In recently working with a new potential client who shared that a team of employees was unusually overburdened, one of our case managers and a training specialist in our BizPsych division helped with some project delivery ideas around “Emotional Resiliency.”  The interesting part was hearing that a common approach to “Stress Relief” is simply sharing tools on how to potentially reduce it or even eliminate stress, rather than the resiliency approach, where employees are given tools on how to better respond.  We can’t always eliminate stress, but we can adjust how we deal with it.  But what happens, when those folks are not able to eliminate or even reduce the stress?  In their minds, this stress is real and it’s not going anywhere.  That is where the emotional resilience approach can be helpful.  Rather than discounting their emotions by moving them towards a stress reduction approach, we can give them even more powerful tools on how to emotionally respond in a perhaps less stressful way.

By highlighting ideas like emotional awareness, sense of humor, internal locus of control, perseverance, and optimism a stressed out population can work toward changing their perspective about the stress and, in turn, limit the emotional toll that stress is taking.

Here is a link to some tips on how to help you become more emotionally resilient

Ian Holtz
Manager of Business Development
MINES and Associates