Career Coaching for Resilience
In my last post, I spoke of what resilience is, and what happens when we lose it. In this post, I want to turn the focus on what coaches can do to support those struggling to refind balance.
One answer is that we can help individuals to reframe their thinking. When resilience goes so does flexibility in thinking. The individual becomes fixed on a narrow range of thoughts. Thoughts such as:
- I will never be able to . . .
- I am a failure
- I cannot . . .
These thoughts can be particularly harsh when they are stated by people who Tal Ben-Shahar of Harvard Business School calls ‘perfectionists’. What he means by this is individuals who expected their route through life to be “direct, smoooth and free from obstacles.” When they hit a bump in the road after years of uninterrrupted success, they can be ill equipped to deal with a different reality. Terrified of failure, their thoughts show themselves in actions such as:
- Avoiding friends and colleagues
- Setting themselves even tougher goals – but goals which do not match with a changed reality
- Paralysis
The extensive work on resilience undertaken by Penn University’s Resilience Project has shown that coaches can :
- Help the individual build new thinking patterns by enabling them to see that between an adverse action (A) e.g. job loss or disappointment and the consequence they have created (C) e.g. a withdrawal of effort, there is an intervening factor – their beliefs (B). At times of difficulty we jump from A – C, unaware that it is B which is central to how we deal with the world. By exposing the ABC pattern, the individual can start to identify different beliefs which open up new possibilities. Job disappointment accompanied by beliefs such as:
- I have the ability to take a different direction
- I know I can weather the storm because I have done it in other areas of my life
- No one achieves anything without some failure along the way
leads to very diferent outcomes. Energy starts to flow back, the emotional range opens up and the range of choices available widens.
But it is not only the coached who need to recognise the limitations of the AC model, it can be equally true of coaches. Faced with someone who is convinced the future is hopeless, it is easy to get caught in the same web of thinking, and to start feeling the very same emotions that the client is experiencing. Doing an ABC on ourselves is as valuable as it is applying it to clients, so that we stay resourceful in our work with them.
For more on this topic see my colleague Lindsay Wittenberg’s presentation on career coaching for resilience.
Posted in resilience
