Noelle Phillips: Hi, everybody. My name is Noelle Phillips. I studied in industrial and organizational psychology. And today, we'll be talking just briefly about resiliency, maybe touch on a little bit individual as well as workplace as they do sort of go hand in hand with one another. Individual resiliency is really important for a lot of reasons, and that word has definitely been highlighted in the workplace and just all over social media and things like that. And so, I'd like to just kind of highlight what that word is and maybe how you can build on that at your own level as well as within your workplace.

Resiliency is very layered and so, to hit the high notes without going into it too much, will be influenced by things like your upbringing, things like your genetics, your environment, all these things really play into who we are as people, but also how we develop our resilience. So when you're able to have a clear understanding of how those things influence you, then you can have a better understanding of the road that you need to begin hiking, I guess you could say, in order to really start establishing that for yourself.

Now, for in the workplace, that's a little bit more intricate, right? Because you're working with different people from different backgrounds who have been exposed to different things. And so, when that's happening, individuals in say your leadership role, you're the ones that need to take those things into account and also understand your own resilience within yourself so that you can better assist the people in your workplace.

Workplace resiliency can really be established, I think, fundamentally, when you start at the individual level and when you're promoting that for the people in your workplace, if you have a huge incident, and say that there's some sort of debriefing done after that incident for the people that you work with, if these people don't even really understand how to establish their own resilience, they're not really given the tools to do that to begin with. And so, that's why I speak to the individual resilience piece first.

Now, establishing this in your workplace would include things like making sure to give them the space and feelings of safety in order to actually build on that resilience so that when they're struggling, they can have the ability to come up to you and say, "Hey, I'm not doing okay. I need some help with this," right? But also, understanding that when you're doing team building type things, take advantage of the times that, say, conflict arises or something to really help them to develop things like perspective. Perspective also influences our resilience.

So if a trauma happens and I see that trauma as life-ending, it's going to ruin my life. And every day, those are my thoughts. Every day, I'm thinking, "I'm not going to ever get over this." Every day, I'm thinking, "Why did this have to happen to me?" That's a sort of perspective or even mindset of what's happening and that will influence your resilience. So, giving people the space to have a different way of viewing things is also really important. And sometimes that can happen when you're going through maybe, say, conflict resolution as an example. You can start to help them understand different perspectives within each other.

You can also really start to highlight ways that they can look at it alternatively. So when you're experiencing a conflict with somebody else, you have the opportunity to see something differently. And then as that relationship mends, you're developing resilience between each other, between the group, and then that just grows. And so, that's just an example. It doesn't have to be conflict resolution, but just to kind of help give a clear understanding of how the perspective piece really influences workplace resiliency. But being able to demonstrate this also will help people. So, the trauma happens, right? People are going to process it differently and they're going to need time to do that. But being able to eventually give them a space to see maybe some sort of silver lining out of the situation. And you may not even see that for quite a while. It may take some time, and everybody's going to take that in very differently. But being able to establish that at the leadership level and show that is going to make a huge difference for these people in bouncing back from those difficult situations. And that's really what resiliency is. A lot of descriptions out there are kind of variable, but one of the big ones is bouncing back from difficult situations or trying situations. And so, that's the idea. Being able to come back from that, and to come back from it, and demonstrate a stronger sense of how you approach different situations.

In workplace resiliency, you also have to remember just the different backgrounds that people are coming from too, and how this is going to maybe influence things for them, how they view things and who may need more assistance, who may not, how to maybe pair people up so that they can help each other. So, maybe you have someone with higher resilience that you could pair with somebody who maybe has lower resilience to better assist that person in growing and flourishing. That's going to also help with your team dynamics, connections with each other, which also comes into play with resilience.

So, I can't get into all of these into too much detail, but just understanding that there are a lot of really big, key components that come into how we develop resilience and how they influence us on a very significant scale. I think that, as leaders, we have to make sure that we are developing a very strong skillset of emotional intelligence and resilience that we can demonstrate to our employees. When we have those two things, people see that, they notice it, and they want to also demonstrate it. And then, that further comes into the culture dynamic. So, there's just a lot of different areas that that can go in, just to further highlight the importance of building resilience in the workplace.

 If you have more questions, if you want more insight or feedback, or need some trainings with this, I can help give more details on these different pieces to you individually or to your team on resilience and how to build that and how to adapt and how to really come back from situations, because trauma is going to happen. It doesn't matter what field you're in, it's going to happen. And especially focusing in on your people who do experience trauma on a pretty regular basis, those are the people who really do need that resilience in order to continue to do the job effectively and to continue to provide the care that people need, especially in the healthcare industry, as well as the long-term employment of those people and when they leave the field as well. So, this is something that impacts people at such a huge level, personal life, work life, all of it.

And so, I think that people definitely deserve to have that understanding of resilience within the workplace and the individual level. And I do so hope that this helps. I think that resilience deserves to have a very close look at itself within ourselves and within the workplace. You guys can find more information on all this and what I do with my business, Balancing Act Coaching and Consulting at findmyfooting.com. Thanks so much for listening, guys. I do hope this was helpful.