Workplace Resilience: Staying in the Zone for Performance and Calm 

Managers spend a lot of their week reacting, from a tricky conversation in the diary to a deadline shifting without warning. HR Recruit’s latest virtual boardroom, ‘Staying in the Zone – Tools for Resilience and Performance,’ brought together Dr Izzy Battye and Dr Naomi Filio, clinical psychologists working across NHS services, children’s social care and organisational consultancy. 

“These are all really useful states that we will move between at different points in the day, perhaps, or in our lives, depending on what’s going on.” 

Reading the signals behind stress responses 

Much of the first half focused on the states of activation people cycle through without noticing: Calm and relaxed, fight and flight, and freeze and detached. Naomi used the example of nearly stepping in front of a bus to show that the nervous system isn’t malfunctioning when it triggers an anxious spike, it’s simply doing its job. She also pointed to something quieter and more common in office life, the double screening habit of half watching a show while scrolling a phone, as a subtle form of freeze and detachment that most people would never label as such. 

Turning workplace resilience theory into practice 

Izzy picked up the practical side, walking attendees through a calm place visualisation live on the call. This is where workplace resilience training tends to separate itself from generic wellbeing advice. Rather than telling people to relax, Izzy gave them a specific, repeatable exercise: Bring to mind a real or imagined place, notice the detail and use it as an anchor when things get tense before a difficult meeting or a hard conversation with a direct report. 

She followed this with a grounding exercise built around the four elements, earth, air, water and fire, each one tied to a different physical sensation, from noticing where the body makes contact with a chair to gently pinching the tongue to switch the digestive system back on after a stress response. Izzy admitted she let this one run longer than planned, closer to nine minutes rather than the usual three or four, because the room was clearly getting something from it. 

Workplace resilience tools covered during the boardroom 

The session moved through several techniques attendees can use directly with their own teams: 

• Calm place visualisation – A short, guided exercise to build a mental anchor before stressful moments 

• Slow tapping and resourcing – Drawing on resource figures, real or imagined, to build a felt sense of support 

• Four elements grounding – A sensory exercise using earth, air, water and fire to settle the nervous system 

• Colour breathing – Breathing in what is needed and breathing out what is not, useful as a thirty second reset between meetings 

• EMDR awareness – A brief look at how the approach is increasingly offered in group settings for teams processing shared difficulty 

What came through clearly during the live Q&A was that Izzy and Naomi were not selling a quick fix. When a manager asked how to handle staff who roll their eyes at the suggestion of a breathing exercise, Izzy was blunt about it:  

“If just taking nice deep breaths was going to solve all of this, we wouldn’t be sat here talking.”  

She followed this by stressing that acknowledging the underlying stress matters just as much as offering the tool itself. 

In Summary 

The boardroom closed with a reminder that landed well with the HR audience in the room. None of these exercises are mandatory or one size fits all. Izzy was careful to flag that consent matters, that people should stop if something feels uncomfortable, and that the pace should always match what feels right for the individual and the team. 

For HR professionals thinking about how to introduce workplace resilience practices without it feeling forced, this session offered a useful starting point: Short, specific tools that managers can use themselves before rolling them out more widely.