Resilience is the ability to cope during challenging periods of change and stress, with greater efficiency and effectiveness. Building stronger mental resilience empowers you to adapt positively when experiencing adversity, reducing the risk of developing a mental illness. Resilience supports your return to a positive state of mind and gives you the confidence to face challenges with optimism.
Eager to explore more about the ins and outs of our resilience courses, we conducted a question-and-answer session with one of our workplace trainers who delivered resilience courses with St John Ambulance for many years!
We got to find out more about what taking a resilience course is really like and why it’s so beneficial to both organisations and their people.
28% of UK employees left their job in 2021 or are planning to quit this year and 61% are naming poor mental health as the reason. - The Wellbeing Project, Wraw Resilience Report 2022.
Q. Tell us a bit about yourself 
A. I am Stu Payne, I am the Digital Development Officer for St John Ambulance. I have been in this post for 9 months, prior to this I was a workplace trainer here for 6 years. As a trainer, I delivered a range of courses, including First Aid, Mental Health First Aid, and Resilience. In my current role, I create and maintain our online learning platform and modules, with numerous wellbeing-related modules which can be found on our etraining platform.
Q. Tell us what a resilience course is and what it involves
A. The resilience courses are really interesting, from both a trainer and learners’ perspective. Before you attend the course you complete a self-assessment, which is a series of questions giving you a score out of 100% on the five pillars of resilience (energy, future focus, inner drive, flexible thinking, and strong relationships). This is then taken to the training course with you to reflect and develop upon.
Once at the training course, the trainer will give an overview of what resilience is and what the ‘results’ of the self-assessment mean. The results can be kept confidential or shared with the trainer or other learners, there is no pressure to share if you don’t feel comfortable.
The course then consists of discussing the five pillars and how we can maintain these if we score highly or build on them if we feel we could improve.
Q. What are the benefits of attending a resilience course?
A. The aim of the courses are to empower managers and their teams to bounce back from difficulty and cope with workplace pressures in a more effective way. People often leave the course having achieved this and take their new skills and confidence back to the workplace to continue developing themselves as more resilient employees.
The self-assessment provides a great analysis of your resilience, providing you with a visual representation and explanation of what your resilience currently looks like as an individual, offering delegates a great opportunity for personal development.
The course provides time with a trainer who can suggest skills and methods to increase resilience in key areas; a workbook to take away and a pack of booklets on how to continue the path to self-growth. These are all incredibly beneficial and important on the road to increased workplace resilience.
Being around other people on the training course provides you with ideas and strategies others may use to improve or maintain their resilience. Organisations who invest in the wellbeing of their people will reap the benefits of their more motivated and effective workforce.
Employers see a return of £5.30 on average for every £1 invested in staff mental health, the economic argument for putting wellbeing at the heart of post-covid recovery is clear. - The Wellbeing Project, Wraw Resilience Report 2022.
Q. What is it like to teach a resilience course?
A. Delivering the course is a pleasure! It is rare on a course we focus on the learners themselves.
For instance, First Aid is how to treat others, Fire Marshal is how to evacuate others (and yourself) from a building in an emergency, whereas with the Resilience courses it’s personalised completely around the learner and how to make impactful self-improvement.
Often on courses you can see learners making notes throughout the day of ideas they have had for how to improve their resilience, which is great to see and a real positive for the trainer.
The feedback I have received from the courses has been overwhelmingly positive too! Learners like that they have the psychometric test ‘results’ to refer back to and often comment that they will use these to monitor improvement.
Q. Anything else to add or anything which would be beneficial for people to know?
A. When completing the self-assessment, it is most beneficial if you are totally honest. If you don’t like the outcome, it can be kept confidential, but by doing this you will get the most benefit from the course.
When you receive your ‘results’, don’t feel disheartened if you score ‘lower’ than you would have liked, it isn’t a quiz. If you do score lower, you will be given information and strategies on how to make improvements during the training course.
