Canadian HR Reporter

SEPTEMBER 8, 2014 CANADIAN HR REPORTER & STRATEGIC CAPABILITY NETWORK Credit: DreamLand Media (Shutterstock) Ordinary magic Why resilience can completely change a person's experience of work BY LIZ BERNIER Eight years ago, Andrew Soren went to camp. It wasn't an ordinary camp — it was a summer camp for children with cancer. And Soren was one of a number of volunteers who spent a week there with the kids. "It changed my life," he said. "It's the most magical experience to be able to go to camp and see these kids fi nd ways of connecting with each other, and they totally trans- form the lives of all the volunteers involved." e volunteers got to see the kids fl ourish, despite overwhelm- ing adversity, he said. And both the children and the volunteers gave that camp the best they had. " ere was no monetary rea- son why they were doing this, but they were performing at their very best." Soren has returned to volunteer at the camp every year since — and those experiences have made him curious. "How were they creating this ordinary magic that made this experience of camp come to life?" he said at a Strategic Capability Network event in Toronto. "How do you get individuals in organizations to fl ourish? How do you get people to perform their very best?" at ordinary magic, as he calls it, has a name: Resilience. It's quite a loaded term, said Soren, who is a leadership coach and consultant as well as senior advisor of talent and leadership strategies at BMO in Toronto. " ere's actually a huge wealth of information and research about this topic." Defi ning resilience Resilience is one of those topics that people have all sorts of ex- traordinary defi nitions for — and there are a number of pervasive myths about it, said Soren. "We have often this picture of the resilient hero standing alone in the fi eld of battle," he said. "We have these senses that resilience can mean no emotion, going it alone, doing it the solo way… those are some of the myths that people often have about resilience." But that's deeply untrue — re- silience is very much a team sport, he said. Another big myth is we are born with resilience — we're ei- ther got it or we don't, and it's not a skill that can be developed. But that's not true either, said Soren. " e reality is that resilience is actually very emotional. I would say resilience and emotional in- telligence are actually two really closely tied connections." And resilience isn't about being stoic, perfect or unmoved. "In fact, much more of the re- search suggests that it's actually about muddling through than it is about being able to confi dently move on… those who are best at resilience are those who are best at just muddling through," he said. " e type of resilience that I want to connect about and talk about is really the ordinary magic, as opposed to the invincible and the invulnerable." It's actually something we all know — to a certain extent, you already know how to be resilient, he said. "If we just applied a little bit more attention and focus on it, we'd be able to, ultimately, be much more satisfi ed." Tiny paper cuts One classic defi nition of resilience is patterns of positive adaptation during significant challenge or adversity, said Soren. "But there's one thing about this defi nition that I don't love, and it's the notion of signifi cant adversity. I don't actually think that adver- sity necessarily needs to be about big things. I think in many ways, it's a series of tiny paper cuts that we get every single day." When we tackle strategy execu- tion, for example, those tiny paper cuts can sometimes be the biggest challenges. "It is the collection and accu- mulation of all the tiny things that get in our way every single day that ultimately make us exhausted at the end of the day," he said. But becoming positively adap- tive to those little situations that add up can help make the big stuff easier. "My bottom line on resilience is that the way that you think chang- es how you feel and what you do," said Soren. "I am focusing on the things that we're not born with, but that we all have the capacity to develop." Building resilience There are six factors of resil- ience, he said. Ultimately, these allow someone to become more resilient. " ese are the things that we all have a capacity to change." e fi rst is emotional awareness and regulation. "We need to identify that 'Whatever emotion I'm feeling right now isn't going to last for- ever,'" he said. e second is impulse control, or the ability to control behaviour to achieve goals. e third one is optimism. is is often misunderstood because it doesn't mean that we aren't real- istic, he said. "We do mean just an ability to see the glass as half full." Also, optimism can be learned, particularly when it comes to changing how we explain nega- tive situations to ourselves, he said. "(I need to be able to) look at something and say, 'That bad thing that just happened, that's not entirely my fault. And it's not always going to be bad, and it's not everything that's bad.'" Connected to that is the fourth factor, which is fl exible and accu- rate thinking, he said. "It's about really thinking through all the causes and eff ects of a situation," said Soren. "When I see that bigger pic- ture, that ultimately allows me to become much more cognizant of my place in it." e fi fth factor of resilience is empathy and connection, which really connects to the notion of resilience being a team sport, said Soren. The sixth and final factor is self-effi cacy. "Self-effi cacy is a huge predic- tor of whether or not someone will be resilient. If they believe that they can, then they're much more likely to able to be resilient," he said. Workplace benefi ts ose skills and competencies be- hind building resilience have been tested extensively, said Soren. "Most of the research that has been done has taken place in schools and in the army." In schools, in particular, there have been huge amounts of suc- cess training teachers to be able to train students in resilience, he said. ey've also had a huge impact with resilience training in the military. e U.S. army created a resilience training program for every single military cadet that enters, he said. "(It's aimed toward) helping people ultimately prevent things like post-traumatic stress disor- der, suicide, drinking problems — all of the things that ultimately are terrible and costly. So how can they help soldiers prevent those terrible things that happen?" Those benefits are clear, but what about resilience in a more general workplace setting? ere are numerous benefi ts, according to the research that's been done on resilience in orga- nizations, said Soren. "When people have positive ex- pectations for the future, there's a greater belief in our ability to be able to handle on-the-job chal- lenges. ere's more discretion- ary eff ort that people are putting in, there's higher job satisfaction, there's greater intentions to stay, there's reduced turnover, there's more organizational commit- ment and less deviant behaviour," he said. "Those attitudes and behav- iours lead to performance."

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