I recently had a chat with one of our freelance Thornfields Associates, Brooke, about a workshop she ran that nearly had all the ingredients of everyone’s favourite Christmas movie (or is it?) — “Die Hard”.

I may be exaggerating slightly, but the main shared ingredient is snow, and in both cases there were successful outcomes — once the main protagonist had overcome a number of weather related difficulties.

Brooke is an experienced Primary Care Manager who works with us as a freelance trainer. She lives in Sheffield (but surely in the virtual world that training now inhabits, a trainer’s location doesn’t matter…?)

Well, Sheffield was recently officially declared the UK’s snowiest city, receiving 11 days of snow each year. That’s at least two more than its nearest city rival for that accolade.

So it was a snowy Friday afternoon in Sheffield and Brooke was about to deliver our Clinical Notes Summarising Workshop to a group of delegates over 200 miles away. It was a remote session being delivered via MS Teams, so surely snow would have no impact on that, right?

Well nearly…

Unfortunately, Brooke’s laptop, which she was using for the delivery, chose to malfunction as she was preparing for the session. To make things worse, the snow was so deep near her house that she was unable to get out and get another one!

However, her brother came to her rescue because he had the added benefit of owning a 4x4 jeep that could better deal with the road conditions — but even he had to walk the last 100 or so yards, to hand-deliver a fully working laptop to Brooke.

That enabled her to successfully deliver a glitch-free session, resulting in such delegate feedback as, “Was very helpful in understanding what I have to do”.

So a great outcome, despite a number of potential setbacks.

When I asked Brooke to reflect on this experience in terms of lessons learnt, she suggested the following three things, which could also easily be applied to many other situations:

• Firstly, don’t give up! Exercise your ‘resilience muscle’ — think creatively about how to deal with any problem you may face.
• Secondly, risk assess activities — consider the likelihood of any potential risk, and develop any necessary contingency plans, just in case.
• Thirdly, have a support network in place — whilst not everyone may have a helpful brother on speed dial, it’s important to have a support network you can turn to in your time of need. It will help you cope with potentially stressful situations.

Whilst Brooke’s experience may sound a bit like “Die Hard”, let’s just hope it doesn’t have as many sequels!

If you want to explore these learning points in more details for yourself and/or your team, then why not have
a look at these Thornfields workshops?

• Personal Resilience
• Self-Care and Wellbeing
• How to Develop Your Problem Solving Skills
• (You can also find a list of the next workshops we’re running here.)