CoC Resilience Training

This is the core training for implementing The Challenge of Change in your organisation, and provides a radical and unique way of addressing stress and resilience. In addition to identifying personal strengths and weaknesses, the training provides specific practical tools for developing resilience and stress management skills.

Restructuring/Transition Support

The Challenge of Change (CoC) Resilience Training programme can be adapted to help participants deal with difficult and challenging issues, such as restructuring and making employees redundant. In these circumstances CoC Resilience Training can help significantly in facilitating the transition and providing support, and participants have commented on feeling much more positive and optimistic about the future. From an employer’s perspective, having an external facilitator reduce the negativity that can linger long after these difficult processes, and applying the training in this way can ease the process as well as reducing acrimony and dispute.

Two Half-day Sessions

The CoC Resilience Training programme is a one-day programme, ideally split over two half-days separated by a week. This enables participants to gain experience in using The Challenge of Change tools in the gap between sessions, and to further develop their skills in an informed way.

Individual Psychological Insight

The training includes a unique, confidential pre-training questionnaire, The CoC Profile, which profiles personal strengths and liabilities in coping skills. The questionnaire resulted directly from the research conducted at the Stress Research Unit at the University of York, and has been subjected to rigorous validation. The CoC Profile provides the basis for a focused and detailed action-plan for implementing change.

Waking up and Controlling Attention

The training itself commences with a clear demonstration of why conventional stress management offers little or no practical benefit, based as it is on ill-conceived notions such as life events. By contrast, the basic assumption of The CoC Resilience Training programme is that people are asleep much of the time, and the first steps in the programme are waking up and controlling attention. This leads to a clear and simple definition of stress that resonates with participants and forms the basis for the training: that stress is nothing more than ruminating about emotional upset. All that events provide is things to ruminate about, if you choose to do so.

Adaptive Coping Skills

The link between stress and health is then explained in detail using simple diagrams, and shows why your pet cat is unlikely to die of heart disease. The final steps in the programme are becoming detached and letting go, illustrated with the principle of how to catch monkeys. Coupled with The CoC Profile and a series of practical exercises, the training shows exactly how to develop and implement adaptive coping skills that really work.

Back-up Material and Reminders

As part of the training course, individual participants are provided with back-up material and a unique audio CD to help with deep mind relaxation. Derek also stays in touch with participants subsequently, reminding them of their commitments after the course is completed. This has been recognised as a key factor in the continued adoption of the techniques. At the end of the training participants are asked for their honest, anonymous evaluations, which are fed back to the company to provide an immediate assessment of staff responses to the training. To view some recent feedback, please click on the middle box to the right.