All About the Thriving at Work Programme for Improving Employee Resilience to Stress in Wolverhampton & West Midlands

What is Thriving at Work?

The Thriving at Work training programme is designed to help you and your staff develop a range of evidence-based coping skills and strategies for the stress and anxiety often associated within contemporary work environments, and to develop resilience to on-going challenges.

Tranceform have been delivering this psychology-based programme to the NHS Black Country & Birmingham & Solihull ICBs since Jan 2018.

A central tenet of the programme, which is built firmly upon the proven tools and techniques drawn from our advanced Tranceformental CBT programme, is that anybody can learn to make changes to their ‘thinking’ patterns and ‘beliefs’ in order to develop resilience to life’s problems and challenges, in both work and non-work environments.

This is achieved through:

(a) Developing a degree of insight into our own individual ‘perceptual models’, core-values and ‘limiting beliefs’ that determine how we ultimately ‘feel’ or ‘experience’ any given situation, and

(b) Learning a range of evidence-based tools and techniques to change any unhelpful thinking styles that may not be particularly useful in producing the outcomes that we want.

These perceptual models are known as ‘belief systems’ and we use them to make sense of events or experiences. Belief systems are either ’empowering’ or ‘limiting’ for the individual.

Our Thriving at Work training is focused on helping people to identify any beliefs that are limiting and then changing them.

Its Not the Environment That Causes Stress!

One of the main ‘limiting beliefs’ that people hold is that the way they ‘feel’ is determined by what is happening in the environment around them.

Whilst this is a very commonly held belief, it is in fact a completely subjective belief.

(We recognise that the social environment is full of inequalities and that these may represent ‘stressors’, but it is possible to become resilient against them)

Actually what is really happening is that a person ‘receives’ (or detects) various bits of sensory information from the local environment (such as sound, smells, taste, touch or ‘seeing’ something) and then attaches a particular meaning to that sensory information.

The way that any given person ‘interprets’ the incoming sensory information is based on what they ‘believe’ that information means.

This ‘belief’ about what the sensory information means is a combination of accumulated evidence and socially conditioned rules and regulations!

This may sound a rather unusual way of thinking about things, but if you consider it further, you’ll soon see it makes perfect sense.

Consider, for example, any stressful working environment. If the workplace demands are the direct cause of the Anxiety felt by a person experiencing work related stress, then it follows that everybody in that environment must feel the same way, ie. stressed.

However, this is very rarely the case and in fact what is more normal in any given workplace is that some people are unable to cope with the stress, some people are just about able to ‘keep their heads above water‘ and some other people seem completely un-phased by the demands at all!

How can this be? Well, the very simple explanation is that each individual person ‘processes’ the demands in a way that is unique to them and therefore ‘interprets’ those demands as ‘dangerous’, ‘threatening’ or ‘absolutely no problem at all’ depending on what they believe.

This is known as ‘Resilience’ to stress (or other life problems). Despite the taken-for-granted understandings about the notion of ‘resilience’, it is something that can be ‘learned’ and is not necessarily an ‘inherited’ trait.

Individual Resilience Levels

In this picture we can imagine that the level of stress is like the level of water in a swimming bath. Clearly some people are un-affected by the level of stress whilst others seem to be ‘drowning’ or barely have their heads above the water level!

What’s The Right Solution?

Much of the current strategic advice, for example from the Health & Safety Executive (the ‘Management Standards Model) suggests that business managers should focus on the level of demands (and other factors) that workers are exposed to, and try to reduce them.

Here at Tranceform Psychology we recognise the need to manage the work environment in ‘effective’ ways, but for most businesses and organisations, demanding environments are the norm.

This picture represents the HSE Management Standards solution to Work Related Stress.

“Investigate the principal causes of stress for the people and then introduce mechanisms to reduce or mitigate them completely.”

We consider this an ‘admirable’, if slightly unrealistic, solution in today’s highly demanding work environments.

Take Into Account Individual Resilience

We believe that the quickest, lowest overall cost and most effective solution to this problem is to ‘teach’ people how to develop a better range of ‘coping skills’ and ‘strategies’ so that people are able to ‘experience’ highly demanding environments without any negative health implications.

This is what we call ‘Thriving at Work‘.

Here we can see that the level of demands (the water level) is the same as the original image, but in this representation those people who were previously either ‘struggling’ or ‘drowning’ are now coping with the stress by virtue of the new ‘coping skills’ that they have learnt through following our programme.

This is illustrated by these new coping skills being like boxes that can be stood on to be much higher out of the water!

Delivering The Programme

The Thriving at Work Programme is a ten module course which explores candidates core beliefs and values and then provides proven tools and techniques drawn from Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), Attribution Theory, Social Psychology and Self-Determination theory which are designed to promote greater resilince and self-awareness.

All formats use our specially developed online interactive training portal.

The programme can be delivered in the following formats:

• Face-to-Face Individual coaching sessions at our Wombourne offices in South Staffordshire – usually over a ten week period – £799 per candidate.
• All ten coaching sessions delivered remotely using Zoom which removes any geographical limitations – £799 per candidate.
• As a Self-Directed CBT programme over 10 modules which includes 5 hours of clinical support either face-to-face or via Zoom – £499 per candidate.
• As a Self-Directed CBT programme over 10 modules which includes 2 hours of clinical support either face-to-face or via Zoom – £299 per candidate.