Resilience coaching

Resilience coaching encourages personal and organisational responsibility towards a more sustainable future. Sustainable systems are resilient: they adapt quickly, sustain nourishing relationship networks, celebrate diversity and turn waste into food. This holds for systems of any scale, individually and collectively.

Resilience emerges naturally as a system moves towards balance: with its self and with its environment.Resilience coaching is a process of discovering and attending to imbalances, both personal and organisational. The context includes the individual, their organisations, and the dynamic social and natural systems that sustain them.

Resilience coaching:

  • offers a conceptual framework – within which clients create their own sense of significance and meaning around personal and organisational sustainability

  • suggests practices – that enhance clients' capacity to deepen responsibility by exploring the boundaries of how they adapt and relate;

  • evokes process – that seeks fullness, reconnection and integration.


Why is resilience coaching useful?

It is concerned with the fundamentals…

Sustainability challenges reflected in food, energy, and water shortages, climate change, social turbulence and biodiversity loss probably present the most serious crisis ever to confront global society. No individual or organisation actively decided to contribute to this crisis. And yet we find ourselves deeply attached to the systems that feed it.  As individuals, we deny or ignore this split at a cost.  At some point, our body, mind or soul presents the bill.  For organisations, the inevitable feedback will in time reflect on the bottom line.

It unleashes the energy of creative adaptability…

In organisational terms, resilience is directly concerned with integrating human, social, cultural and natural capital as a source of value – in a way that upholds, restores or develops its integrity for future generations.  This is a wildly creative venture and will undoubtedly be the greatest source of business value in the 21st century.  Yet sustainability challenges all too often herald a mindset of numbing compliance, token gestures or dooms-day complacency.  Coaching seeks the courage to turn this natural resistance to change into the creative energy necessary to direct it.  This is a requirement of resilience; it is frequently the source of radical innovation.  It is also the basis of transformation.

It bridges personal, organisational and social change…

Anyone undertaking a change process in an organisation knows that change comes from within. It is people, and what they think, do and feel, that matter. Resilience coaching assumes that significant movement towards sustainability in an organisation will be prefaced by personal shifts within its members. The more people shift, the more likely the organisation will shift. Likewise, changes in society come about as its institutions and organisations respond accordingly.

Resilience coaching differs from performance or behaviour coaching in that direction is established in relation to the bigger picture: humanity’s movement towards sustainability in an increasingly turbulent world. It seeks to evoke balance and integrity, rather than excellence.