Page 60 - Print21 November-December 2022

Mental Health
Building resilience
Steve Gamble from Man Anchor says mental resilience can be built
if we train our brains, just as we train our bodies, for physical resilience.
• Vision – Vision talks about what drives us, our personal sense of purpose and direction in life. This also includes our vision for what we aspire to be like as individuals, along with a sense of confidence that we can achieve bold goals that we set for ourselves. Flowing from this is a sense of self-worth and personal efficacy, along with our own values, and ability to be committed and decisive.
• Composure – Composure is about how effectively we can regulate our emotions during difficult
or stressful situations. It is at these times that we need to have enough self-awareness to notice how we are responding, and to apply techniques to keep us in a constructive mindset.
• Reasoning – Reasoning plays a major role in how much confidence we have in our ability to solve unexpected problems and adapt
to sudden change. This includes our ability to be resourceful, think critically, identify opportunities and take an action-oriented approach to best work towards our own and shared goals.
• Tenacity – Tenacity is about
the ability to persevere through difficulty and quickly getting back on track. Whether it is an illness or a setback at work, this indicates a measure of hardiness that helps us to keep going, keep trying and to bounce back quickly.
• Collaboration – Collaboration is about the critical need of the human brain to have close and secure connections with others. This includes having support networks with friends, partners, family, colleagues, even pets can have a profound effect.
You maybe thinking, I’ve got
this. Just like our physical health or mental fitness lives on a continuum, as the world changes around us,
we need to be prepared to adapt to face new challenges, so we need to be aware and open to continually working on areas of personal growth and development.
Someone who is truly resilient is someone who is open to learn, grow, challenge their own beliefs and take on new perspectives.
Steven Gamble and Man Anchor offer a wider range of programmes around mental health literacy and resilience coaching. Man Anchor has recently released a new app setting out three
to five minutes of daily activities to improve mental fitness and resilience over a 12 month period. 21
Like most of us, I have been on my own personal and professional journey over the last few years, with a need to understand how
I could best position myself to navigate all the challenges Covid, and life, could throw at me.
On this journey the word and notion of resilience kept popping up, and if you were anything like me, it made
me cringe. The word resilience was used constantly, alongside another favourite over the last few years, pivot, and to me it became a term that was a polite way of saying to a community or team “harden up and get on with it”. I found it separated and divided teams, rather than brought them together.
Resilience can be defined as the ‘ability to positively respond to adversity’. Everyone responds to adversity, but not everyone responds positively. I look at resilience as basically mental fitness, and just like physical fitness for some of us
it comes more naturally, but for the larger majority it’s something we need to work at, and build on, through navigating challenging situations, and learning from each of them.
Working on our mental fitness before a challenge or problem in life arises can create an opportunity to
Steven Gamble, Man Anchor
build protective factors. Take the proactive approach, means we can be best placed to thrive in change.
Resilience is about training the brain, and just like physical fitness is around supporting development, growth and health, so is our mental fitness. Through training the brain, we support neural plasticity and the formation of new neural pathways. With the strengthening of these pathways, we become naturally more adaptive and open to challenges.
Just like physical fitness if we hit
the gym once we don’t automatically become fitter or healthier. It takes work, small daily tasks or behavioural changes that contribute to our overall health. Our mental fitness is just
the same, and it is broken down into
six key resilience domains. Each of these domains play an integral part of building resilience and neural plasticity.
The six-resilience domains are Health, Tenacity, Collaboration, Vision, Reasoning, and Composure. • Health – Health is a foundational
domain of resilience. Various studies have shown how much an impact your own physical health can have on your wellbeing, simply because
it has such a strong effect on your experience of life when everything is not working as it should.
Six factors: resilience
60 Print21 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2022