Where Work Meets Life

In this episode, Dr. Laura welcomes Dr. Marie-Hélène Pelletier, leadership psychologist, executive coach, and author, to the show to tackle the issue of resilience. Resilience is a quality that increases our ability to handle stress and bounce back from setbacks with greater ease. But how do we identify healthy ways to develop resilience and to tap into it when needed? How can it assist our work performance? Marie-Hélène answers these questions in her new book “The Resilience Plan: A Strategic Approach to Optimizing Your Work Performance and Mental Health” and shares key insights in this episode.

In working with her clients through executive coaching and in her speaking work, Marie-Hélène would hear feedback about how helpful her knowledge of resilience was. That led her to write this book so she could share the message with a greater audience. Resilience, according to Marie-Hélène, is the skill we need to hone to deal with the chronic demands at work and life in general. In her book, she walks us through analyzing the demands on our time and how to create a strategic plan to strengthen our resilience through action. The ideas that Dr. Pelletier shares are uniquely positioned to help us survive increasing patterns of burnout and her ideas can be tailored to each of our individual needs.
“Then you may have had people around you that tell you, oh, you’re so resilient, we can give you anything and it always works. And then they’ll start calling you the rock, the rock of the team, the rock of the family. And so you get to a point where you buy it, you associate with that idea. It feels like it’s an identity. And that’s a trap because we know from research [that] resilience is not a personality trait. It’s a state.” Dr. Marie-Hélène Pelletier