Supporting and developing resilience in social work

# Introduction

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.

## Key questions

- Why do you need to be emotionally resilient, and what skills and strategies are involved?
- What skills and qualities are involved in professional leadership?
- What can you expect from your managers, and how can you get the best out of your supervision?

This OpenLearn course is an adapted extract from the Open University course K315 Social work practice .

OpenLearn - Supporting and developing resilience in social work
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