If ever there was a programme that lives up to its billing, it’s Resilience.
Carefully crafted and refined over a series of many months by OTD Head of Coaching, Louise Roberts and business coach, Tina Dullaghan, Resilience is a programme based on the concept of reminding us of the coping strategies we all have within us.
Delivering fully experiential learning, the two-day programme had successfully harnessed LEGO® Serious Play as a mechanism for even the most reluctant delegate to express what resilience looks and feels like to them.
Soft launch enthusiastically received, it was ready for worldwide rollout. Then the pandemic hit.
Tina, a certified LEGO® Serious Play facilitator and licensed NLP practitioner explains: “The world had changed and we knew we were going to have to do something different. Could we offer customers the same concept in a virtual setting?”
The answer was an emphatic ‘yes’. Lou and Tina adapted the programme for a global digital audience, taking Resilience directly into the homes of people who perhaps had a greater need for personal and professional resilience than ever before.
Customer responses were universally positive but the team was keen to take the concept even further: how could we manage and sustain the energy that had been created?
“We built Deliberate Resilience,” adds Tina. “If you make healthy decisions around breathing, exercise or spending time with family for example, you have to do it deliberately. We took that into an area where we give people something really practical.
“We’ve brought in new thinking around fresh start, grit, advice giving, growth mindset and WOOP, a concept developed in the US. It’s all about having a structure to set yourself a wish, identify the potential obstacles to fulfilling it and developing a plan.”
In the last 12 months, we have delivered 192 sessions on Resilience and Deliberate Resilience. In that time, we’ve equipped nearly 2,000 people with skills for maintaining an optimistic and healthy perspective through unfeasibly difficult times.
Tina adds: “We’ve had fantastic feedback and there have been some really interesting responses, one of our customers even added Resilience as a partner to their own wellbeing programme. Some people have been incredibly open, like the senior leader who was brave and vulnerable enough to take his corporate armour off and reveal his own personal story.
“To take something that was an idea and put it into a format that has been easily shared, during a particularly difficult time is hugely rewarding.”