A wellbeing programme born in Christchurch is a bubble of hope helping people around the world deal with grief and develop resilience during the Covid-19 pandemic.

“I feel really buoyed and excited about the future of Christchurch,” says New Zealand Institute of Wellbeing & Resilience (NZIWR) director Dr Lucy Hone. “We often have visitors at home, predominantly young people down from Auckland because that’s where our sons are now, and they are always amazed at how beautiful our city centre is.”

She believes the story of Christchurch’s new face and its post-quake life should be shouted from the rooftops. “People want to come here, so we need to get better at showcasing that we are the best little city in the world to live in,” she says. “I have had enough of it being presented as the Garden City with images of punting, because we are so much more than that. Those are the images of the past… I want to see images of people sitting in traffic in Auckland, and us already out at the beach.”

Over the last two years, from her Ōtautahi home office, Lucy has developed a new programme with NZIWR, called Coping With Loss. The programme helps people around the world deal with their own tragedies. It came about as a response to the pandemic, but the programme is for anyone who needs it, Lucy says. “People, sadly, always have to deal with death.”

The institute is a global brand based in Christchurch. The team work remotely, and over half of them are in Ōtautahi. Last year, NZIWR trained 30,000 people around the world, including leadership teams in massive multinational companies and well-known tech giants.

It’s no secret that Christchurch has seen its share of trauma, between the Canterbury earthquakes of 2010 and 2011, and the March 15, 2019 mosque shootings. Lucy has also dealt with her own personal tragedy – the public health and wellbeing expert became a household name after speaking and writing about coping with the loss of her daughter Abi, who died with her best friend and her friend’s mother in a car crash in 2014.

The programme is based on the principles of Lucy’s book, Resilient Grieving, and her viral 2020 TED Talk, both grounded in Lucy’s personal experience of grief and resilience as well as her research on the topics. It is built around the knowledge that people are looking to be active participants in their own mental health, and want the tools to do so.

“When Abi and our friends died, I was horrified by the existing resources,” Lucy says. “They were very passive. We were told to write off five years of our life, and we were told about the five stages of grief. I was like, bugger that, I want to know what I can do.”

She looked for support groups, and found them wanting. “You just have to go look on Facebook and search for these groups. They’re miserable places to hang out. I didn’t want to add to my misery. I wanted hope. So we’ve created a hopeful place.”

Coping With Loss is a nine-step online course, combined with a community. It’s a place to share and support people to take action.

“It’s been amazing to see this community come to life and the appetite people have for it.”

Lucy is the first to acknowledge that the word ‘resilience’ has become overused and maligned in Christchurch, as politicians, media, and just about everyone else have used ‘resilient’ to describe the city and its people since 2011. Lucy calls it ‘resilience fatigue’.

“The word was actually being bandied around in the global financial crisis in 2008, that’s when I got into it,” she says. “People are fed up with being told they need to be resilient, without being taught how. They’re told to be resilient without being empowered to do so.”

The word is even used as a stick to beat people with, Lucy says. They are told to be more resilient and work through burnout when they are overworked and under-resourced.

But used properly and carefully, it’s a word used to describe something essential. All the time, people need to deal with divorce, dementia, death, infertility, terrible diagnoses and other huge life events. We all need to understand how to understand how we can help our own mental health, Lucy says.

“And that is resilience. You can call it whatever you want.”

Dr Lucy Hone’s tips for developing resilience

The best tool for individuals looking to develop resilience is to ask yourself: “Is what I’m doing, how I’m choosing to think, how I’m choosing to act, helping or harming me?”

You can change the wording of this question, but the principle is the same. Ask yourself things like this:

• Is having that glass of wine is helping or harming me achieving my goals?
• Is arguing with my daughter about a towel on the floor helping or harming our strained relationship?
• Is scrolling through Instagram helping or harming me finishing that presentation for tomorrow?

This technique is research-driven, and it works. I get a message a week from people around the world saying: “Your ‘helping or harming’ strategy changed my life.”

And for resilience in the workplace, we encourage teams to consider these factors that can cause or prevent burnout:

• The support you’re giving each other
• How well you know each other
• How inclusive the environment is
• How much autonomy team members have
• Levels of fairness

There are ways of thinking and acting we can put in place to improve our own capacity for resilience. And we can help others by including them; being curious, not judgemental, about their differences; and making them feel welcome, safe and validated.

copingwithloss.teachable.com