‘Well-being’ and ‘wellness’ are increasingly popular phrases in the training world, but what do they actually mean? There is ample evidence that practising The Challenge of Change Resilience Training programme leads to greater psychological well-being, but do the benefits extend to better physical health?

In the most recent World Values Survey, which ranks the countries of the world on happiness, Denmark tops the list. Perhaps not altogether surprising – a small but prosperous country with generous state benefits – and it is joined in the top dozen by Sweden, Ireland, Netherlands and Canada. So far, the results suggest that wealth and relative peace might account for the ranking, but also in the top five is Colombia, and the wealthiest nation, the USA, comes in only 16th.

Interviewed on the NZI Business morning TV programme on Monday, I was asked for my views about how business people can cope with the downturn in the New Zealand economy.  Putting recessions into context, the economy is by nature cyclic: after periods of growth, there is a necessary correction.  Knowing this in theory doesn’t lessen the impact of suddenly having fewer orders, having to make people redundant, perhaps even having to wind up the business, and what makes the current global change especially demanding is that it is happening very rapidly indeed.  In the space of a week during a recent visit to the UK, we saw several thousand jobs go in the construction industry alone. 

A page in the Business section of recent edition of the Press made interesting reading.  The lead article was a report on the implications of the new Flexible Work Arrangements Act, which will allow those employees who care for others the legal right to flexible working arrangements.  The business community – or part of it at any rate – is predictably upset by the new Act, arguing that it will make unacceptable demands on small- to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).  The feedback to Claire Massey of the NZCentre for SME Research is that these employers resent being dictated to, and that their view is ‘Come on, give us a break, we have more common sense than that’ – in other words, you don’t need to legislate, we look after our staff already.

The Challenge of Change offers a unique perspective on resilience training: that resilience is not about keeping your head above water for longer, which would still mean paddling furiously to keep afloat.  Instead, it says that there is no water to keep your head above, other than imagined ‘what-ifs’ and ‘if-onlys’, which the programme describes as ruminating about the worst things in your life that never happened.