Business in Glasgow

Resilience is the topic we are currently exploring and we do hope you can join us to enjoy a tasty breakfast, good company and some interesting discussion around this matter.

To register, email gayle@businessinglasgow.net, or
 text or call me on 07740 467235.

Resilience is the ability to say, “We are often troubles but not crushed, sometimes in doubt but never in despair.” How do people develop that attitude? Peter will be introducing ways to use storytelling and narrative techniques to learn from our business or personal past and plot our way through to a more resilient future.

Peter Gardner has worked at Renfield St.Stephen’s Church since 2002 and is a founding Trustee of Business in Glasgow. He divides his time between the work of a parish minister, encouraging better integration between work and spirituality and developing the creative arts in the cultural contexts of Church and the city centre of Glasgow.

BiG Event Report by Jack Quinn

Peter opened the session by commenting that ‘resilience’ is a trendy word at the moment, for example in the centre pages of the Guardian 5^th September 2011 it talked about UK banks and their ‘resilience’ and America the ‘resilient’ country after 9/11. Resilience is a key word, it is a famous word, and if you work for the Scottish Government you might have a chance to work in the Scottish Government ‘Resilience’ Committee. So resilience is quite a buzz word.

So what is resilience?

Peter read a poem quote from ‘Luck in Sarajevo’ written by Izet Sarajlic in 1992 just after Sarajevo had been besieged by the Serbian army

In Sarajevo in the spring of 1992 everything is possible

Go and stand in the bread line and end up in an emergency room with your leg amputated, afterwards you still maintain that you were very lucky. – That is resilience

Peter believes that Resilience is not a character trait; it is a process that we can develop and learn

He went on to give some ideas of how you can think through the process using the idea of story telling or developing narratives:

He suggested that if you want to be able to develop resilience a lot of it is about the context in which you develop the story or the understanding of your life, or the understanding of what has happened to you. He gave the example of Boris Cyrulnik is a French Psychologist who says that almost any experience can be reshaped if those who endure it are given the power to write their own narrative. Boris himself was a Jewish child during the Second World War and remembers vividly an experience when six gendarmeries coming into his bedroom to arrest him. After the war he tried to make sense of what had happened to him and he tried to tell his story but nobody wanted to hear.

Peter went on to say that sometimes we are not allowed to tell the stories of what we go through. Sometimes the companies for which we work or the organisations in which we are involved in have a bigger story that they don’t want our traumatic story to be part of. If you have any influence in a company, one of the best things you can do to make your staff more resilient is give them space to tell their stories even if it does not fit in to the story you want your company to be telling.

Peter spoke of his experience talking at AA meetings being among people who are incredibly honest and open about their stories to an audience that are willing and receptive to hear. If we give people the space to tell their stories in that kind of atmosphere then resilience starts to be developed.

Boris Cyrulnik said ‘Resilience is the mesh that we create out of emotional and social things around us that enable us to look back and say ‘that was a hard journey, but we got through it even though times were tough.’

Sometimes resilience is speaking against the bigger story that is round about you, try and tell a story that no one else is telling and you will find it very hard to be heard.

Current thinking tells us that happiness is when you are wealthy, when you are successful, when you are fulfilled and when you have lots of positive experiences. When you don’t have any of these things, if you have to sacrifice something, you are thought of as being a victim, you have struggled, and you have suffered. Compare that with Britain in the 1940’s and 50’s when sacrifice was seen as a positive thing, so if you were giving something up because things were hard then you were seen as someone who was a bit of a hero. It was so much easier to tell the stories that people had experienced when the whole narrative behind was positive. Whereas today if someone goes through a difficult time it is easy for others not to listen.

The Apostle Paul famously said ‘we are broken but not crushed, we are in doubt but not despair, we are wounded but not dead, we are surrounded by enemies but not friendless.’ His life was a roller coaster, one minute he was popular the next minute he was being let down walls in baskets in order to escape, one minute he was being listened to and the next minute he was imprisoned. He understood the story of his life against another story, a bigger narrative, his bigger narrative was the story of Jesus, His sacrifice and yet resurrection so he could see that whatever he went through was against another story.

What is the background story that we tell or impose upon other people who talk to us? When you are telling a story what actually matters is less about the plot and the narrative but the context in which you tell it. If you tell the story in an affirming context then resilience starts to grow.

What kind of story do you tell about something that has happened? Stories of the past so often determine the way we understand the present and they shape the trajectory of our future. You start to see a pattern but sometimes that can be the dominating story of people’s lives and if the story starts to dominate then we start to fit our story into that plot. You have to start to tell your story before you can work out which is your plot. Some of the most resilient people are people who have identified the pattern of their story.

The narrative context gives isolated individuals the ability to determine how they will survive. How can we help people determine their own stories? Peter gave some helpful tricks to helping yourself or other people tell your stories:

1. Write it down
2. Using a long sheet of paper write your timeline – what happened in between the big significant moments actually tell you more about how resilient you are through all the things you have experienced
3. If you find it hard to tell your story or are with someone who can’t start then give them a way in, for example ask them to tell it from the mobile phones perspective or what they were wearing at different points in their story.

Isaac Denson the Danish writer said this ‘All sorrows can be borne if you can put them into a story.

Resilience – against the background story it is important to free yourself and understand that your story may be different from the background story round about you. If you have influence in your organisation in helping people to cope with what is happening make sure there is space for them to tell their own stories. Use creative ways of telling stories to free people up.

‘Luck in Sarajevo’ is a very short story but very powerful, would your story summed up in 20 words have the same influence on you? Remember you may not feel resilient but resilience is not a character trait but a process you can develop and a key element of that is telling your own story.