Resilience training: How to bounce back
“Failure will happen in everyone’s life – and resilience is the ability to recognise this and see the opportunities in the most challenging situations,” explains Marian Silltow, co-leader of a new Chartered IIA virtual course: “Resilience – bouncing back from adversity”.
The course will lead participants through the various times in their career when they are likely to encounter such challenges and help them to see how they can ride out the storm and emerge stronger and fitter at the other end. This will include drawing up a personal resilience plan and recognising three categories of challenge most likely in an audit career: perfectionism, which can lead to fear of failure; self-confidence, the lack of which can trap you and prevent you from seizing opportunities; and conflict – how you respond to it and your preferred styles for dealing with it.
At a time when so many people across the UK are facing challenges at work and at home, and when an unusually high number will have to deal with health concerns alongside rapid changes, budget cuts and the threat of redundancy, this is particularly relevant. However, as Silltow and her co-leader Ros Goodall point out, everyone can benefit from improving their resilience, no matter what their life is like at the moment or how fortunate they appear to others.
The two course leaders say that their style is complimentary because they have different personalities, but both admit that they have been held back in the past by lack of self-confidence. They stress that they are internal auditors and academics, not psychologists, but there are many practical ways in which people can learn to boost their confidence and their ability to develop and move on.
“I was a very shy child. My school report calls me helpful and eager to please, but shy,” Goodall recalls. “I was fortunate that I met a pioneering woman who saw something in me and mentored me. She told me never to hold myself back; to be honest about my abilities, but to try everything. After all, what’s the worst that could happen?”
This woman proved inspirational to Goodall because she wasn’t a parent or a teacher, but she was glamorous and “you wanted to be like her”. “She was someone I wanted to model myself on,” Goodall explains.
For Silltow the turning point came when she took on a job as senior lecturer at Southbank University. “I met an ex-colleague on the station and she said ‘You can’t do that, you’re far too quiet’. I thought ‘she’s wrong! I can do it and I am doing it’,” Silltow says. “I found that having to do public speaking really helped me to overcome my fear. Making yourself do something that genuinely scares you boosts your confidence and you find it changes the way you behave in meetings and other public situations.”
Other issues that can seriously affect the way people progress at work include how they take negative feedback. Those who are able to see criticism in a positive light and work with it to reassess what they are doing and change their approach are far more likely to move forward in their careers.
“You don’t have to pretend to be perfect,” Goodall explains. “People tend to respond to you according to the way you deal with them. If you can present an honest, positive image and project self-confidence, they are more likely to open up to you.”
This is particularly important for internal auditors who need to speak with authority if they want to be listened to and need people to be honest with them and to act on their advice.
Participants on the course will be encouraged to identify their own capacity for resilience and the kind of situations that may challenge them most. They will look at strategies that could help them to identify opportunities from adversity and assess their own self-efficacy – their ability to function in different situations – as well as learning ways to develop this.
They will also consider motivation and how they can help themselves to seek opportunities in every situation.
There is space for only six people on each one-day course because Silltow and Goodall are keen for it to be interactive and to encourage participants to talk to them and to each other about their own experiences. Participants will gain 7 CPE points and the cost will be reduced to £500 for members (and £672 for non-members) to ensure that those in most urgent need of resilience can attend.
The Chartered IIA is running many live virtual courses and on-demand online courses to help you expand your skills.
For further enquiries about courses contact the training team.
This article was first published in September 2020.