When people build a house, some form of protection, they wouldn’t dream of tackling the job without a plan. So why is it that so many people tackle their everyday challenges, with no protective plans in place at all?

In this piece, I will set out what my experience has shown are the 5 key elements of personal protective planning, more often called simply “resilience”. So, what exactly IS resilience? Why is it such a great idea … and how can you get yourself some?

The online Oxford dictionary defines resilience in two ways, which in my world actually seem quite related:

• The capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.
• The ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape; elasticity.

So, when dealing with clients, I help them find inner “toughness” and the ability to “bounce back” from difficulties. See how I think they combine? What this means in practice is that I work with clients to identify the real scale of the challenge at hand, and to learn to see that challenge from a range of angles. How could it be an advantage? How could they learn from it? How could it affect others? In other words, to encourage the client to move on from the pit of indecision where they find themselves, and to explore different ways of seeing what they had begun to feel would be an insuperable problem.

Obviously, this isn’t a quick process for everyone, and isn’t about giving the client a metaphorical slap round the chops accompanied by a stern “Pull yourself together!”. Clients will have different levels of trust in others, even in themselves. Many people are so accustomed to catastrophising that they are experts, coming up with generalised negativity on such a grand scale that nothing is ever possible, in the history of everything, ever! When I get to know clients well, I have been known to term this “flouncing”. It is completely unproductive, and yet so very common in people, in work and at home. Many people will actually doubt they ever had any inner toughness. And that may be the case in some, but not for many.

This may be striking an uncomfortable chord for you as you read this. Well don’t worry – you are in plentiful company. And the fact that you are reading this at all shows that you have made the first, most important step – noticing that where you are now is not where you want to stay. Congratulations. That shows that you have inner toughness … you just need to nurture it.

How can you nurture your resilience? Firstly, by noticing it. Every time something happens where you would prefer things to happen differently, you will begin to notice that you are having to make a choice: go with it, or resist. Start to focus on how you do what you do, and how you think what you think. Don’t worry about why yet, just focus on the how. Notice, and reflect upon, your responses to different stimuli, be they a request to work unpaid overtime, or an invitation to go to the pub with your mates.

“Going with it” is not the same as giving in – let’s get that straight. Going with the general flow, showing personal flexibility, which is key to personal resilience. In other words, you have to begin to recognise where to pick your fights. In extreme situations, the flexibility can go too far and there is a “snap” – back to that elasticity definition again. So the second tip is to keep flexible. The NLP presupposition “the most flexible, wins” (I paraphrase) will help you to judge when it is in your interests to go with the flow, and when it is not. It might help to get an important project done, to work a long day. It might be unhelpful to go to the pub with mates the night before a big exam. Flexibility is not always straightforward, but it is important that you understand the terms under which you are using yours. Learn what works for you.

Next comes the recognition of boundaries. The third element is to recognise boundaries, ie where the “snapping point” is, and to learn to take action to avoid things getting to that stage. You need to understand the boundaries of a situation, to help you to gauge how flexible you need to be. If your boss is inviting you to stay every night to keep him company in the local bar, that’s an easy boundary to spot. You make an excuse and avoid, or go now and again if it suits you. If that becomes bullying pressure to lose control of your consonants with him, every week, that is beyond flexibility and is a straight “no” – well at least it was for me many years ago. Notice your personal response to this scenario. You may be feeling a range of emotions, positive and negative. These responses will pull on your value system, your upbringing, your beliefs, corporate policies, personal commitments … all of these things inform your boundaries and the intensity with which you choose to reinforce them. However, the ability to recognise your boundaries is a crucial tenet of improving your personal resilience.

Once you know how you are feeling about a situation, and you can see how others would like you to respond and how you might in turn respond (based on a conscious choice whether to go with it or resist), you have, in fact built the foundations of your own resilience. Next comes understanding. So the fourth tip I want to pass on, is empathy – to learn to see things from others’ perspectives. The old saying “you won’t understand someone until you’ve walked a mile in their moccasins” has a ring of truth about it. You don’t have to want to be the other person, nor am I encouraging you to sympathise with their situation, pitying them or “taking their part” as people used to say. Instead, I am simply suggesting that seeing things from another viewpoint helps you to understand a situation more fully. The more facts you have about a situation, the better you can respond to it appropriately. Imagine … someone in the office has been out all week, you jokingly accuse them of “skiving” on their return, it goes quiet in the office, someone informs you that your colleague was recently bereaved. You can sense the awkwardness, caused purely by not making the effort to find out more, to see a situation from another’s viewpoint. Empathy, then, is a key leadership skill, and an excellent way to protect yourself. You can understand someone’s situation, but you don’t have to join them in it! Self-protection is a crucial underlying technique to shore up your resilience. “Look after yourself” is not an encouragement towards selfishness, so much as a recommendation that you may need to be strong for others, so you need to be strong enough to do that in the first place.

I am sure when you read this you can come up with a range of alternatives to my top tips, but for me, the fifth and perhaps most important tip is maintenance. There is minimal benefit to you, to be resilient … then not … then resilient … then not again. Using the previous four tips, you can learn what works for you, in terms of making you identify as more resilient. Once you have this learning, find a way to make it stick. Perhaps you could associate it with an image, either in your mind’s eye or one of those motivational photographs so beloved of those of us who post aphorisms. Perhaps you could associate it with a sound, or word, or a sensation or emotional response that you feel able to conjure up on demand. You might even be like me and associate it with a smell, a positive scent, a favourite perfume. And then there’s always associating your resilience with a taste (although I wouldn’t advise linking it to alcohol as that is a path strewn with trouble … see above!). Whatever device you use, use it. Think about it often and in as much detail as you can. Repeat it. Learn to be able to create that sensory impression at the drop of the proverbial hat. That will enable you to build your resilience to the extent that you outgrow the image, word, feeling etc. You will naturally become more resilient, because you are reinforcing your learning and applying it to new situations. You will grow and improve. And then you can use the tips all over again!

If this all rings true for you, and you think that this is something that you would like to explore in more detail, then please feel free to get in touch. I would love to hear from you, and help you find out what other tips and techniques would work for you, on your personal development journey.

It is common sense that older people have longer years in the workplace and therefore have more experience than their younger colleagues. However, for some reason, employing organisations appear to find it difficult to choose to capitalise on that experience, when it comes to retaining and valuing older workers. So, let’s take a look at a few of the attributes that older workers have to offer.

First of all, older people are statistically more likely to have worked longer in an organisation than their younger colleagues. Staying with the same employer (although not necessarily in the same job) is something which has become less usual in the UK in recent years, but it used to be the norm. “A job for life” was not a throwaway line; it was the real expectation for generations of employees. So, leaders need to bear that cultural change in mind. It takes time for people to notice, appreciate, understand and then respond to a changing work climate. Telling them there is no such thing as a job for life isn’t enough. The effective leader will note an employee’s loyalty over the years and recognise its value. Older people with long work track records will have a detailed knowledge of the history of their workplace. They may not realise the level or value of this knowledge.

An effective leader will recognise how to tap into this, to find out how to capture the germ of a profitable idea.  They will also avoid wheel-reinvention.  They may even uncover where previous leadership teams have buried their “skeletons”. This latter can be particularly helpful in assessing business risk and avoiding employment lawsuits. Better to face an issue than to try to hide it; the truth will out, as the saying goes. All the better to be seen by your workforce to address issues and seek the truth actively. This sends a clear signal that transparency and truth are prized. This can often have a significant contribution to ensuring a workplace is happier and more productive.

Older workers also have “seen it all before”. Although that phrase is often synonymous with cynicism, it actually is a potential resource of knowledge. These workers will know who tried what, what wasn’t tried, what has worked elsewhere. They are people who probably live locally to their work and are part of the community … they are a font of potential knowledge which often remains untapped. What stops managers and leaders tapping into this knowledge? Sometimes it is pride, sometimes it is distrust based on the apparent cynicism, sometimes it is pure laziness. What stops managers and leaders is, therefore, their failure to invest their own time to listen, and to learn. That failure costs organisations dear.

A role which older workers often fulfil in workplaces (whether they seek it or not) is as the office elder – the wise advisor. This is the plus side of having “seen it all before”. Older people have done just that – they have seen similar situations, they have faced similar challenges, and they had developed strategies and responses which can be helpful to their younger colleagues. Sometimes, of course, those responses have been shaped by stress-avoidance. However, in the main, their experience of similar situations means they can advise younger colleagues how to keep calm, how to make their point a different way, how to build positive working relationships. So many of the leadership gurus who publish online quote or cite learned colleagues and older teachers (Goldsmith cites Drucker, Covey cites Frankl, for example). Older workers can fulfil this function in their workplace.  If you recognise them as doing this – and even equip them with more training to do this formally, you can have effective and experienced in-house coaching. It can be as simple as that. And the potential benefits are many and varied. Here are a few:

• better staff retention (all ages) through a happier workplace;
• better skills transfer and knowledge retention;
• positive inter-generational working to make the most of everyone’s skills;
• more ambassadors in the community for the employing organisation (67% workers in empowered workplaces are proactive ambassadors for their employer).

That’s not a bad list of benefits from simply acknowledging that older workers have seen and done lots – and making use of it.

In many industrial sectors, skills which were taught in workplaces are not taught with the same intensity, as technology has taken over and skills have had to be amended. However, these “old” skills are now coming back into demand. There are several reasons for this: the rise in artisan/niche businesses; the ongoing need for high quality practical skills which technology cannot replicate; ironically, the increased demand by the growing older population for things to be done “properly” (ie using the skills they recognise as valid). For instance, the belated search for sustainability has led to a welcome renewed focus on these “traditional” skills, in tandem with cutting-edge technology, to reduce our dependency on dwindling natural resources. In practice, this results in older workers being re-hired, to return their “traditional” skills to the workplace when those skills were difficult to find in younger workers. Skills scarcity is starting to focus the attention of astute leaders. It should. As the workforce ages, unless there is effective skills transfer within organisations, these “traditional” skills will disappear.

In addition, as the community ages, organisations’ customer base attaches increased importance to having something in common with their service suppliers, retailers and so on. Although reverse-ageism is not great, it is an uncomfortable truth that there can be a degree of chauvinism among older people about young workers, new into the workplace and yet to acquire significant skills and expertise. A way to counteract this is to challenge it if it occurs in the workplace, and use inter-generational working and knowledge-transfer to improve the levels of mutual understanding and respect. However, beyond the workplace, older customers will value being able to deal with someone who has shared similar life experiences.

There is also the simple factor of the benefits of a thriving and diverse workplace. Difference brings interest, stimulation, innovation, opportunity. This applies to any difference, whether that be age, heritage, faith or any of the other ways in which people choose to describe and categorise themselves. That diversity brings a rich range of resources to the workplace. It is an effective leader who recognises the benefits of tapping into those rich resources, for the benefits of their workforce, and for their customers.

It is important to remember that age, as with other comparative measures, means different things to different people. Many of the points I have made here could equally apply to a workforce from different ethnic backgrounds, or with different physical or intellectual capabilities, or of different genders. Wait a minute … isn’t that simply an everyday workplace these days? So why bother employing anyone over 50? Why even ask that question? The question that we should be asking is, ”Who’s the best person to employ for that job/task/team/organisation?” Age shouldn’t be an issue. Leaders have enough to cope with – why add to it by inventing more things to stress about?!

You may find that some of the issues I have discussed here sound familiar. If you have experience of the benefits of older workers, I would love to hear from you in the comments below. However, you may have found that some of these issues rang true for your own organisation. If this is the case, please get in touch and we can have a conversation about how you can make the changes you want.