Building Personal and Team Resilience at Work

About this course.

Resilience is the capacity of a person — or a team — to cope with pressure, adversity and change, and to recover and keep functioning well afterwards. It is the ability to take a knock, a setback or a stressful stretch, and to come through it without being permanently derailed. Crucially, resilience is not about "toughening up", "hardening up" or "manning up"; it is not ignoring problems, suppressing how you feel, or gritting your teeth in silence. Those responses tend to make things worse, not better. Genuine resilience includes noticing when something is wrong and doing something about it — which sometimes means asking for help.

It helps to picture resilience as the ability both to bounce back and, over time, to bounce forward — to recover from a difficult experience and, where possible, to learn and adapt from it. A resilient person is not someone who never feels stress, worry, grief or frustration; feeling those things is a normal, healthy human response to difficult circumstances. Resilience is about how you carry those feelings and how you recover, not about being immune to them. Anyone who tells you a good worker should never feel the pressure is not describing resilience; they are describing suppression, which has a habit of catching up with people.