Workplace dilemma: Which is better, going for counselling or building one’s emotional resilience?
What you need to know:
- Fostering emotional resilience empowers individuals to interpret stressors adaptively, harness internal resources, and rebound more swiftly from adversity.
- This may entail cultivating habits such as reflective thinking, emotional regulation, physical activity, and meaning-making in the face of hardship.
- Mental health interventions offer diagnostic clarity, structured support, and the normalisation of distress, all of which create a safe psychological space from which resilience can emerge.
Q: In dealing with work stress and life’s pressures, what would you recommend as an effective balance between seeking external support and building my own emotional resilience? Is there a danger of going too far in any of the two directions?
A: The balance between seeking professional mental health interventions and cultivating emotional resilience is personal, nuanced, and essential. While interventions such as therapy, medication, or psychiatric support provide crucial scaffolding in times of psychological distress, they are not antithetical to resilience; rather, they often enable its growth.
Resilience— generally the capacity to adapt to adversity and recover from emotional setbacks—is not an innate trait but a dynamic that can be forged through conscious effort and, paradoxically, therapeutic guidance. Fostering emotional resilience empowers individuals to interpret stressors adaptively, harness internal resources, and rebound more swiftly from adversity. This may entail cultivating habits such as reflective thinking, emotional regulation, physical activity, and meaning-making in the face of hardship.
Mental health interventions offer diagnostic clarity, structured support, and the normalisation of distress, all of which create a safe psychological space from which resilience can emerge. Conversely, over-reliance on external support without engaging in internal development risks cultivating dependency rather than strength. Defaulting to exclusive, long-term dependency on external support can undermine personal agency and contribute to the atrophy of emotional resilience.
The optimal path lies, therefore, not in choosing either external support or developing emotional resilience, but in recognising their interdependence. Seeking help is itself a resilient act, acknowledging that one’s current coping strategies may be overstretched, and that growth often requires collaborative effort. At the same time, building resilience ensures that future challenges are met with greater internal resources, gradually shifting locus of control inward. Ultimately, the judicious integration of intervention and resilience fosters a sustainable, adaptive approach to psychological well-being—one that anchors mental health in external wisdom and internal mastery alike.
Factors including your personal experience, the gravity of issues at hand and the wider context at a given time can determine whether the approach you take should draw more of your internal resources or lean towards external support. There are days you can wrestle with the vagaries of life bare-fisted, and others when you will profit from procuring some armament.
Fred Gituku is a HR specialist.