and we have used Reaching Home and now First Night as tools for teaching these skills and attitudes.  This tends to work well and we encourage people to tell their own stories about how they’ve dealt with situations in their life and what skills and attitudes of resilience they’ve used.
A few years ago we developed a card game called “Bounce Back” and have used it in the training over the last few years. The game asks participants to respond to a challenge card that they have drawn from the deck of challenges. Like life, we never know what card we will be dealt. Participants must then respond with the skills and the attitudes that they would use in dealing with the challenge that they have received. In some cases we have imposed a time limit on response, creating another pressure that they have to deal with in responding. We have also asked participants to describe exactly how they would use the skill and the attitude that they have chosen from the list of skills and attitudes that we have reviewed in this blog. We have found this as a very useful tool, because it requires people to demonstrate how they would utilize the skills and the attitudes of resilience.
As I have mentioned over the last year and a half, we have been developing this hardcopy card game into an electronic card game. In the game participants are dealt a challenge that they must respond to. They must use the skills and the attitudes of resilience and they must describe in detail how they would apply them to the specific challenge. This is a game that will be played over the Internet from a website that we are developing. After the participant responds to the challenge, a dropdown box appears and describes the skills and the attitudes that we think might have been useful for them to apply in dealing with the challenge that they responded to. Players can hold their responses and be coached on their responses either in real time or, if they save their responses, later. We believe this is an excellent tool for helping people to develop and use the skills and the attitudes of resilience.
In the next blog I’m going to give you a demonstration of how this works by presenting a challenge and then describing how we would suggest that it might be dealt with. Again, these are only suggestions of skills and attitudes of resilience that might apply. Every situation is different, as is every person. So tune in in a couple of weeks and we’ll present a challenge and discuss the skills and the attitudes that might be applied to dealing with the challenge.

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