Resilience Coaching

Sustained pressure needs a different response from a single crisis

A one-off crisis can be managed on adrenaline. Sustained pressure cannot. When the restructure runs for a year, the targets keep rising or the role keeps expanding without support, the habits that got you through a hard week start to cost you.

Leaders usually come to resilience coaching when they recognise some of these signs.

• ✦Setbacks that used to bounce off you now stay with you for days.
• ✦You are still delivering, but with less patience, less creativity and more irritation.
• ✦You feel responsible for keeping everyone else steady, and nobody is doing that for you.
• ✦Every problem feels urgent, so you have lost the sense of what matters most.
• ✦You are leading through a merger, a long change programme or a national talent transition and expect it to continue.
• ✦You know what you should do to recover, but you never quite do it.

Mental fitness is the core of how I build resilience

As a certified Positive Intelligence® coach, I use mental fitness as a practical route to resilience. Under pressure, certain thought patterns take over. Positive Intelligence calls them Saboteurs, such as the inner Judge, the Controller or the Hyper-Achiever. They feel helpful, but they narrow your thinking and drain your energy.

We build the opposite capacity, which the framework calls the Sage perspective: a calmer, more curious and more creative way of responding. You strengthen it through short, regular exercises built into your day, much as you would train a muscle. For a fuller explanation, read what mental fitness is.

Five capacities that make a leader resilient

These are capacities, not personality traits. They grow with practice, which is why the work between sessions matters as much as the sessions themselves.

Your first session begins with a map of your pressure

In our first session I ask where the pressure in your role comes from, how you currently respond to it and what it is costing you. We look at a recent moment when you lost your footing and a moment when you held it, and compare the two.

From that conversation we identify which inner patterns show up most for you under strain, and agree one or two simple practices for the coming weeks. I won’t give you a generic resilience routine. What you practise has to fit your actual calendar, including busy seasons and Ramadan working hours, or it will not last.

Between sessions, resilience is trained in small repetitions

1. 01

   Notice

   You learn to catch the moment a Saboteur pattern takes hold, often first as a physical signal such as tension, rushing or a racing mind.

2. 02

   Interrupt

   Short focus exercises, a few minutes at a time, shift your attention and calm the reaction.

3. 03

   Choose

   From that steadier place you decide how to respond to the situation in front of you.

4. 04

   Review

   In our next session we look at what worked, what did not and where to practise next.

Resilience coaching is not therapy or medical care

Resilience coaching works with performance, thinking habits and behaviour. It is not therapy or medical treatment. If you are experiencing exhaustion, anxiety, low mood or sleep problems that are affecting your health, please speak to a doctor or a licensed mental health professional. Coaching can sit alongside that care.

If you are already depleted rather than under pressure, burnout coaching for executives addresses that situation directly. If you want the mental fitness work as the main focus, see mental fitness coaching.

I have watched capable people wear down, and recover

I spent more than 26 years in leadership, HR and talent development, much of it supporting executive teams through growth and transformation in financial services, FMCG, entrepreneurship and government. I saw how talented people wear down when pressure becomes the norm, and how much faster they recover once they have the right habits.

I am ICF PCC credentialed, with over 4,500 hours spent coaching leaders. Sessions usually run weekly or every two weeks, and every engagement is personalised.