Workshop · For research institutions and their researchers
The Resilience Workshop:
one session, two outcomes
Built on the Personal Resilience Indicator. Every researcher in the room leaves with a personal, evidence-based starting point. The institution leaves with a benchmarked picture of where its people are thriving, where resilience is under pressure, and where targeted investment will move the needle fastest.
Who this workshop is for
This workshop is for researchers who look fine and are quietly running on empty, and for the institutions that want to see it before burnout does.
This is for you if:
- You keep performing while exhausted, and everyone assumes you are coping
- You suspect perfectionism, overworking or hyper-independence is costing you more than it returns
- You lead or support researchers and want a measured picture of where a cohort actually stands
It is not a crisis service: if you are in acute distress, the right first step is clinical support, and we will say so.
The most driven people are the last to notice
Research institutions attract exceptional minds. People are drawn not just to a career but to a purpose: advancing science, understanding disease, answering questions nobody has answered before. That calibre of commitment is what drives world-class research. It is also, without the right foundations in place, what makes sustained high performance hard to maintain.
The most driven people are often the last to notice when their reserves are running low. In a research environment, that has consequences, not just for individuals but for the quality and continuity of the work itself. The institutes that keep exceptional talent performing over the long term do not leave this to chance. They build the conditions for it deliberately.
This workshop exists to start that work, and to make it measurable from the first half hour.
And here a distinction matters that academia routinely gets wrong: a lot of researchers are not resilient. They are very good at enduring. They keep performing while exhausted, anxious, isolated and increasingly disconnected from themselves, so everybody assumes they are fine, including them. The patterns that carry this are rarely random bad habits: perfectionism, overworking, hyper-independence and living entirely in the head are protective adaptations, and academia rewards every one, perfectionism reads as rigour, overworking as commitment, hyper-independence as competence. A pattern can build an impressive career while quietly draining the person underneath it. The workshop names this from the front, includes direct guided experience of what regulation feels like in the body rather than another explanation of stress, and uses the room deliberately: no forced disclosure, simply the reliable moment when people discover that half the room feels guilty when resting and privately believes everyone else is coping better. And the leadership debrief is straight about the other half of the equation: if an entire cohort is depleted, the answer cannot only be individual skills; the PRI shows where the individual has agency and where the environment needs to change.
For the researchers in the room
A personal resilience profile before the session, and a workshop that turns it into specific, workable changes. Your results are yours. Nobody sees your individual profile but you.
For the institution behind them
An anonymised, aggregated evidence base: where your people stand against comparable research institutions, and a roadmap for where investment will generate the most significant shift in wellbeing, performance and retention.
How the workshop works
Three components, deliberately sequenced. The PRI comes first so that nobody arrives at an abstract session; everyone works from their own data on the day. The debrief comes last so that leadership decisions rest on what the room actually showed, not on assumptions.
If you will be sitting in the room
A fair question to ask before any wellbeing session: is this actually for me, or is my data the product? Here is the straight answer. Your individual PRI profile belongs to you. Leadership sees patterns across the whole group, never a person. The session itself is built so that you leave with something concrete: not heightened awareness, but a specific picture of what is protecting your performance right now, what is eroding it, and one or two changes sharp enough to act on the following week.
Resilience, measured properly, turns out not to be a fixed trait. That is the single most useful thing the PRI shows people, and participants who have measured themselves before and after working on it say it plainly:
“Seeing a great improvement between the two PRIs that I took, I also learned that it can change, it’s not a fixed characteristic.”
Participant Sep 2023 cohort
The other thing the room reliably delivers is the discovery of not being the only one. A workshop room does something a webinar cannot.
If you are responsible for the people in the room
Coordinators and institute leaders usually come to this workshop with one of two triggers: a mental health awareness week that needs more substance than awareness, or an assessment, review or retention question that needs evidence. The workshop is built to serve both.
Evidence, not impressions. The debrief gives you an anonymised, benchmarked picture of where your researchers stand, with the PRI’s research-institution data allowing comparisons that generic resilience tools cannot offer. The standards for judging any resilience instrument, including ours, are ones I take apart in my article on resilience psychometrics; bring those questions to any provider, us included.
Your existing data, made more useful. Where your institute runs a culture or staff survey, we connect the PRI results with it, so you get a robust, multi-source evidence base rather than another disconnected report.
A defensible next step. You leave with a roadmap for where targeted investment will generate the most significant shift in wellbeing, performance and retention, which is just the kind of prioritised, evidence-based plan assessments and funders increasingly ask to see.
Framework fit. The workshop maps directly onto the wellbeing and mental health themes strengthened in the Vitae Researcher Development Framework 2025, which UK institutions are currently remapping their researcher development programmes against.
Timing works well around mental health awareness weeks, onboarding periods for new classes, or ahead of institutional reviews. Formats run face-to-face, virtual or hybrid, in English, and scale from a three-hour session to a full workshop day.
What a single session can and cannot do
We will not pretend otherwise: a three-hour workshop creates awareness, a shared language and a personal starting point. It does not, by itself, change behaviour that has been years in the making. Behavioural change needs time, repetition and support while new habits meet real deadlines.
That is what our Resilience Training is for: a nine-week training built on the same Personal Resilience Indicator, in which researchers measure themselves, work through the drivers over multiple sessions, and measure again at the end. Institutions often run the workshop first, use the debrief to decide, and follow with the full training for the classes that need it most. The workshop tells you where you stand. The training changes where you stand.
The format at a glance, every stage, and how much it asks of you
Who leads it
DR. NADINE SINCLAIR
Dr Nadine Sinclair is a Managing Director of Mind Matters and co-creator of the Personal Resilience Indicator. A scientist by training and at heart, she conducted her doctoral research at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry. She has 30,000+ hours of hands-on project management experience, built across 18 years as a strategy consultant, at McKinsey and as an independent consultant. She has trained over 1,500 researchers at more than 30 institutions across Europe in sustainable peak performance, and Mind Matters is part of a select group vetted by the Max Planck Society’s Planck Academy for expertise in Healthy Work and Resilience.
PAUL SINCLAIR
Paul Sinclair is a Managing Director of Mind Matters and brings the depth side of this work: hundreds of hours a year of one-to-one practice, much of it with researchers, on the patterns that erode resilience from below. He is a certified Compassionate Inquiry practitioner, one of a small group personally trained and certified by Dr Gabor Maté over two and a half years.
Frequently asked questions
A structured session, in our case three hours built on the validated Personal Resilience Indicator, in which every researcher works from their own resilience profile rather than from abstract slides: what is currently protecting their performance, what is eroding it, and one or two changes concrete enough to act on the following week. The institution receives an anonymised, benchmarked picture of the whole group alongside it.
No. Your individual PRI profile belongs to you and is never shared. Institute leadership sees only anonymised patterns aggregated across the whole group, benchmarked against comparable research institutions. This separation is deliberate: the moment individual scores could affect careers, truthful self-report would end, and the data would be worthless.
Three ways: everyone works from their own measured data rather than general advice; the group format surfaces the discovery of not being the only one, which no webinar delivers; and the institution gets an evidence base, not an attendance list. A talk raises awareness. This workshop produces a personal starting point per researcher and a benchmarked roadmap per institution.
The leadership debrief turns the anonymised results into a prioritised roadmap. Many institutions then run our nine-week Resilience Training for the groups the data says need it most: same instrument, measured before and after, so the next budget decision rests on documented change. The workshop tells you where you stand; the training changes where you stand.
Start with the measurement
If resilience has surfaced as a priority, from leadership, from a culture survey, or from what your researchers are reporting, this is the session that gives every researcher a personal, evidence-based starting point and gives you a benchmarked picture of where targeted investment will move the needle fastest.
