One thing that has become clear to a lot of us since lockdown began is what a lifeline time spent in nature is.

Whether it’s pottering around your garden, enjoying Spring in all its vivid charm when out walking in one of Bristol’s park, or traipsing through the woods, for many, it has become a source of sustenance that feels almost as important as eating.

Exercises that generate conversations and an exploration of ideas promotes open communication in the team, horizontally, across departments and vertically too.

With good communication, ideas can flow between interns and management as much as they can within teams. Diversity of opinion, different perspectives and richness of feedback, it all drives up quality and deepens work relationships.

One of the reasons why leaders need to take workplace resilience seriously is that it creates an organisational culture that is fit for the future.

Almost every one of us has an awareness that we are living in times of massive change. The old world is passing away and the emergent world is not yet in full view.

A team that knows how to manage their time will be less stressed, higher achieving and most importantly of all, they will have more room left over for the things they enjoy and the things that develop them.

Research suggests that if you let people be self-directed (in the context of clear parametres and support) it will boost commitment to the organisation, not diminish it. Once an organisation embarks on a sincerely felt mission to foster employee wellbeing, all sorts of weird, wonderful and unexpected directions or travel emerge.

It seems there is always stuff flying into the inbox, the in-tray, and no sooner is something scratched off the To Do list, 3 more things get added onto the end of it.

Spending most of our time in ‘just about keeping up’ mode is a serious culprit for why so many of us feel stressed when we’re ‘On’ and too knackered to do anything meaningful or enjoyable when we’re ‘Off’. But there is hope!

A successful team is nothing if not a motivated team. Broadly speaking, empowerment is a short-cut to motivation.

Knowing each other in a social sense, not just a role sense, knowing what makes everyone tick as individuals, and communicating the company vision in a way that strikes a chord with all, that fosters that sense of belonging too. 

Not always harried and stressed by looming deadlines and unexpected set-backs, but calm and in control, planning and doing things ahead of time…. This leaves the headspace we need to stay cool and sort it when the inevitable glitch/crisis/hiccup/catastrophe does strike.

We have a list of things To-Do we’d like you to work with. It’s a little ridiculous, so prepare yourself for a fun, team-bonding experience! We’ll share the To-Do list with you, then we’ll give instructions on how to run this activity. This list is ready for you to print it out or to copy onto on a large sheet of paper.

Have you got an away day to organise? Don’t want to take the team paint-balling again? Here are 3 alternatives if you’re in or near Bristol and looking for something a bit different for your dose of team building this time.

How does a good leader lead? And how does leadership affect the culture in the workplace?

We all know how bad leaders lead – we’ve all heard about, or directly survived the bosses from hell who create organisational cultures that are poisonous. See our list of the symptoms of a toxic work culture.

Resilient leaders see setbacks as something that can be recovered from with haste and minimal drama. crucially, they are setbacks are seen as something that can be learnt from. In that way, the setbacks achieve some positive value. They become fuel for growth rather than something that depletes the mission.

We believe that forest immersion can provide a super-boost to any organisation’s innovative capacity.

Here’s how:

Observing nature’s processes, patterns and practices give rise to elegant solutions to complex problems. This is a practise often referred to as biomimicry.

Looking for a quick win? We’ve got a few suggestions for quick activities you can roll out in the workplace, immediately. Each of these team building activities is a quick way to foster resilience in your team while at the same time reinforcing relationships between the members of the team.

However much you care about the wellbeing of your team, understanding how resilience training will impact your bottom line is maybe going to be the biggest decider when it comes to bringing resilience into your learning and development programme.

When the people working in your business have appreciation, respect and awe for nature, some excellent business outcomes follow. There really are some important ways that strengthening the connection between your team with the natural world will strengthen your business.

By investing in resilience training, an organisation opens up its teams’ awareness to the vast resource for creativity, problem-solving, individual and group achievement and enjoyment that every member holds. 

The research based insights, practical strategies and the motivation to actively experiment with the learning that resilience training provides sets in motion a culture change.

A major factor in why forest training benefits organisations is that when teams spend facilitated time in nature, as a group and as individuals, they experience the creation of a strong container and a felt sense of containment. 

Besides being fun and interesting, and perhaps ticking a few well-being related boxes, what will it actually do for their team and for their organisation?

On a very basic level, the difference that resilience training makes is that it brings awareness to the multiple components that contribute to resilience.

Forest Leadership training somehow strengthens our awareness of being a part of a greater whole, not just in terms of how we relate to the ‘more than human world’, i.e. nature, but also in terms of our feeling of belonging and value among our colleagues, and within our wider organisations.