Resilience in the Time of Covid-19

Ordinary workdays are currently a thing of the past as the world grapples with the Covid-19 pandemic. Those of us who can are now having to work from home, but in circumstances not at all like an office. Schools are closed, so the children are at home too, and shopping for daily necessities is a hit-and miss affair: will there be any pasta available? Probably not, as a consequence of needless stockpiling by some shoppers.

With businesses closing there are many whose income has simply stopped, and while the government is doing what it can to help, the process is never straightforward. However, the frustrations of haphazard shopping and even losing your job pale into insignificance next to the consequences of actually contracting the virus, and the global death toll continues to rise.

In these circumstances, what can the Challenge of Change Resilience programme offer to help? The unique way we define stress in the training is ‘ruminating about emotional upsets’ – in other words, churning over what-ifs and if-onlys. We know from the long-term research programme that underpins the training that habitually ruminating can compromise the efficiency of your immune system, and hence can make you more susceptible to illness. This definitely does NOT mean that avoiding ruminating about upsets will completely protect you from the coronavirus – the most vulnerable are the elderly and those with existing health problems, and there’s no evidence that they ruminate more than anyone else – but rumination can certainly compromise your physical resistance and could make you more susceptible.

Rumination self-evidently makes you miserable, and it is equally true that it doesn’t help at all. Ruminating is not the same as usefully reflecting and learning from experience. The pandemic illustrates this: there are things you can do to keep well, especially the advice to wash hands often, avoid touching your face, covering coughs and sneezes and disinfecting surfaces that might have become contaminated. Worrying about whether you’ll be infected is pointless. If you have a sick relative, do whatever you can to help, but worrying adds nothing other than making you upset and possibly lowering your own resistance.

Resilience can be thought about as having both strength and flexibility, which allows you to adapt to change without catastrophising about it. Being resilient also leaves room to remember that everything changes. Like good times, bad times also pass, and the pressures and joys of life tend to alternate. This isn’t about adopting a false optimism – the demands of dealing with any global catastrophe can’t be underestimated – but the crisis of the pandemic will pass. When it does, the need for resilience remains paramount. The demands will be different, but the way to respond to any pressure is to meet it with the presence of mind that true resilience provides.

The Challenge of Change Online will help your employees to develop personal resilience in these difficult times. Thoughtfully crafted, the course allows new or isolated workers to quickly get up to speed with key resilience thinking and language and learn how to begin to build their own resilience skills.