How can you train psychological resilience in leadership? The Persolog? Resilience Model: leading in crisis and building resilience (with examples)

What is psychological resilience, how can you train it in leadership and why is so critical to efficient leadership?

How can you train psychological resilience in a leadership role? Why is it beneficial for you, your peers, and your company? Empathy is at the core of a broad set of skills needed to navigate complex business environments successfully. Yet, many CEOs, managers and top executives struggle to shift from the theory of coaching leadership training to the reality of emotionally loaded situations that they may understand rationally but find challenging as individuals. Learning to navigate the four stages of change empowers your empathy muscle and equips you to guide others in their empathetic leadership. This 10-minute read article summarizes my executive coaching materials and guides you through step-by-step know-how.

What is psychological resilience and its role in mental well-being?

Psychological resilience is an adaptation in a person's psychological traits and experiences that allows them to regain or remain in a healthy mental state during crises/chaos without long-term negative consequences. Psychology distinguishes four types of resilience:

• physical resilience
• mental resilience
• emotional resilience
• social resilience

Psychological resilience is the process of ingesting, digesting, and processing raw experiences and a broad range of emotions without getting stuck in fear, freeze, or attack mode.

Psychological resilience doesn't mean you're immune to negative emotions. It's about experiencing them without overreacting or judging yourself or others—team members, collaborators, partners, or clients. Remember, it's normal to feel negative emotions, and resilience helps us navigate them.

Why is psychological resilience critical to efficient leadership?

As a top manager or CEO, you should always work to expand and sustain your tolerance for difficult emotions without collapsing or colliding. Because training psychological resilience can be uncomfortable, being clear on the positive impact resilience and empathy have on you as an individual and leader will help in times of discouragement.

Psychological resilience makes you more empathetic and capable of guiding peers in their use of rational and emotional intelligence when navigating challenges and finding innovative solutions. You lead by example, showcasing others how to tap into their inner resources to:

1. Cope with uncertainty and complexity. As a leader, you can foster a culture of agility and innovation in your company by promoting emotional safety to boost creativity. Hence, employees dare to think outside the box and propose solutions that enable their company to pivot quickly in response to market dynamics.
2. Problem-solving and innovation. Drawing on empathy, team members actively listen to diverse perspectives, including those of frontline employees and external stakeholders, to understand the root causes of inefficiencies and propose new solutions to complex business challenges.
3. Conflict resolution and effective communication are about more than maintaining harmony within the team. Effective communication fosters a culture of understanding and respect where diverse perspectives are valued. It improves teamwork, employee engagement, productivity, and retention.

Balancing rational and emotional communication impacts idea generation, problem-solving, and innovation, all needing an environment where psychological safety is fact, not fiction.        

Empathy, confidence and trust will become natural binders in teams working towards a shared goal, equipping them with better communication, problem-solving skills and innovation capacity. They will feel safer contributing and dealing with errors and friction as part of their working process.

And it's not just about the team. Enhanced client relationships and business outcomes are the direct results of this, driving revenue growth and ensuring long-term sustainability. Such is the growth potential that lies within your company.

With that in mind, you will quickly grasp why empathy is more needed yet more challenging in the current business setting, where speed, unpredictability, and pressure keep building up to almost unbearable demands for employees, managers, and CEOs.

How do you build psychological resilience as a CEO? The Persolog? Resilience Model

As a leader, you must understand that empathy is a capacity that builds over time. It's a process that requires awareness and practice until you become a skilled master of your reactions at a specific moment.

There′s a direct correlation between a CEO′s empathy and their psychological resilience.

As an executive coach to senior managers, I assure you those who invest in building their psychological resilience become effective and empathetic leaders without becoming overly emotional or rational.        

The Persolog? Resilience Model for building resilience as a CEO

The Persolog? Resilience Model is an effective tool for differentiated assessment of people’s resilience competence and support in buildingtheir inner resilience and successfully overcoming crises and challenges. This model distinguishes four factors that form what we call the “psychological resilience curve:”

1. Acceptance
2. Feeling
3. Gaining Orientation
4. Understanding

Ten resilience factors can be specifically trained and developed within each area: Acceptance, perceived self-efficacy, responsibility, positive emotions, impulse control, realistic optimism, solution orientation, social support, causal analysis, and empathy.

Optimism, self-efficacy, high intelligence, and adaptive emotional regulation strategies have positively contributed to resilience.

What are the four factors of the psychological resilience curve?

1. Acceptance is embracing the situation for what it is, as raw as it may be. Acceptance is the factor I see people struggle more with. Accepting you can't change a situation, even if you know how to, is challenging and requires lots of self-empathy. Two things that help are working on your perceived self-efficacy and connecting it to your goals, actions, delivery and the quality of the relationships you build. Likely, you will have to realign what you're internally capable of with external expectations, circumstances, and actors.
2. Feeling. For most of us, it isn't easy to identify how we feel. In the discomfort of not knowing what's happening, we attempt to solve things by rushing into doing instead of being (and feeling). Pause and consider how you feel and how it affects you, your performance, and others around you. If you find it a rollercoaster, there's much you can do about understanding your feelings and impulse control.
3. Gaining orientation means searching for practical solutions with realistic optimism. If you can't cope with the situation, who can help you cope? In this phase, it's critical that you move from introspection and reflection to taking an active role that benefits both you and the situation.
4. Integrating the learnings into future behaviors. Integrating requires self-reflection and integration of the causes, feelings, steps, and actions, as well as self-evaluation.

Integrating the learnings is how you consolidate your empathy muscle strength so it's readily available in future situations.        

A real example: Conflict resolution and psychological resilience in the workplace

The following is an example from an executive coaching session. I'll share the backbone of what was at stake and omit personal details.

Challenge: As a chief HR officer, he was informed that top management was initiating a search for a new CEO and that he would not be part of the search process. As a senior manager in the company and with direct competencies in executive search and recruitment, he felt immediately excluded: "If somebody else is leading the project, and as an HR chief officer, I will have to collaborate with that person, how should I position myself? As an observer? How much initiative can I take? And why am I not leading this search?" These concerns and the subsequent emotions were unsettling. He knew the facts but couldn't handle them rationally. He reached out to gain clarity on what was at stake.

Actions: He used executive coaching to build psychological resilience and learn practical tools for his case. Accepting the situation was the toughest for him—it is for most of us.

As a senior HR chief, he first experienced the shock of the exclusion. At this stage, most of us rush into proving ourselves for the role, denying that this is happening and ignoring our feelings. He progressed into accepting the situation, even though he didn't know the top management's motivations for making the decision. He could take or leave it, and he decided to take it and learn from it.

Step one: Acceptance

Acceptance is not defeat. Still, you must understand the situation, what you can do, whether you finally accept it, and why. Most people in this situation place themselves in a non-active role, observant and pessimistic, because they neither leave the situation nor see how to be active and take the lead for their benefit—even if to learn from it and integrate the learnings into future behaviours.

Step two: Understanding

The following piece was about understanding his feelings. "Somebody decided I won't be part of this search for reasons I can't understand. Why am I feeling like that?"

As you progress towards acceptance, you are open to the possibility that the situation is putting your efficiency and performance at stake. Very often, it has little to do with your capacity for direct agency and much about what a third party decides, leaving you with little room for interaction. Do you know how to make the most of this fate?

Consider how you feel and how it affects you, your performance, and others around you. If you find it a rollercoaster, there′s much you can do about understanding your feelings and impulse control.        

Step three: Gaining orientation

Gaining orientation for him meant moving himself from a passive player role to an active one. "If I want to have an impact and participate in this process, how can I contribute?" This shift opened possibilities he didn't see at first.

Step four: Integration and lasting results

His activation made it possible to go through the process without feeling excluded or overwhelmed, but contributing when possible and letting go of the rest. He positioned himself in the best possible way and integrated the learnings into future behaviours.

Top management could have refused his efforts and pushed him back into a passive role. In that case, you must know when to step out and the costs of leaving or staying in such conditions. This knowing is also part of your emotional intelligence, balanced with your rational one.

The costs of unresolved conflicts in the workplace

The expenses of unhandled and mishandled emotions in the workplace are high in euros, revenue and personal toll both for the employee and the company.

Unresolved conflict, colliding interests, and unheld conversations usually translate into inaction, precipitation, or procrastination of decisions and activities vital to a corporation's financial, business, and human well-being.

Confronting the facts and holding difficult conversations constructively and productively is difficult. It requires self-knowledge, respect, understanding of others, and outstanding communication skills.

Strengthening leadership: Building resilience, emotional intelligence, and empathy through Process Communication Model and Executive Coaching

It takes work for individuals to go through such a process independently, and there are more effective ways. Of course, you spare yourself the investment of an executive coach. Still, the price of unresolved issues pays a heavy toll on self-confidence and agency capacity that can be limiting and either propel you into overreacting or push you to a corner, eroding your career and finances.

You may be aware of what is happening as a senior manager, but as an individual, you might need to learn how to deal with it.

Executive Coaching and the Process Communication Model offer effective solutions if you're facing a critical situation or are eager to strengthen and deepen your leadership. These tools can give you the insights, strategies, and self-awareness needed to navigate challenges, enhance your leadership skills, and achieve personal and professional growth.

1. Executive Coaching helps you gain insights, accept the situation, and work on it effectively without denying or feeling drained by your emotions. Integrating how you feel and your rational and emotional intelligence will give you stability, adaptability, and flexibility to thrive now and in the future.
2. The Process Communication Model is a highly recommended entrance to gain a deep understanding of your personality structure, drivers, and stress factors, as well as your communication style and how to integrate the information effectively through a personalized action plan.

Transformative change happens when you internalize leadership coaching techniques

While training leadership coaching skills are practical, as we do in our executive training programs, the real, transformative change occurs when you internalize these techniques. When you start seeing open-ended questions and active listening as tools and integral parts of your identity, you embody authentic leadership.

If this information triggers or compels you, please reach out. I'll happily continue the conversation in a quick scan coaching call. I've been there and want to support you as an individual in a management and leadership role.

To your success,

Simona

I'm the founder of BOC Institute , one of the renowned consulting agencies for international companies operating in Slovenia and South-East Europe.

I coach CEOs and top managers 1:1 worldwide. I'm here to save you time, energy, and money through your objectives, decision-making, and leadership development. I understand we can change the world one coaching session at a time!

Do you feel like having a call?

You can reach out here and let me guide you from there.