Understanding Resilience

‘The capacity to recover quickly from difficulties: toughness’

Life in HR is full of potential conflict: there are many stakeholders and client groups who have different priorities. Usually, conflict isn’t personal, but it can feel like it is. We talk a lot today about psychological safety, and we are far more likely to feel able to contribute at our best when this is in place.

The tendency to feel resilient is based on many factors, and we will explore a few here. This is not intended as an expert summary, and is far from comprehensive, as this is a huge and important subject. These points are selected to stimulate your thinking, and we will relate them to HR in particular.

Areas to explore within resilience

Experts on resilience tend to include the following aids to resilience:

feeling that you’re in control; autonomy;
a sense of purpose, of vision or overall direction that gives clarity and can be a source of courage;
self-awareness; a feeling of strength; being able to call on previous situations; understanding your own emotional responses so that you are able to regulate them;
the ability to change and adapt and openness to do so;
social connectedness; feeling supported and able to reach out to colleagues, friends, family;
personal well-being and self-compassion;
the ability to stay in reality; what is actually happening and being practical; knowing that stuff happens and it won’t be the end of the world.

That doesn’t stop our fear response, though, which is part of our physiological make-up.

Here’s some science behind fear, and why we have to learn to live with it, manage it and even grow with it.

Neuroscience gives us a strong foundation to understand resilience

Despite our apparent sophistication and intelligence, humans feel a threat response that’s physical and instinctive, and disables the intelligent part of our brain. Recent advances in Functional MRI (imaging in real time while the brain is working) has provided scientific proof of this.

Our nervous system has evolved a hierarchical structure … the more advanced systems shut down in the face of overwhelming threat, leaving brain, body and psyche to their more archaic functions.

We may not live in caves any more, but our most basic instincts of fight or flight are as powerful as they were millions of years ago. Our intelligent brain is disabled by the other parts of the brain that are designed to protect us by saving energy for physical escape.

We can think that we’re successfully hiding our emotional response, but in fact it will show anyway. A good and positive response is to voice our concern or fear calmly – it is likely to be completely valid and useful, eg. ‘I feel that we’re not on the same page here, let’s talk about that’, or ‘I was hoping we’d get further in this meeting.’

Our previous experiences can rise up to the surface and affect our response

Levine also makes some points that shine a light on how it’s our past experience that triggers us to feel discomfort in a situation that may be completely unrelated:

'The human nervous system does not readily discriminate between a potential source of danger in the environment, such as an abruptly moving shadow, or distress about a situation long past.’

This seems relevant to our experience of corporate life – the kind of behaviour that we see as threatening may feel so because we have experienced that before. For example, we may suspect that someone’s agenda is in conflict with our own – and it feels worse because we’ve been there before. We may be reacting to held memories – for example of times when we, or HR, were disrespected; when we experienced gender or other bias; when we felt we failed an employee or colleague, or failed to speak up.

This also gets amplified because we have so much vested in achieving our own goals (eg. financial, reputational, political, etc.) and, in HR in particular, in living and role modelling our organisation’s and our own values.

There is far more for you to explore, if you would like to deepen your understanding of neuroscience.

Fear, real or imagined, gets in the way

The first step in resilience is to understand, and accept (because it’s hard-wired) the fear response. Daniel Goleman was the first writer to get this across in an accessible way, and coin the term ’emotional intelligence’. The intelligent response that he recommends involves these steps:

Self Awareness
Notice and accept the ‘somatic’ response – the physical signs, eg. butterflies, headache, feeling flushed. It’s trying to tell you something – it’s valid.
Self Management
Take a breath and take control, to give yourself time to choose your response and step out of your immediate emotional response
Social Awareness
Be aware of the other people involved; deploy empathy and organisational awareness.
Social Skills
Now, with your frontal cortex engaged, you can draw on your communication skills and manage the situation so that all parties involved can step back from their emotional responses and act consciously.

What is your default style, as an HR team and as an individual?

This is included here within resilience because it relates to our ability to adapt to new situations.

Goleman also clarified 6 leadership styles; Coercive, Authoritative, Affiliative, Democratic, Pacesetting and Coaching. Whether or not you agree with these, or identify with them, his point is that we have a default. The brain likes to have set patterns and responses. The brain likes to use its energy efficiently.

The brain is obsessed with saving energy. That certainly isn’t a scientific way of putting it, but the brain will always choose the option that uses less energy. That’s why we prefer our comfort zone. It can actually take us quite a long time to notice when something we do actually doesn’t deliver the results we want.

Research has revealed that the brain develops ‘neural pathways’; the well worn responses that are familiar and perhaps haven’t resulted in disaster in the past, so we hold onto them. That doesn’t mean they’re working well for us right now.

It would be interesting to consider the default style that you have as an HR function. This will relate directly to how you are regarded by your organisation.

The brain is plastic - and resilient

Here’s the good news. We can change our neural pathways. We can’t (often) change our environment, but we can change how we respond to it.

It is often our response to a situation that causes the stress within us, rather than the situation itself. This may be driven by what we have invested in the situation, or our perceptions of the agenda of the person in front of us, or by our own emotional experiences.

Re-programming our neural pathways takes time. It means trying new approaches, and repeating those new patterns even when they don’t work first time.

Be kind to yourself

When we move on to think about how to be more resilient, emotionally, this is the first rule. We are tough on ourselves in today’s world. Draw on resources in mindfulness to find your own recipe for building your emotional strength.

Push forwards and push back

There are many techniques that we can draw on, behaviourally. Developing these leads to feeling more skilled and confident in the moment to act as you really want to.

Three key areas to work on that can help you to feel more resilient:

Building your sense of purpose and courage to say what you want to say, and be who you want to be. Much stress comes from frustration about what we wish we had done or said (or wish we hadn’t). A strong sense of purpose will enable you to martial your resources and hold your centre of gravity.
Building real clarity about the situation, the environment, the other parties and, most importantly, what you want to contribute.
Preparation: prepare your mindset and your skills, and open your mind so that you can resist going into autopilot.

We will talk more about these skills in our sections on Assertiveness and Influencing.

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