How do we actually boost resilience?!

Trauma – in whatever form you’re naming it, from traumatic workplace stress to interpersonal abuse or surviving violence – seems to rarely come by itself. We can’t reduce it down to a single factor that is causing the issue, when life is complex and people even more so.

I’ve written about my experiences with domestic abuse on before, but I’d like to touch on the complexity of my work life at the time in the later years of that relationship, to truly show you the poly-victimisation that can be occurring in your life and work.

My boss at the time summed it up for me: “you can cope with stress at home, you can cope with stress at work, but when there’s both you are probably going to fall apart.” She was – to me – the epitome of grace under pressure, beautifully put together and calmly spoken under any kind of fire. The opposite of my fiery idealism in the workplace or my complete collapse of resistance at home.

My home life was one of semi-acknowledged stress. I had not even approached the words “abuse” or “trauma” or “coercive control” at this point, but there were nudges between my colleagues that something was wrong. Add in financial abuse, and there’s that all familiar strain of money worries, and my physical wellbeing was on the nose-dive.

And work... I loved and hated that job. The kids that I worked with lit me up, kept me coming back every day for the moments of connection and communication breakthroughs. I don’t spend my time as a Speech Therapist any more, but I can tell you that there is nothing quite like when a non-speaking autistic teenager trusts you to share his favourite flapper or gives their happy sound at your arrival.

But I was also finding myself shouting down the phone about the cleanliness of the minibuses on a regular basis. I was meeting with the deputy head of the school as we played “staff sickness sudoku” to try and juggle the volume of staff sickness with ensuring the service was safe, let alone high quality. We had the pressure of new pupils coming in – the thing that paid all our wages and kept the school afloat – amid shortages of space, staff, resources, time, energy, sanity…

This is “poly-victimisation” – exposure to multiple types of traumatic events or stressors. I’m using the term a little liberally to make a point – most of us have a combination of primary and secondary traumas and stressors impacting us at any one time, but we’re also out here doing our best for our mission. We want the world to be better, but it’s costing us physically and emotionally.

Introducing ‘resilience portfolios’

As a loud and proud nerd, it isn’t good enough for me to rest behind the woolly definitions of resilience that are out there. If I could fit it on an embroidered throw pillow, it wasn’t enough for me. Like… yes, google defines it as “the capacity to withstand or to recover quickly from difficulties” but what does that actually mean?

Turns out, there’s lots of theories out there, but one in particular stood out to me. It’s easy to understand, can be rooted in practical coaching and training, and they did one of my favourite bits of science with the model.

A ‘resilience portfolio’, simply put, is the collection of skills and traits someone needs to possess in order to cope in challenging situations. It’s breaking down that big, monolithic “throw pillow” definition into the constituent parts. It was created by three American researchers – John Grych, Sherry Hamby and Victoria Banyard – through studying how survivors of violence show healthy adaptation skills. Since then, several research teams have applied the model to different groups and scenarios.

The model breaks resilience down into three key themes:

Self regulation: put simply, this is awareness of our own emotions and trauma responses, including how to manage them and support others without compromising our needs. This last one needs a newsletter all of its own, because people in changemaking fields so often help others at the expense of their own wellbeing!

Interpersonal skills: none of us are operating in a complete vacuum – we are all surrounded by people. So in times of stress, we need to communication effectively and bring our teams and communities together – fostering good relationships with others in place of conflict, cliques or isolation.

Meaning making: now this one definitely needs more discussion! How we view and make sense of an event can differ wildly from the other people who are living the exact same situation. Understanding this – and choosing to view things through the most helpful lenses – is vital to our resilience. We need to stay rooted in hope and purpose!

If our resilience portfolio is the domains and skills that comprise resilience, it can be supposed that we will have more than one item in our portfolio, and they will interact with each other. This is what Hamby, Grych and Banyard called ‘poly-strengths’ in their 2018 paper – the total number of skills that a person had at above average levels. This paper tested whether poly-strengths predict our ability to function, and if there were certain strengths that influenced this (regardless of the total). I promised you cool science at the end of last week’s newsletter about resilience portfolios – never say I don’t deliver!

Here are some of my favourite things from their findings: despite the high levels of victimisation in their participants, 77% of them agreed that they were “satisfied with their life” and 87% felt they had “a lot to be proud of”. Statements of post-traumatic growth also had high levels of support: 84% of participants believed “they found they were stronger than they thought they were” and 69% had changed priorities based on life experiences.

The total number of strengths in their resilence portfolio was associated with increased well-being and increased post-traumatic growth. To me (and hopefully if she’s reading this one too, Dr Hamby agrees) this suggests that if we support people to increase the skills in their resilience portfolio, we can expect them to feel better and be in a good place to grow.

Now here’s the cool science for all my fellow nerds. Obviously, these three themes cover a multitude of skills and qualities, so researchers started looking for the key ones – the things that would make the biggest impact to people’s wellbeing and ability to cope – and the research shows that there were certain strengths (like hope, optimism, emotional awareness and regulation, and psychological endurance) that uniquely predicted increased wellbeing, post-traumatic growth and mental wellbeing.

When I read this paper, it felt like a lightbulb had been switched on, illuminating not the café I sat working in, but all the way back to when I was working on the grassroots, feet-on-the-floor and exhaustion-in-my-bones side of change-making. My boss gave me pithy wisdom, but she never told me how I could develop my resilience. She highlighted the impact of my poly-victimisation – probably as one of only two people trusted to know how hard I was finding things, but she never helped me boost my poly-strengths.

I had the picture, but not the solution back then.

Now, with my years of coach training behind me, I have solutions that I am flippin awesome at delivering, but I’m no longer working at the sharp end of things.

I want you to have access to the strategies you need, as you need them, to make your biggest impact.