Beyond Bouncing Back: A Guide for Coaching Resilience

I am incredibly privileged to engage in daily calls, appear on podcasts, and offer talks on cultivating resilience, and I have even written a book on the subject. In the realm of personal development, resilience is now heralded as the key to navigating life's unpredictable waves.

We live in such a chaotic, unpredictable, and disrupted world. There are so many stressors, and people feel disempowered when they turn to the dictionary definition of resilience, which suggests that resilience is about bouncing back. In our chaotic world, the people I speak to don’t know what to bounce back to. When the stressors are constant, there is no bouncing back. So I am often asked, "How do we become resilient?" If I am speaking to a coach or leader, I am asked, "How do we help our clients or staff become more resilient if we can’t bounce back to something?"

I have had countless calls with coaches and leaders who are not only struggling to support their overwhelmed, stressed, and nearly burned-out clients, and staff, but are also struggling themselves to keep up and stay centered. These conversations inspired me to create a guide called Beyond Bouncing Back: Your Coaching Guide to Cultivating Resilience in Your Clients, Staff, and Yourself.

This guide starts with a deep dive into what resilience truly means and how to coach others to become centered and calm amidst life’s storms. It offers four keys to coaching resilience, along with tools that you can use with your team, staff, or clients—and you can test them out on yourself too.

The Four Keys to Coaching Resilience:

1. Easing Overwhelm: We cannot coach someone to become more resilient when they are overwhelmed. The guide offers strategies to ease overwhelm and an audit to create awareness.
2. Using Habit Change Science: To help our clients and staff change their current personal reality, using a brain-based approach to coaching has been scientifically proven to have a positive impact. The guide discusses how to do this and offers some practices, including a tool you can share with your clients.
3. Strengthening the Body (Building Physical Resilience): Often overlooked, physical health and strength are key to mental and emotional resilience. When our bodies are strong, they act as reservoirs for mental and emotional strength. The guide offers methods to cultivate physical resilience and includes powerful questions you can use with your clients to bring awareness to this critical area.
4. Managing the Nervous System: As a resilience coach, one of your key roles is to help clients understand and manage their nervous systems. This understanding is crucial for clients to effectively handle stress, respond to challenges, and maintain a state of calm and focus. The guide offers practical ways to do so, plus a reset routine you and your clients can implement.

If you are having coaching conversations with staff, clients, family, or friends, take a moment to download this free guide.

I would also love to hear your feedback. Please try these practices on yourself and your clients to see what resonates the most, what has the greatest impact and let me know.

People are suffering and cannot become their best selves when stressed and overwhelmed. Let’s help them as leaders and coaches. And most importantly, let’s model it for ourselves. We cannot offer something we do not embody ourselves.

If you're eager to expand your skills further, consider joining our next offering of the Certified Resilience Coach Program where we live, teach, and embody resilience every day. Early bird pricing ends July 31, 2024. Use the discount code EARLYBIRD16 for $200 CAD off.