Resilience is not an innate characteristic or personality trait that you either have or you don’t. It arises from successful adaptation to everyday events rather than unusual ones, and emerges from ordinary human capabilities, relationships and other internal and external resources. Ann Masten, a research expert in this area calls it ‘ordinary magic’. It is a quality and a process that can be enhanced and developed which is good news for social workers, who are typically required to manage change and complex, competing demands (Grant and Kinman, 2015, p. 5).
In this free course, Supporting and developing resilience in social work , you investigate how you, as a social work practitioner, can be supported to enhance your emotional resilience.
In the first section you explore the idea of resilience and begin to develop your own ‘emotional resilience toolkit’ of skills and strategies. After this, you then consider the concept of leadership and its skills and qualities. You revisit the importance of supervision in relation to developing and maintaining resilience. Finally, you review what you have added to your toolkit.
This OpenLearn course is an adapted extract from the Open University course K315 Social work practice .
OpenLearn - Supporting and developing resilience in social work Except for third party materials and otherwise, this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence, full copyright detail can be found in the acknowledgements section. Please see full copyright statement for details.