One of the fundamental principles of the Challenge of Change Resilience Training is that stress is not caused by people or situations but is the self-inflicted habit of ruminating about emotional upset.  Attributing your stress to something or someone else must inevitably make you a helpless victim of circumstance.  In fact, you have a choice whether or not you become stressed, but the view that stress is avoidable probably provokes more initial opposition from training participants than any of our key messages: “You should try working for my boss for a day!”; “You have no idea how stressful my job is!” 

This year, 2017, is being described as a time of uncertainty, but when was that not the case?  It is a truism that the one constant in life is change, but it is nonetheless true, and change unfolds into an unknown future.  The real point is that sometimes change suits us, sometimes it doesn’t, and because the costs and benefits of change are seen differently by different people, change is almost always divisive.  That need not necessarily be a bad thing: democracy depends on having an opposition to the establishment, which is why everyone in the UK ought to be concerned about the weakening of the Labour party.

Why do employees attend training sessions?  Motives are likely to mixed, but will range from a passionate interest in the topic to being told they had to go.  Not surprisingly, responses to training sessions are equally varied: ‘loved it’, ‘boring, waste of time’.  A trainer’s job is to meet the positive expectations of the enthusiasts and to show the sceptics that even mundane-seeming subjects can be both interesting and useful, but whatever the views of the participants, the real measure of the success of a training programme is the extent to which the new strategies are practised back in the workplace. 

In the Challenge of Change Profile we have a scale called avoidance coping, which is described as the ostrich principle for dealing with issues – stick your head in the sand and ignore them.  If you're the sort of person who puts off making phone calls because you're afraid of the response you might get, who postpones tackling a project because you don't know where or how to start, or who focuses endlessly on the trivial tasks at work because the big, really important one pushes you out of your comfort zone, you might be what we call an 'avoidance coper': you've learned to respond to the pressures in your life by trying to avoid thinking or doing anything about them.  This might work in the short term, but all you're doing is compounding the problem and making yourself miserable.