Roundtable Presentation 6th World Congress on Positive Psychology 2019

The business case for developing resilience in the workplace is well established. Resilient leaders deliver 29% increase in productivity, 30% reduction in mental distress and the ability to maintain resilience in the face of prolonged adversity or uncertainty. Further, women in leadership experience more distress and challenges to their resilience than men. Our corporate clients have found that this is compounded for female leaders working in a male dominated environment.

Our program incorporates positive psychology interventions to help women boost resilience and enhance performance which has proved successful.

Our evaluations show an immediate increase in participants’ sense of resilience, self-regulation and a subsequent increase in resilient behaviours.   

We will discuss:

• The 4C model of Mental Toughness, an evidence-based framework to understand, measure and build psychological resilience.
• The concept of Best Possible Self and its role in promoting optimism and the development of intrinsically motivating goals.
• A model for resilience goal-setting to close the gap between an individual’s actual and ideal selves incorporating interventions to increase Mental Toughness.

As leaders increasingly navigate their careers in volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) environments, and organisations grapple with female representation at senior levels, resilience-led leadership development for women will help build sustainable organisations.