The May course has now started, and is closed to further bookings. Due to unforeseen circumstances, we’re not running this course in June. This course can be booked for groups/teams/organisations by arrangement. Please contact us if you’d like to discuss this.
Resilience is the ability to withstand, deal with, and/or recover from difficult situations. It includes our capacity to make the best of things, cope with stress and rise to the occasion. With the challenges we face from the coronavirus crisis, we need our resilience now perhaps more than ever before.
This four week online course combines a series of live webinars with an online resource featuring short engaging video tutorials that talk you through the seven resilience pathways introduced by Chris Johnstone’s book Seven Ways to Build Resilience.
The next course runs over four Thursdays at 1pm UK time starting on May 7th.
The four-week online course involves three key elements
- A series of four hour-long live webinars, at weekly intervals, (for the next course these start at 1pm UK time on Thursday, starting May 7th). Each webinar focuses on specific skills that can help us when facing some of the challenges linked to our Coronavirus Crisis. All the webinars are recorded, so they’re easy to catch at a later date if you can’t make the live event.
- An online resource hosting over three hours worth of additional video tutorials and resources, downloadable handouts and a discussion forum, as well as the recording links for the webinars. Booking on the course will give you long-term access to this resource, so that you can revisit material at your own pace.
- Home practice resilience exercises to try out each week, so that you can become more familiar with the practical of resilience, and also feedback in the webinars, drawing out more learning points.
Chris Johnstone’s book Seven Ways to Build Resilience is an ideal companion to the online course, though it is not a requirement of the course that you read this. Some extracts from the book will be provided as downloadable pdf handouts.
Course content:
Week 1: Drawing out stories of resilience
The first of the seven skills we explore is storyboarding, where we map out key elements in the story of how resilience goes. We look at how to develop our personal resilience toolkit of Self-Help SSRIs (Strategies, Strengths, Resources, and Insights). Foundational practices, such as the six-part SHIFTS storyboarding process, are introduced. We also look at key research studies and reviews showing resilience interventions to be effective.
Week 2: Strengthening heart and mind
While the second skill focuses on ways to strengthen the heart, the third gives attention to what happens in our minds and the learnable skill of flexible thinking. To strengthen the heart, emotional first-aid practices are introduced that we can apply ourselves or pass on to others. To cultivate flexibility in thinking, we draw upon cognitive tools taught in the world-leading Penn Resilience Program.
Week 3: Crisis drill for red-zone states
The red zone of challenge refers to situations we find overwhelming, with levels of pressure or threat beyond what we can normally cope with. This can include VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and/or ambiguous) realities, like those many of us face at the moment, extremes of overload or intense life challenges such as serious illness or the death of someone close. Building on the principle of disaster preparedness that is familiar in fire drills, a crisis drill involves thinking in advance about how to best respond to areas of risk that concern us or people we’re supporting. We draw here on the fourth skill of overload management and fifth skill of problem solving, looking at tools and insights that also help when facing problems we might not be able to solve.
Week 4: Nourishing rootedness and stickability
The sixth skill is about strengthening support; this final webinar looks at how we can grow our rootedness in nourishing relationships and energising purpose. We also look at how to cultivate contexts that support wellbeing, strengthening resilience not only in ourselves but also in our families, organisations, and/or communities. Lastly, the seventh skill involves looking at how to make the gains of resilience practice last longer – both in embedding habits that support resilience and in increasing the stickability of useful learning from this online course.
About the trainer
Dr Chris Johnstone is one of the UK’s leading resilience specialists, with over thirty years experience training in this field. He has a background in medicine and psychology, and for many years taught resilience skills in a specialist mental health team with the NHS. His books include Seven Ways to Build Resilience – strengthening our ability to deal with difficult times, and, co-authored with Joanna Macy, Active Hope – how to face the mess we’re in without going crazy. He is the lead resilience trainer at CollegeOfWellbeing.com