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Building Personal and Professional Resilience – with Joanna Young

Written by: Jane Coffey, ASIP
Published on: Oct 9, 2018
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I was delighted to host Joanna’s excellent CFA UK webinar. She discussed resilience, an important, but often misunderstood, aspect of our metal and physical well-being.  Joanna spent 30 years in high pressured environments as a frontline officer and senior leader in the Metropolitan Police and is now a leadership coach.

Over the past 4 years she has delivered over 50 workshops on this topic and developed a deep understanding of what resilience is and how building and maintaining your personal and professional resilience, is so important for all of us.

Resilience is the capacity to adapt and recover from adversity and stress. 

Joanna explained that we are so used to being under pressure that we don’t realise the impact it is having on us - and those around us.  Understanding what resilience is and how it affects us provides the imperative to act and improve our ability to bounce back.

The webinar also covered;

  • What is resilience?
  • What affects resilience?
  • The real consequences of not bouncing back
  • Understanding our own part in reducing or increasing the pressures we are under
  • How can we build our personal and professional resilience?

Building Personal and Professional Resilience.MP4 from CFA UK on Vimeo.

I really liked the opening analogy she made with trees in a hurricane. Essentially the biggest trees rather than the ones we might perceive to be the weakest and smallest.  are often the most vulnerable when the wind is strong They hold out against the storm standing rigid and strong until eventually when the force becomes too much they come crashing down and destroy not just themselves but everything around them, whilst the survivors are those that are flexible and bend to let the wind through, before bouncing back. Being resilient is not just about being strong and denying any emotion or stress but being able to identify how issues and stresses are affecting you and consciously work on reducing the negative effect they are having on us.

This talk gave me loads of practical ideas on how to improve my own resilience. Some ideas were new, many were things I knew but have not been actively using and some things I heard reminded me about the positive things I was already doing and encouraged me to keep doing them. I am sure everyone can find something in this webinar to add to their resilience tool box and I would like to thank Joanna again for giving her time to the society members.

If you are interested in more information on Joanna Young and her coaching practice you can find her at https://www.wildgeeseleadership.co.uk.