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Reported by Kate McNeil, CSaP Communications Coordinator
What steps can we take to improve personal resilience? How can organisations help to improve the personal resilience of their teams during periods of crisis? As part of the Centre for Science and Policy’s ongoing lunchtime seminar series on resilience, we heard from Graham Pendlebury and Dr Magda Osman about personal resilience, and what it means from a personal perspective to be working as part of a team during times of change or stress.
Throughout the discussion, Mr Pendlebury drew on his experiences as a former director at the Department of Transport and stressed that ‘individual personal resilience is an essential part of the national effort’ in both the short and long term. He highlighted that even good systems will fail if the individuals within them are not resilient, while noting that the importance of this individual resilience is particularly vital during times of crisis. While people have jobs to do, he notes that we also need to remember that policymakers, experts, and ministerial advisors are all human beings who face personal strain, and who must operate under conditions of intense scrutiny and criticism. While acknowledging that discourse about mental health plays an increasingly prominent role in our society, Mr Pendlebury questioned whether the public was also being equipped with the tools needed to go beyond coping. Here, he suggested that people also need tools to confront problems with a solutions-oriented mindset, in a way that builds personal resilience.
Throughout the seminar, Mr Pendlebury also noted that resilience is about recognizing that change is inevitable and often out of our hands, and that we need to focus on how to withstand unexpected and unwelcome circumstances without our mental health being affected. Consequently, resilience is needed in the short term to cope with sudden shocks, but also in the medium to long-term to manage periods of prolonged uncertainty of the type needed by civil servants operating as part of Operation Yellowhammer, or in managing major events such as the London 2021 Olympics.
Ultimately, Mr Pendlebury suggested that tools for personal resilience include learning how to keep emotions under control and to maintain perspective; avoiding coercive positivity; focusing on practical problem-solving skills and reason-oriented decision-making which is grounded in integrity; and recognizing when others are under stress and how to help them through a situation by focusing on your obligations to others rather than on yourself. He believes that this approach can build a mutually reinforcing process which can build shared purpose and motivation.
Drawing on literature and expertise from the field of psychology, Dr Magda Osman built on Mr Pendlebury’s points while stressing how dangerous it can be to give people an opportunity to say how bad things are, without then offering the opportunities to resolve problems. She stressed that we need to avoid reinforcing and compounding bad experiences, by instead focusing on fundamental goals which can create a sense of agency. This sense of personal agency can allow individuals to develop action plans and incrementally work through solutions-oriented strategies.
Dr Magda also noted that there are seasonal variations in the stresses which influence life satisfaction, anxiety, and depression, and that this is compounded by multiple different inputs for sources of stress. Here, she stressed a need to think about sources of stress in a nuanced way, and to break down sources of stress so that solutions can be developed which target particular problems, rather than focusing on the overall picture.