Building Cultures of Resilience Workshop by Tong Yee (part 1)
This morning, I attended a workshop by Tong Yee on Building Cultures of Resilience. You may find my set of notes here - credits to Tong Yee and The Thought Collective (offering a list of online trainings right now, do check it out!). It’s about 12 pages long, but I am putting this out there so you can also gain a greater appreciation in context of what i’m about to share in my learnings and reflections below.
I thought the workshop gave me a deeper understanding of how to unpack resilience, and the reflection breaks were really helpful to process the learning!
Resilience is not about ‘overcoming’ pain, but enduring and staying with the pain.
It is impossible to avoid pain eternally.
There are 3 main components of Resilience:
1. PAIN & ADVERSITY – it could be a certain tragedy, unexpected bad stuff that happen to you, such as divorce, retrenchment.
2. RESOURCE – where pain is unexpected, we may not have time to build the resources (eg. Counselling, therapy)
3. GOAL – in situation where goal is unexpected - to address the certain tragedy that has happened (eg. finding a new job when one has lost their job, prioritising health when diagnosed with minor/major health issues) - people may resist and not want to own this goal because they do not acknowledge their own pain.
The role of pain is get your attention - take care of yourself!'
The moment we learn to take care of ourselves, gather resources and own the goal, pain disappears.
Pain is a gift: Without pain, we will die.
With pain, we (feel like we) want to die.
There are low grinding pains, like the body aches we feel when we sit too long - I am really sensitive to this, I can feel the difference in my body when I stop doing yoga for 2-3 days, it really feels much more tense and stiff. The goal is then to take care of myself, practicing my yoga (resource) to address the ache (pain).
However, it is very easy to ignore low grinding pains too. Such as my parents’ nagging - it is easy to deflect it by working on something else, that distracts myself from this pain.
Deflection is a common way to not tackle the fundamental pain. Creating other goals to distract ourselves from the main goal. (Gestalt)
This part really resonates with my personal experience in running OpenJio. When starting a new project, a new goal - there is a lot of energy in getting resources.
OpenJio has alot more resources than when we first started 2 years ago. We have grown in network and knowledge - to 3.9k subscribers, but I honestly have no idea how to really get in touch with their needs at a broader level.
Though we do see increased engagements (instagram, telegram, in the events/huddles we organise) across most of our platforms, which is encouraging - this tells us people do see value - but what that value is exactly, i would only know if i ask them.
How can I effectively diagnose community needs?
How can we offer a stronger diagnosis of what is happening so that we can share it and raise awareness, draw attention to where resources can be directed to?
Until we start getting a sense of diversity – can we appreciate the pains people face.
Another example: How PAP is losing touch with the ground’s emerging needs, especially in SengKang being won over by The Worker’s Party. My breakout room groupmate shared that the primary reason why her friends who stayed in SengKang voted for the Workers’ party, was that they felt that TWP could voice their needs and stand for them.
How then could we practice empathy and connect with each other’s pain?
Perception makes it far more complex than it is.
Case study
A pain adverse society: we don’t like to deal with pain
Government: “We have a lot of reserves, you'll be fine!”
People: “What are we saving so much for?? Why is government storing so much?”
Parents: “ study hard ah…if not you won’t be able to get a good job.”
Singapore leans more towards resource than the goal – we don’t get the purpose of the reserves; we’re told that studying hard is for the purpose of getting a good job - but as the job market grows increasingly competitive, these narratives are being shakened.
Diagram refers to the missing part of helping people with Resource (missing triangle piece) that can only be fully completed with understanding their pain (triangle).
We often provide solutions that are important to ourselves, in order to build their resilience – but we spend little time in understanding that their pain is.
There is fear in leaning into (someone else’s) pain – what if I can’t help them? What if they suck me in? Hence I cannot support them in becoming resilient.
This results in a sense of purposelessness where we cannot meet our needs/pain.
- Our sense of vision and purpose is waning: A vision that encompasses what Singapore wants – we are looking for a much stronger vision to move on at this particular point.
- Our emotional resources are not as strong
- How leaders help to alleviate adversity
Personal Leadership could help us as a country - people stepping up – does a lot to alleviate adversity we are going through
Listening and paying attention to your pain is a very important part of your growth process.
When is it not healthy anymore? When we are not functioning?
The whole purpose of learning is growth – the Joy of learning! :)
But when your body cannot take it, when there is too much trauma in a relationship when we are constantly in survival mode – that’s when to call it quits.
Resilience is about building a sustainable and healthy relationship between all three. They are symbiotic, each is essential and none can be avoided.
Consider any learning experience.
Does this experience feel painful for you? Do you feel like you are getting restless?
What are we doing right now that is making it easy? (strong leaders, facilitators, teachers pay attention to these)
Reflections:
I thought that I gained a useful framework in understanding resilience - the relationship between goal, pain and resources; the importance of sitting and enduring pain to reach our goals. We can’t ever heal if we keep avoiding the pain instead of feeling and addressing it. Pain is a key piece which I hope we can dive deeper into - such as emotional pain. It is easy to distract ourselves, and deflect pain. (The cycle of learning and resistance in Gestalt is another very useful framework to understand this.)
Sometimes I use OpenJio as a deflection of the pain that I experience with my family. Like I immerse myself in projects instead of tackling issues in my life. Parental expectations and family worries tends to make me feel heavy, and I felt like i did not know how to cope with it. So i like to head out, meet my friends and work on ‘meaningful’ goals - that’s how it looks like to people i guess. Resources on learning how to manage relationships with my family were low. Now that I’ve begin to gain more emotional resources and self-awareness, as well as giving a ton of kindness to self, it feels less hard. :) Also thanks to CB, which makes it harder for me the escape the pain haha.
At the core, i think it is about how can we begin to love ourselves better? Do we love ourselves enough to feel the pain? So that we can begin to take care of ourselves and heal. To feel pain is an intrinsic part of our own human experience. We cannot experience joy without pain. Because joy comes when we grow from our pain.
I guess, avoiding pain is also part of our human experience too. haha. Avoiding pain is a pain in itself…aka our response to pain, can be a pain in the ass. lol. Like getting triggered and angry when my parents nag, but then regret later, and then too egoistic to apologise. haha. (my shit)
For me, having reflections and walks by myself help me to understand the emotions I’m feeling. Having frameworks to understand emotions helps, see The Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings Are Trying to Tell You by Karla McLaren (which you can download here); and am really thankful for my friends, coaches, and people that I have met who held space for me.
What does it mean to love ourselves? Do we dare to dream? Do we dare to feel? Do we dare to be?
Life afterall, is about learning, growing and taking risks. And learning to love the ride.
After today’s workshop, I feel more inspired to write a guide on How to love Amelia haha. My friend Khuyen had previously wrote one and i thought it was pretty cool!
Reflections from a Coaching Workshop
20/6: updated to include my reflections and notes from part 2 too.
I attended a Performance Coaching Workshop by SingaporeWorks on 13 and 20 June! We learnt about various useful distinctions between managing, leading, counselling, teaching and coaching. You can find my notes here for part 1 and part 2. Pre-workshop homework reflections are here, may be good to read both to get a better grasp of the context of my sharing. Or feel free to dive right in!
What stood out for me most were these three things:
1) The intangible aspect of goals I often forget;
2) My experience in coaching N, my groupmate who is from Cambodia
3) My relationship with “challenge”
1) Intangible aspect of goals
When we set goals, we often think about the achievements we want, such as mastering a skill, or getting a degree, or house for example. These are the tangible aspects of a goal.
What we often forget, is what do these goals mean to me? The intangible aspects of our goals. It may become and endless chase for achievements after achievements if we don’t pay close attention to it. Actually, I do feel like social expectations and society’s definition of success ‘pushes’ many people into this direction. I’m not saying that it’s wrong.
There is no connection between the tangible and intangible aspects of a goal, one can feel rich, but empty.
It is worth questioning: what do my goals mean to me? For one, i think i get distracted by what fancies me at the moment. So these questions help to to re-focus on what matters to me most.
Think about your goal - you are actually not after the material aspects of things. If your goal is to earn a million dollars, perhaps what you are after is actually the feeling of financial freedom. If your goal is to save enough for a holiday, perhaps you are looking for the experience of novelty, rest, or relaxation.
I invite you to think about what your goals mean to you:
What is the experience you are looking for? What is the feeling you want to create with this goal?
If I had a magic wand, and you had these achievements you wanted - what would it be like? Where else would you want to experience this?
When i think about this, I think the experience I want is to feel deeply connected with people around me. To feel loved, to have open, meaningful conversations with each other - conversations about our dreams and building each other up with our words and actions. I would like to experience this in my family, and also with my friends and in workplaces.
This is why I really believe in the power of communities - humans are fallible. No one is strong all the time. (That would be borderline psycho)
When we fall, who catches us?
Who are the people we think about? Who are the people I want to surround myself with?
Who do I want to catch when they fall?
We can’t catch everyone. That’s not the point. The point is that even when there is just one person who reaches out, it makes the whole difference to someone’s world.
I want to build strong communities that hold this healing space, so that we can all grow to be more whole and live the lives we truly want.
This is your Why. This is what powers your commitment.
Coaches are powerful not because they impart knowledge. If it were just knowledge-based coaching, the person can only become as good as the coach. Knowing and doing are two different things as well. Americans have the best knowledge in losing weight, yet they have the highest obesity rates as well. Finding out how is not as easy as doing it.
Commitment-based coaching - It’s about doing the practice, identifying what is blocking you, and taking action. With that, growth is infinite!
2) Noticing myself - my first coaching experience
During the workshop, we had the opportunity to get to coach in 2 sessions.
I noticed that when I am focusing on the coachee, i am most in flow. I think about what questions i can ask to support him, and do my best to be a clear mirror that reflects him, asking him if that’s something he really wants to work on. Without judgement, or assumptions. Moments of ‘purity’ i call it.
But there are moments where I notice my own fears, did i catch what he said right? I notice myself feeling the heaviness as he shared his problems - as if it was my responsibility to solve them? The coachee is responsible for doing the work, to continue playing in the field; it is my responsibility to have him reach his goals, and take intentional pauses to reflect and ensure we are aligned to those goals. I notice the tendency to jump in and i want to do this to make myself feel better, instead of holding space for uncomfortable emotions. I notice the feelings of uncertainty, lost - there is comfort acknowledging I don’t have the answers. No one knows, anyway.
3) My relationship with “challenge”
One of the homework given to us after part 1 was to seek feedback from people around us, on whether we are more relationship-focused or challenge-focused.
(Invitation for you to take a pause: which is your dominant muscle?)
Largely the feedback i have gotten is that I am more relationship-focused, though i think in my family i could be more challenge-focused haha.
Through the coaching session with S, I realised this resistance to challenging people comes from my misconception of what ‘challenge’ meant. I realised i narrowly interpreted challenge as being assertive and direct, which could potentially cause conflict. I have the tendency to be conflict avoidant, withdrawing is how i usually respond to tension.
But what I realised when S challenged me to a bigger goal, it gave me more confidence, it felt good. Challenging need not look intimidating; a relationship of growth is when we challenge one another to do better. :) Underlying the challenge, is the belief that ‘I believe you can be bigger’. ‘I see something in you that you may not be able to see right now.’ So the role of a coach is to help people see that potential in themselves too, which otherwise they might not have.
Like what I mentioned in this blogpost:
Believing is seeing. Choosing to see. Helping people to see something beautiful within themselves that they don’t see. Sometimes we forget our own beauty within and we just need people to remind us. We need to remind each other the beauties of our existence, for none of these paths are “by chance”.
Ultimately, what i learnt is that when we focus outwards, these fears become less important. People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. If the intention is to want to care for and help someone, we realise these fears which come from the focus on self will begin to dissolve.
Final thoughts:
The power of noticing and observing are what differentiates good and great coaches perhaps. Noticing what is going on within themselves, and noticing what is going with the coachee.
In fact, if we slow down and notice what is happening within and around us, we may be pleasantly surprised at what we can find.
I noticed that I tend to complain about the feeling of boredom which comes with frustration. This week i notice that if I tried to sit with the boredom, and not jump in to use my phone to distract myself, i become curious about boredom, and how my body feels, what is this boredom trying to tell me?
I haven’t quite figure this out yet - let me sit a little more with it first.