Focusing on ‘redefining resilience’, the 3rd International Conference in Psychology Counselling and Education (ICPCE 2021) will be hosted online on 29th October–31st October.
Resilience is a skill on which we will all be tested by life. And whatever we want to achieve, we all need resilience. The tougher the goal we want to achieve, the more resilience we need. Even for those who want a calm life, the natural and human world will test their resilience repeatedly.
If resilience is a skill we all need to have – and will be called on to use – learning about it makes sense. What is resilience? How do we use it? What do those who use it best that others do not?
Are they naively positive in the face of challenges? Do they trudge through their difficulties with dropped heads and heavy hearts? Or, do they find the sweet spot: that optimum approach that creates maximum empowerment and resilience? If so, where is that sweet spot? Where do you find it? What techniques can you use to optimise your resilience?
In addition to the practical uses of resilience, what does the research say about it? We all have a sense of what it is, but how do scientists define it? What have they learned about it? For instance, how is resilience connected with personality? If resilience is linked, what does that mean for your personality? How does personality impact levels of and approaches to resilience?
What does the research literature say about how we can build our resilience? How does the experience of adversity impact our mental health? What can we do to reduce the negative impact?
Does resilience play a major part in our mental health? Just how important is it? Now that society is, at last, becoming more aware of mental health as something central to all our lives, how can we work together to improve our mental health, both individually and collectively?
People with resilience seem better able to recover from traumatic experiences. Why? How? What are they doing that others are not? What techniques can we all learn from the most resilience to help us better recover from trauma, adversity, and setbacks?
Once you know the answers to those questions, what advice will you pass on to your loved ones to help them better cope with life’s inevitable ups and downs?
If you are to help others improve their resilience, what do you need to know? What behaviours and characteristics are most effective in helping people develop resilience and recover from trauma, from adverse experiences? How much personal experience of adversity is helpful when helping others? What can we learn from teachers who have developed expertise in helping you people find the resilience to recover from adversity?
Everyone has faced adversity and developed approaches to build their resilience? What works and what doesn’t? What works best, and in which contexts? How can we ensure that our approaches to our adversities help us develop greater resilience to deal with future adversities?
Being well connected to others and ourselves seems to help with resilience and many other elements in good mental health. What kinds of connections, with whom? What does it mean to be connected to ourselves? When we are well connected, what specifically can be done to improve our mental health and resilience?
The adversity that would crush most people may be viewed as a minor irritation by those with exceptional levels of resilience. Where do such levels come from? What develops hyper- resilience? At the other end of the spectrum, minor crises, that most people would deal with successfully without much thought, can be devastating to some people. Where does such vulnerability come from? What develops or causes hypo- resilience? Is it hypo- resilience, or can the same effect be caused by atrophy of resilience? Can resilience be depleted by underuse? Can resilience appear to be atrophy by overuse? All of those questions impact all of our lives.
Just how important is resilience to your life and those around you? Many successful people throughout history have expressed the view that persistence is central to achievement, and to living a well-adjusted life.
How important is resilience to persistence? Are they the same thing? Do people persist when they are resilient and quit when they are not? Quitting can be smart when faced with insurmountable problems. Could it be that knowing how to make the judgment call on when to quit and how to recover from that apparent failure are two essential features of optimal resilience?
Resilience is one of those rare subjects that is both academically fascinating and can help us in real life. If you are interested in resilience theory, research or practice, this conference is for you (insert details).
Do you want to make contact with others interested in resilience? Are you looking for ideas on resilience? Do you want to develop your own resilience? Or help others to develop resilience?
If you want to ask questions of people who have spent a lot of time learning about and seeking to understand resilience, attending ICPCE 2021 can be for you. The conference is still open for registration.
Professor Nigel MacLennan runs PsyPerform, a leadership coaching practice. He is a visiting professor at the University of Bolton.
