Christine Hurley reviews our 2020 series of resilience improvement workshops run by Gill How.
2020 was certainly a challenging year for most of us. The arrival of the pandemic in March turned many a life upside down, often causing anxiety, stress and uncertainty around our work, relationships and health. It was a time, more than ever, when we needed to develop resilience.
So, the generous offer of a workshop to support our members from Gill How was very welcome indeed. Gill, who is a much valued Women in Transport mentor and a highly qualified business coach and leadership development consultant, quickly showed her own strength and resilience by adapting, innovating and running her workshop sessions online.
In early spring she led a workshop for 12 of our members entitled 'Improving your resilience and wellbeing using your strengths'. This was very popular and we quickly built up a long waiting list, resulting in four different sessions throughout the spring and summer.
There was a very diverse range of attendees at each session who, under Gill's direction, learned how to discover and grow their individual strengths in challenging times as well as using their strengths to work around their weaknesses.
As Gill explained, Covid-19 had definitely changed the line and called for lots of adjustments. This could be for all manner of reasons, such as being furloughed, working from home, endless online meetings or home-schooling the kids. As Gill said, “In this situation, it is too important to forget about your strengths and not take account of how we can use them.
She went on to say that often people are not aware of their strengths and are far more likely to think about their weaknesses. To prove the point, global research reveals that 62% of people believe that fixing a weakness will make you more successful in life whereas only 38% believe you will be more successful by building on strengths. However, as life experience doesn't support this view, it was Gill's mission to get members to find and stretch their strengths rather than focus on their weaknesses.
Initially, time was spent discussing our own understanding of strengths and how these made us feel. The thoughts on this were many and varied as the example below shows.
This was followed by an equally interesting discussion and diverse response on weaknesses.
As Gill moved on to helping us identify our strengths, she suggested we consider:
Reflecting on childhood memories. What we had been good at and what sort of things we would do without anyone asking. Examples came up of people teaching other children skills, creative projects, inventing or building things or even challenging teachers and lessons at school.
Energy- What did we really love to do? What would get us out of bed in the morning?
Ease – where do we pay attention and learn rapidly?
Motivation; described in the voice, words and phrases that we use.
Things we really want to do that don't get as far as our To Do List. There was some amusement when Gill said a To Do list includes the things you don't want to do but need to do.
This was summed up in a short video clip from Robert Biswas Diener To discover strengths he said, look for a dramatic increase in energy, the shift you see in facial expression, positive increase in engagement eyes widening, smiling, better posture and increased use of metaphors.
This was the cue for an experiment when Gill put the following questions to a volunteer:
What was a day when you were at work when you were really proud?
When have you felt the most alive at work?
Was there another occasion when you felt at your best?
We then went into groups to discuss and establish how we had spotted the energy from the volunteer and what strengths this had enabled us to discover.
After this fascinating revelation, we went on to discuss weaknesses. Demonstrating how we could take this forward and use our strengths to turnaround a weakness, Gill put these questions to another volunteer.
What is your weakness?
If this were a strength what would it give you?
What strengths could you use to reach that outcome?
This gave us a different perspective on weaknesses, making them seem less important. While we might well feel incredibly vulnerable and at risk, we can use our strengths to turnaround our worst fears. It shows that meeting our needs is the main objective and we can take other options or perhaps even delegate to someone else.
In summing up Gill challenged us to revisit our own LinkedIn profile and look at how it makes us feel? Is it talking about your real strengths? Will this help progress your career? She also gave us guidelines on the Via Institute on Character which offers a free online strengths tool that we can use to talk to our team and family about how to get the best out of people.
In every session I attended it was a fantastic experience to see different people in different roles springing to life and, in discovering their strengths, every individual learned more about themselves.
Reviewing these thought provoking sessions feels like a great way to start our new year. Let's focus on increasing our strengths and taking these building blocks forward to what is now becoming our new normal.
Our thanks to Gill How for giving us so much of her time and for designing and running this excellent workshop for our members. They all found the sessions incredibly useful. Here are a few of their comments:
'I found the workshop very helpful, it really helped me to understand different types of strengths and how to identify them'.
'I found this thought provoking and quite challenging (in a good way) and will be looking at how to apply my strengths in these new uncertain times.’
'I found it really valuable and engaging. My attention was held all the way through.'
'Brilliant - I came away empowered and energised'.
'It was a good reminder of my strengths and has settled a bit of an unsettled time for me'.
Gill specialises in strengths-based leadership and coaching and behaviour change programmes and it is her passion to help people stretch and grow and master operating in tough circumstances. To read more about Gill and how she has helped numerous well-known organisations achieve their goals please click here
Women in Transport is a non-profit network with a mission of advancing women working in transport. Annual membership of Women in Transport is £60 per year providing access to professional development and networking opportunities. We very much welcome guest blogs from our members - a great way to share the incredible diversity of opportunity in transport, raise your profile and connect with our community.
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