Table Of ContentResilience as a Framework
for Coaching
In Resilience as a Framework for Coaching: A Cognitive Behavioural
Perspective, Michael Neenan presents an in-depth understanding of resil-
ience and shows how coaches can help their clients to develop and enhance
their own resilience.
By focusing on the beliefs, emotions and behaviours that promote or
hinder the development of resilience, Neenan provides coaches with plenty
of discussion points for inclusion in their sessions. The book, written in an
engaging and accessible style, includes a chapter showing the unfolding of
a five-session course of resilience coaching with lengthy dialogue excerpts
between the coach and the client, accompanied by a commentary on the
coach’s interventions. Throughout the book there are plenty of case studies
and examples of resilience in action. The book ends with a recap on resil-
ience pinpointing some of the key features of a resilient mindset.
Written by an established expert in the field of resilience and cogni-
tive behavioural coaching, Resilience as a Framework for Coaching repre-
sents an essential resource for those wishing to train in this discipline. The
book will appeal to coaches, coaching psychologists, psychotherapists and
clinical, health and counselling psychologists with an interest in coaching,
human resource professionals, counsellors and trainees in these disciplines.
Michael Neenan is Associate Director of the Centre for Coaching and Centre
for Stress Management, Blackheath, London. He is the author of Developing
Resilience: A Cognitive-Behavioural Approach (2018, 2nd edn., Routledge)
and Cognitive Behavioural Coaching: Distinctive Features (2018, Routledge).
Routledge Focus on Coaching
The Focus on Coaching series features books which cover an aspect of
coaching particularly dear to the author’s or editor’s heart that they wish to
share with the wider professional coaching community. The series editors
are Windy Dryden and David A. Lane.
For a full list of titles in this series, please visit https://www.routledge.com/
Routledge-Focus-on-Coaching/book-series/RFC
Titles in the series
The Coaching Alliance
Theory and Guidelines for Practice
Windy Dryden
A Practical Guide to Rational Emotive Behavioural Coaching
Windy Dryden
Resilience as a Framework for Coaching
A Cognitive Behavioural Perspective
Michael Neenan
Resilience as a Framework
for Coaching
A Cognitive Behavioural Perspective
Michael Neenan
First published 2018
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2018 Michael Neenan
The right of Michael Neenan to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Neenan, Michael, author.
Title: Resilience as a framework for coaching: a cognitive behavioural
perspective / Michael Neenan.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2018. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018009394 (print) | LCCN 2018013482 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780429468216 (Master e-book) | ISBN 9781138605275
(hardback: alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Resilience (Personality trait) | Personal coaching. |
Cognitive therapy.
Classification: LCC BF698.35.R47 (ebook) | LCC BF698.35.R47 N443
2018 (print) | DDC 158.3–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018009394
ISBN: 978-1-138-60527-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-46821-6 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India
Contents
Introduction 1
1 Reflections on resilience 5
2 Attributes associated with resilience 23
3 Resolve to be more resilient 48
4 Non-resilient ideas 71
5 A course of resilience coaching 85
6 A recap on resilience 94
References 103
Index 107
Introduction
I’ve long been interested in resilience even before I knew what the word
meant. My enduring fascination is reading stories of people who survived
very dark times indeed, such as the Nazi concentration camps and Soviet
labour camps (though the role of chance in survival mustn’t be overlooked;
see the section on luck in Chapter 1). I have a collection of books on these
individuals and lend them to my clients if they show an interest. I admire
these men and women because while they were certainly marked by their
experiences, they were not broken by them and managed to find meaning,
purpose and some happiness in their post-adversity lives. They refused to
become trapped in embittered victimhood as a result of these grim experi-
ences. What were the qualities they possessed that enabled them to develop
such an outlook? As Southwick and Charney (2012: 12) observe: ‘We know
of no better way to learn about tried-and-true methods for becoming more
resilient than to listen to, be inspired by, and follow the advice of resilient
people who have already “been there”’. I’ve never experienced very dark
times, but these stories of resilient people have invited me to show more
courage and endurance in sorting out my own troubles, whether it’s the
vicissitudes of daily life or the inevitable adversities that lie in wait.
A person who survived horrendous suffering, Viktor Frankl (1905–
1997), a famous psychiatrist, spent a total of three years in four Nazi camps
and observed that those who gave meaning to their lives, even in the most
wretched of circumstances, were the most likely to survive; those prisoners
who lost faith in the future were doomed (1946/1985). As Frankl remarked
(1997: 53): ‘I am convinced that, in the final analysis, there is no situation
that does not contain within it the seeds of a meaning’. Coutu (2003) states
that Frankl’s theory, the search for meaning, is the basis for much of the
resilience coaching in the business world and the basis for a lot of resil-
ience coaching outside of it (for example, see Pattakos and Dundon [2017]).
Finding constructive meaning to guide you through hard times is one of the
key attributes associated with a resilient mindset.
2 Introduction
Whatever life throws at you, events requiring a resilient response can be
viewed along a scale of severity from the unpleasant experiences of daily
life (e.g. bullying boss, partner’s affair) to highly traumatic experiences (e.g.
being kidnapped). The strength of your resilience response in combating
these events will vary throughout your life, as ‘we can be resilient in one
situation but not in another. We can be wounded one moment and victorious
the next’ (Cyrulnik, 2009a: 285).
When I entered the world of mental health several decades ago as a
trainee in cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), the focus was on maladaptive
responses to adversity. Mental health was a misnomer: it was mental ill-health
that was the real subject. The resilience literature, on the other hand, exam-
ined the factors that contributed to successful adaptation to adversity – what
the person was doing right – and therefore resilience could be viewed as the
bedrock of positive mental health (Persaud, 2001). Research has consistently
shown that resilience is an ordinary response to hard times, not an extraordi-
nary one (Masten, 2014; Newman, 2003); for example: ‘It is well established
that most people exposed to trauma, even severe trauma, never develop PTSD
(post-traumatic stress disorder)’ (Paris, 2013: 126; emphasis in original).
I was having a parallel education: understanding both maladaptive and
adaptive responses to tough times. I eventually married my two interests
by developing resilience through the application of cognitive behavioural
psychology (Neenan, 2018a) and adding coaching to my therapy practice:
cognitive behavioural coaching (CBC). My coaching practice is offered to
individuals from all walks of life, in contrast to the overfocus on the business
world in so many coaching books (see Life Coaching, Neenan and Dryden,
2014). The coaching case examples in this book will reflect this diversity.
Cognitive behavioural coaching is derived from the theory and practice
of two leading cognitive behavioural theorists, therapists and researchers:
the late Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck. The cornerstone of CBC is eliciting
clients’ cognitive appraisals of events (internal and external) in order to
understand their emotional and behavioural reactions to these events. What
we think (our attitudes, beliefs, meanings) and how we think (the way infor-
mation is processed to arrive at our conclusions about the self, others and
the world) are of particular interest in CBC. Following on from this, CBC
can be defined as helping individuals to develop their capabilities in order
to achieve their goals in the areas they nominate and with a particular focus
on the beliefs, emotions and behaviours that help or hinder this develop-
ment (for a more detailed account of CBC, see Neenan, 2018b). Resilience-
building features of CBC include:
• Finding constructive meaning to inform our struggles with hard times;
• Tolerating discomfort, uncertainty and distress in pursuit of our goals;
Introduction 3
• Cultivating curiosity about new possibilities in our lives;
• Developing cognitive and behavioural flexibility to move beyond fixed
categories of thought and action in order to be adaptable to changing
circumstances;
• Learning self-acceptance as an antidote to self-condemnation;
• Remembering that no experience has to be wasted in what we can learn
from it;
• Teaching emotional and practical problem-solving skills;
• Realising that many of our thoughts and beliefs are assumptions about
reality, not facts, which can be examined and changed through the
application of reason and the collection of evidence from real-world
experiments;
• Using extra-session assignments to deepen and accelerate the process
of change;
• Promoting greater self-reliance but not with the intention of undermin-
ing the important protective factor of social support.
Here is an example of CBC in action (only some of the above points are
included). A projects manager working in a high-pressure environment had
to deal with, among other tasks, over 200 emails a day and wanted to learn
‘greater email efficiency’ in order to reduce the times she felt anxious and
overwhelmed by this email onslaught (‘It’s doing my head in’, i.e. perceived
loss of control). When she thought like this, she avoided her emails, which then
added to the backlog and caused her to condemn herself for her procrastination.
Working with the coach, she devised an email classification system (immedi-
ate response, today, tomorrow, next few days, delegate) and brief criteria for
choosing each category, and also increased the time she spent on her emails by
taking it from other areas, such as having shorter team and individual meetings.
These measures restored her self-confidence; her anxiety and avoidance
dropped sharply: ‘I’m controlling the flow of emails now rather than me
believing they’re driving me round the bend!’ This example shows practi-
cal problem solving (learning greater email efficiency) reducing emotional
arousal (anxiety) and procrastination (behaviour); on other occasions, the
order is reversed because emotional arousal is too high or intense to allow a
practical problem-solving focus and therefore needs to be attended to first.
Developing resilience and CBC are a very good fit. Leading resilience
experts Reivich and Shatté, in their book The Resilience Factor (2002: 11),
write:
Our research has demonstrated that the number-one roadblock to resil-
ience is not genetics, not childhood experiences, not a lack of opportu-
nity or wealth. The principal obstacle to tapping into our inner strength
