‘Resilience’ as denial

I'm often asked to coach 'resilience'; to help my client cope better with the pressures and stresses of work by changing their behaviours, managing their responses and adopting certain practices. This is fine. It's important work, and can be a game changer for them.

But the request always rings an alarm bell.

One of the more effective forms of 'resilience' - and one that comes naturally to us as adults through behaviours we learned, to a greater or lesser extent, as infants - is denial.

What people are actually asking for when they ask me to coach resilience is - in part - to help them maintain and build their capacity to deny the realities of their everyday working existence.

This capacity as we find it in the first session can take many forms, from a cynical detachment to abject terror; and it can have many triggers, from a concern about the impact on children of particular strategies to interpersonal conflict. Whatever the form and the degree though, the result is an incapacity to focus on or do the work that needs to be done. And as a coach, I cannot collude in helping my clients get better at not doing their jobs!

So we will often work on two parallel tracks. On one, we seek to solve the issue. We look for concrete steps that can be taken to ease the burden of leadership. These are always contextual and depend on the characteristics and preferences of the person (or people) involved.

On the other track, we seek to dissolve the issue. We explore the nature of their denial, including its behavioural roots and triggers. I act as a mirror in which they see the mask they have put on, and in which they can - when they're ready - begin to take it off, turn it round, and come to understand how it affects their ability to do the work they want to do. And we reflect in great depth on the quality and nature and cause (etc) of the thing that is being avoided. We bring it into the room and we process it together. We look at from all angles, and we see every aspect of it. We kick it about a bit, or we polish it, or we poke it. But just by thinking about it, we come to know it. And by knowing it, funnily enough, my client comes to fear it less.

The feedback usually points to the effectiveness of the concrete steps, but we both know what's really made the difference!