Tips to build personal resilience

While organisational resilience is essential, OSH professionals also need personal resilience in their roles to deal with incidents, crises and organisational upheavals. We ask the experts how we can boost it.

When setbacks happen, resilience helps us cope, recover from stress and move on from the experience. This holds true professionally as well as personally: building and maintaining a strong sense of resilience is vital to help us deal with and prepare for difficult events, which can be frequent in OSH work. It involves a mix of behaviours, thoughts and actions that promote good mental health and personal wellbeing.

Follow the framework

Ruth Wilkinson, head of policy at IOSH, says: ‘Personal resilience could be considered as the most effective tool for managing and coming through adversity. Building personal resilience can be difficult, but working on certain disciplines can improve on that.

‘IOSH’s competency framework has various topics, such as self-awareness, problem-solving, communicating effectively, self-motivation and discipline, and personal responsibilities and accountabilities, all of which will enable members to build and improve upon their own sense of personal resilience.’

Signs of personal resilience include the ability to regulate emotions, a sense of confidence and control, effective coping skills and the ability to lean on social support when needed. IOSH’s competency framework is there to help you develop these areas, in addition to following the tips given in this article published by IOSH magazine.