The West of England Academy is well-known for its free improvement and innovation training and resources and this year in response to the wellbeing challenges heightened by the pandemic, it has also turned its attention to supporting the development of emotional resilience. This is vitally important for organisations as declining performance, poor leadership decisions and behaviour, emerging patterns of absence or impacts on safety in the workplace can be caused by a lack of emotional resilience.
In early 2021, the Academy worked with Sue Mellor, a coaching mentor and facilitator, on a workshop to support healthcare leaders to develop their emotional resilience in order to help themselves, as well as provide them with the tools to gain hands on experience to support their team’s wellbeing. In these workshops, Sue shared research and psychology around the theme of wellbeing, tools and techniques to develop personal and team resilience and facilitated talking and breathing exercises. After initially running three of these workshops, demand was so high that another three dates were added.
Delegates responded that there was ‘a good variety of research and practical tips’ and felt that they would be able to ‘share the learning with colleagues to reflect on what we each have in our toolkit’. Feedback showed that delegates appreciated ‘time to process some of my thinking about how I am and how I want to be’ and thought it was ‘fantastic to be allowed the space to think’.
Building on this, the Academy has developed a suite of free online video-based resources to help others learn more and practise techniques to grow their emotional resilience. These videos offer simple techniques to support personal wellbeing whilst encouraging self-reflection to help develop emotional resilience. They include:
Personal energy: advice on recognising when your energy levels are low and tips on how to recharge your batteries
Personal resilience: a model exploring the tools we need to develop and maintain resilience
Positivity jar: a simple tool that can be used to record and collect feelings of gratitude, successes or ideas for improvement
Superpowers: a reminder of the importance of self-care, self-awareness and self-compassion
Kate Phillips, Senior Project Manager for the West of England Academy said:
“These four short videos can be used to learn about each technique so that individuals can try them out and share them with their teams to develop everyone’s resilience. Even as the restrictions ease and life begins returning to some sense of normality, it will be important for everyone, especially healthcare workers who face on-going challenges from the pandemic, to continue to focus on their wellbeing – these free resources can help with that”.
View our videos for developing emotional resilience here.
Posted on June 21, 2021
