Session D1
Tracks
Stream D
| Friday, May 16, 2025 |
| 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM |
Overview
Brick by Brick: Building Cognitive Hardiness to Cope with Stress at Work | Dr Sherrica Senewiratne (60 mins)
Presenter
Dr Sherrica Senewiratne
Deakin University
Brick by Brick: Building Cognitive Hardiness to Cope with Stress at Work
2:00 PM - 3:00 PMAbstract
Have you ever come head to head with a stressor at work that you just couldn't cope with? Think about the last time you received news that a deadline has been brought forward or a team member has called in sick, and you have been requested to take over their workload. Stress can be helpful to motivate us to work more effectively, but constant stress can end up being detrimental to our physical and mental health.
Through research, coping resources have been identified as integral to helping leaders and employees manage stressors at work. One of these is cognitive hardiness, a mental appraisal process that involves evaluating one's ability to cope with a stressor by thinking about their commitment, control and challenge when faced with a stressor.
Within this workshop, the aim is to build awareness of what cognitive hardiness means, and ensure you can further understand the three components that make up cognitive hardiness. As a result, you will be provided with a bank of strategies to use to build your cognitive hardiness. In addition, there will be activities introduced to help you assess your current level of cognitive hardiness and further understand how these strategies can interrelate to help you cope with stress and manage your emotions when you are stressed. As a result, you will learn to cope more effectively when faced with a stressor so you can remain motivated and engaged at work. There will also be a discussion around why this is important, through introducing the impact of too much stress at work, and how to recognise the signs.
As such, the goals of this session are to:
1. Discuss stress and how it impacts you at work
2. Introduce cognitive hardiness and its components
3. Assess your current level of cognitive hardiness and work within a team to understand the different components of cognitive hardiness
4. Provide strategies to help you build your cognitive hardiness
Through research, coping resources have been identified as integral to helping leaders and employees manage stressors at work. One of these is cognitive hardiness, a mental appraisal process that involves evaluating one's ability to cope with a stressor by thinking about their commitment, control and challenge when faced with a stressor.
Within this workshop, the aim is to build awareness of what cognitive hardiness means, and ensure you can further understand the three components that make up cognitive hardiness. As a result, you will be provided with a bank of strategies to use to build your cognitive hardiness. In addition, there will be activities introduced to help you assess your current level of cognitive hardiness and further understand how these strategies can interrelate to help you cope with stress and manage your emotions when you are stressed. As a result, you will learn to cope more effectively when faced with a stressor so you can remain motivated and engaged at work. There will also be a discussion around why this is important, through introducing the impact of too much stress at work, and how to recognise the signs.
As such, the goals of this session are to:
1. Discuss stress and how it impacts you at work
2. Introduce cognitive hardiness and its components
3. Assess your current level of cognitive hardiness and work within a team to understand the different components of cognitive hardiness
4. Provide strategies to help you build your cognitive hardiness
.....
Sherrica is an Organisational Psychologist who completed a PhD focused on servant leader wellbeing. Her research interests include wellbeing, burnout and leadership, amongst other organisational psychology topics such as career development, resilience and organisational behaviour.
Through her research, Sherrica developed a passion for introducing cognitive hardiness as a coping resource at work, and hopes to create greater awareness of how cognitive hardiness can help leaders and employees cope more effectively when faced with stressors at work, and outside of work.
Sherrica has also worked in consulting, providing clients with creative, user-centred solutions to workplace problems, prior to founding her own coaching and consulting business, Stellamari Consulting, focused on improving wellbeing and career development in migrants.
