RESILIENCE integrates corporate wellbeing, stress mastery, emotional intelligence, cognitive discipline, neurobiology and leadership. Resilience underpins leadership and work in modern organisations dealing with the turbulence.
The Resilience Institute, in partnership with senior management, works with organisations (of all sizes and from all industries and geographies) to create sustainable high-performance.
We believe that an organisation’s Resilience is a direct function of the resilience of its human capital; first and foremost that of the executive team and of its board, but ultimately that of the entire workforce.
Resilience is a critical personal competency for individuals who want to re-ignite their careers, succeed under sustained pressure; recover quickly from work, health or relationship setbacks and to remain on course to fulfill their life goals. Equally, Resilience is now a key strategic competence for organisations to attract, motivate, develop, nurture and retain great people.
The growth and development of the Resilience Institute’s thinking is maintained through disciplined research. In particular, the constant review and assessment of the stream of exciting developments in preventative medicine, psychology, the brain sciences, systems theory, leadership and integral practices.
The strength of the Resilience Institute offerings rest on four cornerstone components:
- integrated scientific discipline;
- business and organisational experience;
- integrated training intervention; and
- individual coaching
The roots of the Institute lie in the sports medicine practice of its founder, Dr Sven Hansen (MBChB, MBA). This was established in 1989 (together with Dr Merv Dickinson) and based in Christchurch; its prime focus was performance optimisation for elite athletes.
What the two partners found they could achieve for New Zealand athletes proved to be inspiration for helping people in business and other work environments to master stress, secure and enjoy physical vitality and begin to tune their individual and collective thinking towards sustainable performance. So the process began of formally introducing organisations – their executives, managers and staff – to the disciplines of sports science under the headings of corporate health, executive medicine, stress mastery and team development. The objective was to integrate these disciplines into the drama of leadership, strategy and team-building.
Systematic collaboration and extensive research resulted in the establishment of some of the first integrated long term New Zealand leadership development courses. It seemed that the business world was at last ready to accept and take the concept of Human Capital Resilience seriously. This work ran for a number of years and proved to be the foundation for today’s Resilient Leadership.
The Institute itself was founded in 2002. Its mission was (and remains) to deliver high impact, practical, evidence-based and integrated Resilience training by bringing together modern preventative medicine, positive psychology, emotional intelligence, cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) and neuroscience.
During the years preceding The Institute’s formation and subsequently, literally thousands of executives and professionals have shared their stories of success and failure. They built stronger bodies, achieved greater levels of emotional control and understanding and have developed ever sharper minds. These participants have variously completed the HealthCheck, the Practical Resilience programme, the RESILIENT!360© Assessment, and the Resilient Leadership programme.
In addition to the core training (and often in support of it), The Institute has developed and offers a range of Keynotes and Training Workshops and Sven has published Five Books on Resilience which are regularly used in support of the training but which are regularly purchased separately.
In 2003, Stuart Taylor, who gained exposure to The Institute’s approach and materials as one of its clients, joined the Institute and proceeded to establish the business in Australia. In 2005 Stuart and Sven proceeded to pioneer the business in New South Wales – work which has continued through to the present time. In 2008 they were joined by Tim Ellis, an ex-PricewaterhouseCoopers consulting partner and more recently an executive in IBM’s New Zealand Global Business Services team. Between them, Sven, Stuart and Tim, coordinate and deliver The Institute’s strategic and corporate Resilience interventions throughout New Zealand and Australia and increasingly in Asia and beyond.