Building Emotional Resilience. Understanding the connection between emotions and optimal learning to elicit robust development.

There has been an assumption that human beings are rational decision-makers. However, more recent research shows that we are not thinking machines that feel, but we are feeling machines that on occasion think. We make decisions based on our emotions. This new understanding has implications for how we lead, learn, relate, parent, develop etc. It also involves learning how to recognize, name and regulate one’s emotions, which leads to greater emotional competence to make sense of oneself and one’s environment, make better decisions, develop agency and act in the world. Being part of an ever-changing world, the need for emotional resilience and positive emotions connected to learning is critical for our wellbeing and development. Building this emotional resilience is a process that is not yet adequately understood and is the focus of this PhD project. It will research both how adults learn to become more aware of their emotional patterns and triggers as they experience them, as well as test the effectiveness for this of carefully designed learning sequences. This will involve helping project participants identify the micro-moments and contextual factors that would usually bring forth an unhealthy tendency to bypass or suppress their emotions. They will test a specific form of micro-learning structured activities that will be tested for how well these programs support participants’ ability to develop emotional resilience over time. Organizations are asking for leader development opportunities for all employees that are based more on relevant daily experience, rather than expensive classroom-based programs that only a few can participate in. The Center for Transformative Leadership (CTL) will use this research to respond to this need by developing scalable, online learning platforms and sets of activities to enable organizations to support people’s developmental growth.

The training and development industry in the field of leadership and management has been criticized for many years now for consuming vast resources while under delivering on improved performance and the resulting lack of sustained outcomes. There are many perspectives on this issue, such as the limitations of behavioral training, knowledge and application gaps, a lack of practical approaches, overly relying on broader pop psychology approaches and the need for a better understanding of development itself. These issues form a complex set of critical R&D challenges for the field. The Center for Transformative Leadership (CTL) has been involved in action research initiatives to understand these issues for the past ten years. CTL has delivered impactful, in person leadership development programs and understands the broad mechanisms involved in successful leadership development. However, there is another, more pressing R&D challenge being faced: How can we make such leadership development available to everyone? Companies are moving from high cost, executive only off-site trainings and looking for scalable, on-the-job oriented micro-training that can be made available to all employees. This combination of challenges requires an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on research in fields such as dynamic skill theory, neuroscience of learning, micro-skill and habit building and recent neuroscience research on emotions and emotional resilience. This research project is aimed at understanding the diverse interdisciplinary mechanisms involved in the design of scalable, online, self-guided leadership development programs. From the pilot designs coming from this, initial testing of their impact will be the second aim of this research project.