Resilience is a skill, we know that instinctively but how do you say for sure if someone is more resilient than another. How about if they become more resilient? How do you prove it?
There is no easily comparable tool that many people use, there are a number of resilience scales but these tend to be used in a clinical setting and not suitable for every project. I have therefore, developed my own resilience scale, which shows what the individual believes to be their own skill-set.
I have based this on the ten ways to be more resilient as defined by Liggy Webb – the United Nations adviser on resilience; author of the book ‘resilience’ and international keynote speaker on how to be more resilient. The ten skills are; take a journey of self-discovery, optimism, emotional control, change for the better, coping well with conflict, embracing opportunities, looking after yourself, making positive connections, keeping going and having a vision.
I have reworked these skills into a scale which participants can rate themselves and a set of skills that project staff can assess.
Participants answer how often they feel like this, over the last two weeks:
- I know myself well, and can describe my strengths and weaknesses
- I cope well with change
- I cope well with conflict and/ or arguments
- I feel like I can say yes to opportunities
- I put myself first, so I can look after others better
- I have been socialising recently
- I am able to make plans and stick to those plans
- I believe that life will improve in the future, I feel optimistic about the future
- I have coped well with making decisions
- I feel that I can cope well with stressful situations
Assigning each answer a number, means we can measure how resilient a person is, at one moment in time. We can ask them again, every quarter and track their movements. We can find out what happened to make them more resilient, and what happened in their lives to become less resilient.
In short, we can show impact numerically.