Mental Resilience

The Calm After the Storm!

Achieveing Peak Performance Through Mental Toughness

In these challenging economic times many staff feel under pressure whether it be because of more demanding targets, their own job maybe under threat or generally being asked to do more with less. Mental toughness is the quality, which determines in some part how people deal with these challenges, stressors and pressure at work.

The National Careers Council have recently recommended that:

“The National Careers Service should launch a new initiative to bring together a range of organisations to explore and highlight the importance of ‘character’ and ‘resilience’ in a successful working life and identify realistic and effective options for addressing this issue.”

Source : An  Aspirational  Nation: Creating a culture change in careers provision June 5th 2013

What is Mental Toughness?

Mental Toughness, as measured by our purpose designed questionnaire, is the ability of an individual to deal with the ever increasing pressure and demands of organisational life in these challenging and turbulent times!
Developed by the Psychology department in Hull University, the Mental Toughness concept offers individuals and their organisations a powerful development tool which enhances workplace resilience. Mental toughness can also measure someone’s ability to undertake new tasks and how they would cope with new roles which are particularly prevalent in restructuring and change management.

If you can get your staff to continue to perform even when under severe pressure then it could put you ahead of your competitors.

How to Develop Mental Toughness

Designed specifically to help people develop workplace resilience and Mental Toughness, this workshop  has been developed to create an understanding of what stressors are and how people and groups can best deal with them.
It has benefits for performance improvement, behaviour modification, building confidence and the management of stress.

Benefits of Mental Toughness Programmes

The key issues around Mental Toughness for individuals are:

• What causes one person to succumb and another to thrive in the same circumstances
• Can we identify people’s strengths and weaknesses in these areas?
• Can we develop individuals to enable them to handle stressors like change, pressure and challenge more effectively?
• How can we support individuals better with their specific needs?

Aims and Objectives of the Programmes

By understanding these issues and applying the principles of Mental Toughness in the workplace, organisations are able to:

• Develop strategies and tactics to help individuals perform under pressure.
• Help managers get the best from their people.
• Recruit more effectively around these key criteria.

Our Mental Toughness Programmes

Broadly the content will include:

• Understanding mental toughness – What is mental toughness?
• Putting stressors and challenges into context
• Tools and techniques for managing  & coping with stressors and challenges
• Understanding fatigue and its role in managing pressure
• Team toughness – the role of teams in managing stressors and challenges
• Creating plans that work for developing Mental Toughness

The First Step in Improving Performance – Mental Toughness Questionnaire

Research carried out by Call of the Wild’s  and it’s partners has resulted in the development of a reliable and valid questionnaire. This testing is at the forefront of current psychometric tools and is designed to measure character and offers individuals and their organisations a powerful development tool which enhances workplace resilience. This assessment identifies mental toughness as a personality trait which drives all individuals in a certain way. It helps to develop a mindset which assists individuals in determining how they deal with stress, pressure and the challenges of prevailing circumstances. It has a strong correlation to well-being, performance and good behaviour.

These are four components of mental toughness:

1. Control: The degree to which someone feels in control of their lives and their emotional state.

-What influence do you feel you have over your environment?
– How in control of your emotions do you feel?

2. Commitment: The ability to set goals and strive for their realisation.-

– How focused are you on achieving your goals?
– How do you react when faced with tough deadlines?
3. Challenge: The ability to cope with setbacks and to perceive them as challenges and opportunities rather than threats.

-What do you consider a challenge/problem/threat or opportunity?
-How do you deal with change and unstable environments?
4. Confidence: The level of self-belief and the ability to have interpersonal confidence.

-How optimistic are you about life in general?
-How good are you at dealing with difficult or awkward people?

A report is generated which provides an opportunity to look at the psychometric measure and discuss areas for each individual to develop.

Benefits for You -Evaluation and Outcomes

Measuring resilience and mental toughness allows organisations to:

• Accurately assess the strengths and weaknesses of their people
• Build resilience in them.
• Build teams that can deliver performance.
• Enable effective coaching & development.

This results in:

• Better bottom line performance – stress is one of the largest causes of absenteeism.
• Improved morale and better working environment.
• Better ability to recruit people who can make it.
• Reduced risk of stress related claims and awards.

Call us now  on 01639 700388 for more information on how you can achieve peak performance through mental resilience and mental toughness