To complete our work on our new Resilience Hub (at least for now, is anything ever really 'finished'!?)- we finish with an interview with Alex Pett from Shore Coaching.

Alex is a Resilience Coach and the host for the Notes on Vulnerability podcast (which Ready Sweat Go sponsors currently).

In the interview Alex and Andrew discuss resilience, how you can start developing it and how its of benefit, not just in the workplace but also with dealing with external matters in life, such as climate
change or the cost-of-living crisis.

We found it both insightful and encouraging and a big thank you to Alex for agreeing to do the interview. We hope you enjoy.

I became a resilience coach as I lived most of my life without much resilience, and I know how painful that is. It means your base line is a tense and fragile place where everything knocks you for six easily, you give up easily and often feel like a victim.

I became a lawyer, which probably made it ten times worse, working in the city doing banking law. It was a very toxic environment for
someone like me, an empath, highly sensitive, emotionally intelligent person who thrives off genuine emotion connections. For me, it was a difficult environment to be in, and I became shut down, numbing myself with alcohol, drugs and anything which keep me from feeling my feelings. Perhaps inevitably, that came to a head dramatically, and from that point onwards, it’s been an adventure and journey of reconstructing coping mechanisms.

All of that has made me realise that what we view as resilient; bouncing back, being adaptable, being tenacious, being consistent, all of that are outcomes we are not born with, no one is born with resilience.
It’s the result of what you say and do, your habitual thoughts and behaviour every day, what builds resilience is the stuff we don’t talk about, for instance, self-compassion.

You don’t see many resilient memes on Instagram talking
about self-compassion but it is the absolute fertiliser for resilience. If you don’t understand the impact of your past, it will derail you when you’re trying to bounce back or be consistent.

The classic resilience idea is you put your emotions in a
box and don’t feel them, but that will derail you as they get bigger and bigger. Part of the work I do is helping people process emotions, understanding them, not being afraid of them.

Another big part of it is the nervous system, you live in
your nervous system 24/7, most of us don’t understand it but if its continually kicking us into fight flight freeze, we can’t be consistent, we can’t bounce back, we can’t adapt because the body is in survival mode.

To see it as a daily practice. Everything you do is habit,
thoughts, actions, reactions, 80% of what we do everyday is repeated from the day before, we are habitual creatures. You can start to influence how you feel, and what your outcomes are, by changing your habitual thoughts. Your thoughts create your beliefs, beliefs create emotions and emotions trigger your actions.

If you can get into the habit of challenging unwelcome thoughts and self-criticism, changing it for self-compassion, it becomes habitual to keep momentum up, or to be kind to yourself in the face of failure.

Seeing it as habit and a daily practice means if you don’t
feel resilience right now, you can change it with the right habit. Get smart about this stuff, get exercise, get outside, give yourself nutritious food
every day and you’ll have a healthy brain. When you have a healthy brain, all of this stuff becomes easier.

Therapy is looking at the past, you’re looking back, exploring what happened. With resilience coaching, there is an element of that, it can get emotional, we’re looking at deep-rooted beliefs, but we do that in the context of how it’s affecting you right now, and what you need to do to
move past it.

It’s present-focused and future-focused, its very practical. Therapy is a lot of talking, resilience coaching has a lot of talking, but its practical, and you’re working towards a goal and structure, and you have actions and homework at the end of each session.

For me, its resilience that’s our lifeforce as human beings.
Authenticity is massive as well, you cannot be resilient without knowing who you are, what matters to you and where you’re going. For a lot of my clients, it’s about answering the question “who am I?” and getting clear on values and
purpose.

Another thing about resilience coaching which might differ
from traditional life coaching, its not just in the mind, we look at the body and your nervous system, how you can use your nervous system to stay consistent, to be adaptable, to support authenticity, to deal with anxiety better, it’s an incredibly powerful tool that we’re only just understanding.

You can’t think your way out of a situation you thought
yourself into, so it’s better to get into your body. Its more effective, there’s so many ways you release yourself from overthinking or catastrophising by getting into your body.

Understanding the impact of your past and mindset is
important as well. I work with clients in developing a resilient mindset, which involves shifting away from negativity, not necessarily to positivity. There is an option in between called neutral thinking, I find it hard to go from negativity to positivity, it doesn’t feel credible to me.

Negative is the glass half empty, positive is the glass half
full, neutral is the glass is refillable, you’re stating fact and people find that easier. There’s a lot in resilience coaching, we don’t need to cover all of it, it just depends on what the individual needs, it often extends into confidence, self-esteem, self-belief, self-trust, learning how to set boundaries with yourself and others, assertiveness, there’s a lot in there, a lot of good stuff.

One of the big benefits is developing stress resilience, or the ability to flexibly navigate stress. For individuals, I do a lot of work
with individuals who are struggling with toxic workplace problems. For example, a boss with no emotional awareness or who is micro-managing you or a team with incidents in the past, and someone is feeling ashamed or isolated.

I can work with individuals to find their feet again, remind
them who they are, to heal some of their pain in the workplace environment. There are strategies people can use, assertiveness is a great example. Its trained out of woman, to be assertive, well not just women, it’s a case of relearning assertiveness.

Its stress-reliance and showing up in the workplace as who you want to be, acknowledging you don’t leave yourself at home. There’s no such thing as professional and personal, we are who we are, in the work environment as much as at home, it’s a myth they are separate. Its also about giving yourself permission to expand into who you really want to be. If you have a self-critical narrative, it will tell you certain things aren’t possible for you professionally, you shouldn’t be hoping for them. Then we get imposter syndrome, so resilient coaching can tackle all that.

In a team environment, I’ve done a lot of workshops and
coaching around collaboration, better communication and overcoming some of the things which stop teams functioning well, such as dealing with conflict, engaging people, inspiring people. I can work with man agers to develop a
management style that is less confrontational or less egocentric, that’s one of
the big problems.

Allowing people to be human beings in the office, communicating their needs and throwing off the idea we have to be robots without feelings. In the feelings, that is the rawness of being human and its often where the best innovation and creativity comes from. We have to feel safe to make mistakes, to learn how to fail and create a culture where people feel able to make mistakes, collaborate and be themselves.

Those things cause us anxiety, and with money, there’s a lot
of shame as well. More resilience will help you to release shame, shame is an emotion with no value at all, it shuts us down and sends us to a place we can’t function.

If you are struggling with the cost-of-living crisis and you
can’t make your mortgage payment on time for example, if you have a lot of shame, your reaction might be to go inward. This encases you in shame, you can’t function, you can’t help yourself, you might feel like hurting yourself or having a lot of negative thoughts. Through resilience coaching, we can tackle shame so in that situation, you learn to see it without the value judgement. It can help you say, “okay, this is what’s happening, I’m not a bad person for doing this, it doesn’t make me a horrible person, it’s a problem I
will solve because I can.” We would work on building up confidence, resourcefulness, giving yourself permission to ask for help or think outside the box or be curious about options.

Basically, freeing up the body and mind from that frozen
response that can come with feeling shamed.

With climate anxiety, it’s having a better response to anxiety. Anxiety is a choice; it doesn’t feel like it but it often is. If you follow anxiety to its natural end, you don’t have any other responses available to you. It’s giving people enough calm in their nervous system, enough space to make a choice where they don’t have to dissolve into anxiety, they can choose other options that help them process what’s happening.