What’s on for next week?

Next week, we’ll explore ways to develop more systematic or ecological approaches to resilience not only in our own lives and communities, but also in organisations and the workplace.

Before putting what you’ve learnt into practice by creating your own resilience plan, we’ll examine the idea that resilience in an individual or group arises from a systematic combination of:

• a broad set of capabilities – such as critical thinking and problem solving
• specific skills – such as communication and project-management skills
• self-care practices – such as exercise, sleep and mindfulness
• values and orientations – such as meaning-making and altruism
• awareness and engagement – such as prioritising collaboration and collegiality.

Each of these elements are integrally related.

For example, developing mindfulness may increase your focus, which can improve your ability to better manage projects. In turn, this could facilitate better collaboration and increase a sense of both personal and collective meaning.

In other words, resilience is a process that brings together a number of component skills and practices, and the power of these skills and practices acting together is much greater than any one of them alone. It is this wholistic process that allows us to become resilient.

Your task

Use the comments to discuss with other learners how you anticipate these different elements of resilience fitting together and reinforcing each other, including some examples of the way you think this approach could work for you.