Resiliency

by Carol Kauffman, PhD, Director of Institute of Coaching

Success isn’t about how far you fall; it’s how high you bounce back. What are the ingredients of resilience? How do we get more? I think the building blocks are: optimism, interest in learning from mistakes, self/other compassion, and developing options when you hit the wall.

There is massive research on resilience. One stream of research that comes from positive psychology, particularly the area of “Hope Therapy and Coaching” is CR Snyder’s research on “hope” that strongly predicted performance in over a hundred studies.  His cognitive model of hope includes two main ingredients:  Will power and Way power.  The first is based on a sense of “agency” that you CAN do something. There are many coaching techniques to support empowerment that we all know. But “Waypower?” (For the science deep dive see: Positive Psychology: Scientific and Practical Explorations of human Strengths, Sage publications 2010 or Google CR Snyder)

Brainstorming is the “O” in the famous GROW model of coaching. Did you know there is a vast body of research that shows that highest, most enduring performers can articulate 6 pathways to a goal?  In science-speak: this variable accounts for a significant percentage of the variance of performance in many, many different situations.

A brand new paper ( March 2013) on resilience, linking psychological and biological perspectives, concludes:  Secure attachment, experiencing positive emotions and having a purpose in life are three important psychological building blocks of resiliences. ( abstract: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23488807

What does this say to me?   Often, what we are trained to do as coaches, even if we haven’t learned the theory, turns out to have solid research evidence.  Why is that good to know? Understanding it not only helps your practice, it can help you market what you offer more effectively.