Resilience & Stress-Management Training for Coping with Coronavirus

The Coronavirus threat is unprecedented – and so is the level of stress and fear it is likely to strike into the hearts of many members of your team, and people paralysed with fear can not bring their best to the challenges your business is facing.

“The key goal in managing dynamic and unpredictable challenges is resilience – the ability to survive and thrive through unpredictable, changing, and potentially unfavorable events.” Reeves, Lang and Carlsson-Szlezak - Harvard Business Review.

Stress isn’t an unusual feeling—especially at work – and it’s important to recognise that fear and stress, while undesirable, is a perfectly normal reaction to what’s happening all around us with the advent of Coronavirus. When we perceive a threat the stress response kicks our brains and bodies into high gear to find ways to deal with threats.

HOW STRESS CAN BE HARNESSED

Science tells us that there are two main challenges to stress – a ‘threat’ response or a ‘challenge’ response. The ‘challenge’ response is what stress triggers in the surgeon who must bring her steadiest hands to an operation, the pilot flying a jet at 1400 miles per hour who must make impossibly fast and accurate decisions, the sportsperson who rises to the impossible challenge to pull out the best possible performance just when the team most needs it, and the colleague who always seems to deliver their best work under heavy pressure.

You’ve already experienced the challenge-response – think of some of the greatest personal breakthroughs you’ve ever made, times when you achieved something you would previously have believed yourself incapable of achieving. These breakthroughs are usually made in times of high stress.

A threat response, however, throws people into a fight, flight or freeze response – behaviours that are not only unhelpful in situations like the one we find ourselves facing now but which also come with myriad undesirable health impacts like fatigue, upset stomach, muscle pain, loss of sexual desire/ability, insomnia, frequent colds and infections, and heart problems.

THE CRITICAL ROLE OF MINDSET

Research from Harvard and Yale medical schools show that the difference between experiencing a threat and a challenge-response is largely down to one’s ‘stress mindset’. Having the right mindset changes everything about how people experience adversity and the stress that comes with it. It also shows that with as little as a few hours training people can assimilate the ‘stress can be helpful’ mindset that triggers the challenge-response in stress situations, converting the physical and mental energy charge from stress into a resource that can help find us imaginative solutions to these completely new problems.

But with the highly contagious threat mindset that is predominant now, one of fear and panic, such frequent and consistent stress could cause a dramatic decline in your team’s focus, productivity, joy for life and overall health – and those are impacts that could be felt long after the current crisis has passed.

GIVING YOUR TEAMS THE TOOLS TO COPE

Consider hosting a Genos Europe Program on building deep resilience in your organisation. In four 60-minute sessions your team will experience a shift in their stress mindset that will radically change how they respond to the challenges of the coming months. They’ll learn about research from the neuroscience of stress coupled with proven mindfulness and emotional intelligence practices to equip them with the deep resilience they need to deal with this crisis.

The program uses four core research-driven strategies for building the resilience needed to thrive during challenging times and can be supplemented with additional modules to suit the objectives of your team:

1.    Coping with the Coronavirus Challenge

• Changing your stress mindset to respond to challenges most effectively.
• Actions to take to begin strengthening your resilience ‘muscle’

2.    Developing Inner Calm

• Calming yourself under pressure.
• The neuroscience behind R.A.I.N. – why it helps you cope
• Bodyscan for raising emotional self-awareness. 

3.    Building up your Emotional Resilience

• Gratitude and journaling - effective mechanisms for building resilience and dealing with stress.

4.    Envisioning a Post-Coronavirus Life

• Creating a personal vision to build a sense of purpose and meaning that looks beyond current challenges and sources of stress to provide an optimistic, forward-looking outlook.
• Practicing Self Compassion – changing one’s internal dialogue and learning to be compassionate with oneself in challenging times. 

Additional Customised Modules

You can also add extra customised modules to meet your specific requirements. Attendees get access to post-program recordings, check-in sessions, access to journaling and mindfulness apps, plus much more. It's suitable for employees at all levels and roles in the organisation. The program is delivered live, online at a time of your choice and is available for small and large groups.

By the end of this experience, they’ll be equipped with a unique and totally practical toolset that will not only help them come through this time of challenge in one piece but will help them become their best selves in the process of doing this – making personal breakthroughs they never thought possible in the face of such challenging times. They'll walk away with an actionable approach for shifting their mindset when it comes to stress and challenges at work, and how they deal with them.

If you're responsible for the well-being of your teams and feel like this would benefit your organisation, you learn more here or share this page with your HR or leadership team.

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