Doctors tend to be highly resilient; we need to be with the pressures we face.
Yet even if we cope well most of the time, we may not always be as resilient as we’d like. Research identifies doctors as a high-risk group for stress-related harm and also shows the pressures we’re facing are increasing. We can find ourselves overwhelmed by increasing demands or exhausted and dipping in our mood, morale or energy.
And then on top of that, we’ve had the pandemic – which brought significant threat to life to those unvaccinated and now, increasingly, pandemic fatigue and exhaustion. It has been, and still is, for many, a very tough time.
Resilience training can play a role in helping us make the best of difficult conditions. It needs to be accompanied by structural and workplace changes too – resilience interventions need to happen at a range of system levels, not just the personal. There are things we can do on a personal level though, and the last twenty years has seen breakthroughs in our scientific understanding of what helps resilience grow. Research has also shown that resilience training helps protect against the risk of depression, anxiety and stress related harm, while also strengthening our capacity to address challenges. That’s why we’ve set up this website and have been working with ResilienceTraining.net to develop a range of online resilience courses.
At the moment we have three online courses for a general audience. The first is short (about an hour) and free, the second lasts about three hours and is video-based, so that you can start at any time. The third course, the Resilience Practitioner Training, is a more in-depth course for helping professionals (not just doctors) who’d like to take a deeper dive into this topic, learning skills and practices both for self-care and for passing on to others (whether patients, colleagues or trainees). Here’s the links.
Free course – Resilience Skills for Free in a Time of Coronavirus Crisis.
About an hour of video presented by Dr Chris Johnstone, offering an introduction to practical resilience supporting practices. Please see https://resiliencetraining.net/p/free-online-resilience-training
Video-based online course – Seven Ways to Build Resilience
With about three hours of video tutorials, presented by Dr Chris Johnstone, introducing practices based on the seven pathway framework introduced in his book Seven Ways to Build Resilience. Please see https://resiliencetraining.net/p/seven-ways-to-build-resilience
This costs £30 (UK pounds, currencies can be converted if needed). There is a discount available for group bookings. If interested, please email us.
A more in-depth option – The Resilience Practitioner Training
This course runs as a live webinar based course once a year from October to January, and then is available as a recorded version for the rest of the year.
The next live webinar based version starts on Wednesday 27th October 2021, running weekly for seven sessions at 7.30pm to 9pm UK time, with a follow up webinar at the same time on Wednesday 26th January 2022.
For details, please see https://resiliencetraining.net/p/resilience-practitioner-training
For more about resilience training, please see this video.
Here’s an interview with Dr Chris Johnstone by Mark Williamson from Action for Happiness at one of their webinars in November 2020.
Chris describes some of his most important learnings about resilience, both in his past work as a medical doctor, and in the resilience training work he’s developed over the last three decades.
About us
ResilienceforDoctors.com is run in partnership by Dr Chris Johnstone (a resilience specialist and online educator who trained as a GP and then worked in mental health for many years) and Dr Simon Wade (a practising GP who set up and runs WebinarsForGPs.com, an online training service for GPs). Our advisory panel includes Professor David Peters of the Centre for Resilience at the University of Westminster. David also has a background as a GP before making resilience training his main work.