A Lifelong Commitment to Developing Resilience [Podcast Series]
[:56] Dr. Bantham introduces her guest, Dr. Glenda Rivoallan
Dr. Glenda Rivoallan is Founder of WeTalkWellbeing and Founder of Soulgenic.
She is a resilience and well-being strategist.
[1:13] Defining resilience
“But the most important thing about how I define resilience is the ability to not just bounce back from challenges, or adversities, or more negative things that happen to us in our life, but actually bounce forward and with the ability to thrive.”
[1:49] Teaching resilience
“But I think there's something that you said there that we need to remind ourselves of, is that the joy of resilience is it can be taught. And it can also be learned, which is a really positive and transformational approach to what we do, rather than thinking that your mind is fixed, going about the idea that your mind can actually change as we grow, and help you to not just survive, but thrive.”
[4:17] Integrating mental and physical health
“So we really do quite a bit of work about understanding that to actually improve your mental thinking, it's not often helpful to just do more thinking, it might be more helpful to do more being and more doing. So we look at activities that don't just work the mind, but also work the body, and vice versa. And I think you're absolutely right to see about that relationship between the two.”
[6:04] Role of the health & fitness sector
“But I definitely think we've made some fantastic progress in the last few years. I think that the challenge that we still face is that we often—whether it's mental health or it's working on our resilience—that we offer interventions to either communities or employees, but they usually tackle the symptoms, and possibly not the root causes.”
[8:30] Resilience in a corporate setting
“So whether it's a community or it's a corporate, for someone to be truly resilient, they have to be topping up the batteries of those pillars, to give us that holistic view of resilience that really helps someone to thrive.”
[11:54] COVID-19 pandemic and resilience
“And what we find in the research is that adverse events or big challenges in your life are the test that then wakes up the resilience skills. Where they then—when they have that sort of sleeper effect—they get switched on, and then they get tested. And I think that's such a powerful thing to think about. Because what the pandemic did was gave us all a point of reference for a very large adversity that tested all of our resilience.”
[15:46] Effective resilience strategies
“I'm a big believer of the resilience tools becoming habits. Because the more we can build healthy habits and replace the more unhealthful habits, that is going to help you moving forward in terms of how you think, how you feel, and how you behave.”
[19:33] Reframing self-care
“And then you would absolutely know that in a good high performance sports car, you might have to change direction and change course. And that's about having the flexibility to understand that things don't always go the way you want it to go. But rather than limiting your options and getting that tunnel vision, you keep that positive. And when I say positivity, I actually mean hope. Hope is critical.”
[23:12] Normalizing mental health
“So I think it really opens people's eyes when they understand the scale of mental health in the world. And the people that suffer from poor mental health. And when we can give statistics and we can give stories, and we can give stories of people that they would relate to, I think that's really powerful.”
[25:02] Linking mental health and physical activity
“Well, first of all I think that the fitness industry does have a long way to go to understand how you get someone from the sofa to the gym. Because there's so many steps between the sofa and the first gym workout. So rather than go after your new customers by way of traditional marketing, I feel that we do have corporate and social responsibility to help our societies get more active.”
[27:01] Meeting consumers where they are
“And I think it's about sharing with our consumers and our customers and our community that want to engage with us that physical activity doesn't need to be starting at something that feels near on impossible. I mean, we underestimate the power of walking, because it's just so phenomenal.”
[27:56] A lifelong commitment to developing resilience
“And in answer to your question, I believe to be truly resilient it's a lifelong commitment. Because we do get lazy and as you said, we're always full of good intention. And then we sometimes put something down and that is okay. But it's about understanding that that toolkit that you've worked hard to build up, you can keep adding to that backpack of skills, and then you can pull them out when you need them.”
