Tips for Coping with the Uncertainty Caused by COVID-19

With COVID-19 throwing some pretty massive curveballs our way, we are all feeling the pressure. Cognitive psychologist Jolie Wills joins our members on Friday to share some hard-won wisdom and tips for coping with uncertainty and stress.Jolie, who specialises in disaster recovery, is co-founder and director of Hummingly – an organisation supporting people and organisations through stress and uncertainty. She has studied how the mind works under prolonged pressure, how we make decisions and how our reactions and behaviours are impacted by stress. Jolie developed and led the psychosocial recovery programming following the Christchurch earthquakes for New Zealand Red Cross before becoming the National Psychosocial Advisor and led the support for the bereaved families in Christchurch. Jolie has lived experience of the challenges and opportunities of recovery from a community perspective as a survivor of the Christchurch earthquake herself, living disaster recovery with her family first-hand. She has been collating lessons learned from disasters around the world and supporting recovery capacity building and recovery in action. Jolie was awarded a Winston Churchill Fellowship to study how best to support the workforce resilience of those working under prolonged pressure (www.supportingthesupporters.org). She is the co-creator of the Doing Well card system, the Cards for Calamity, co-author of Leading in Disaster Recovery: A Companion Through the Chaos, author of the New Zealand Psychological First Aid guide and is a 2019 Edmund Hillary Fellow.