Build Your Resilience

SUMMARY

Resilience is about being able to propel yourself forward out of adversity. It's being able to navigate through a particular situation and take out it things that can help you move on.

It’s not about hardening up.

It’s not about eating some concrete and toughening up.

That thinking can be very damaging to your health.

This week, I will help you understand the different types of resilience:

1. Physical Resilience

2. Emotional Resilience

3. Mental Resilience

4. Social Resilience

Resilience is a key shift that you and I need to make when we’re in the area of People Leadership.

So, instead of just learning the skills of how to lead people, you want to make sure that you build and continue to grow in your resilience.

TRANSCRIPT

Do you feel like working with people all the time can get you down, where you feel a little bit exhausted? Where physically, mentally, and emotionally it is sucking away your energy?

Well, stick with me because in this week's episode, I want to continue our conversation into the people leadership shifts by helping you to stay strong and navigate this thing called: working with people.

Hi, this is Grant Herbert, Leadership and Sustainable Performance Coach, and today I want to continue our conversation around the ‘9 Crucial Shifts Every Leader Needs to Make’ so that they can thrive and survive in all areas of their life by moving into the people leadership areas. What I want to do is help you to build your resilience.

Over the last few weeks, we've been talking about these nine crucial shifts. We talked about the three faces of leadership: Personal Leadership, Professional Leadership, and then People Leadership.

We learnt there’s more to being a leader than having skills to get people to do what you want them to do. It starts with your inner certainty and your own personal leadership and then steps into being able to get the results that you need from your output.

Now we want to unpack, over the next three weeks, those three crucial areas of People Leadership.

Resilience is a word that's been thrown around a lot. It’s one that's also misunderstood, and in my opinion, it’s sometimes mistaught. People seem to think of it as hardening up. It's all part of this hustle-and-grind mentality of just keep going, be strong, or just keep pushing through.

But I know from my own experience, and from working with thousands of people all around the world, that that is a lot easier said than done. In fact, my experience is that thinking this way is even harmful.

Resilience is about being able to propel yourself forward out of adversity. It's being able to navigate through a particular situation and take out things that can help you move on.

It’s not about hardening up.

It’s not about eating some concrete and toughening up.

That thinking can be very damaging to your health.

Now, when you look at resilience in the context of People Leadership, the shift that I will talk to you about here is to go from being stressed all the time to being strong.

We all wear “stress” as a badge these days.

“Yes, I'm stressed.”

And stress is a good thing.

There's a type of stress called “Eustress”, which you need to be able to operate. What I am talking to you about here is “Distress”. It’s the unhealthy stress which can damage your ability to perform, and in my case, it got to a point where I went through physical and mental burnout.

There are certain things that you need to look at when you are putting this resilience into the context of working with other people.

To kick that off, I want you to understand there are different types of resilience.

Resilience is not just physical resilience.

Physical Resilience is the ability of the body to be able to move forward. It is the ability of your body to adapt, change and heal itself and move forward in whatever it is you're doing, even in the midst of difficult circumstances.

So, physical resilience is really important.

I found that when we are talking about working with people, there are other types of resilience that are a lot more pertinent.

The second one is Emotional Resilience.

Remember, back in identity, we talked about emotional intelligence and the ability for yourself to be aware of your emotions and to be able to navigate them; not manage them, but utilise them and come out the other end with healthy behaviour.

But when we are working with people, I find (and I know you do as well) that this can be really challenging because we've got our script, but they haven't got our script, and therefore they've got their own way of navigating their emotions.

So emotionally, our interactions with people can be depleting.

I don’t know if you've ever felt emotionally drained.

I know I have.

And a lot of times that comes in all the conflict that can come with working with other people.

Building up your emotional resilience is all about going back to emotional intelligence, self-awareness and self-management. It is being able to recognise the meanings that you're putting on things that they're saying. Being able to go right down into your identity and asking yourself: "Where am I being a roadblock here?” “Where am I creating my own emotional stress?”

The next area is Mental Resilience.

Mental resilience is all about the mental drain that can come from decision fatigue.

Whenever you work with people, you're constantly making decisions and trying to be who you need to be for them and all those things.

Just like emotional resilience, you need to be strong in your mental capacity as well.

To do that, you need to be able to do things to build that up. You need to go outside the bounds of what you do for a living, and you need to do things that will help you stay mentally strong.

There are many things that you can do to be mentally strong.

When I'm working with clients, I give them a smorgasbord of ideas that work from what we know from neuroscience and it is a great help.

Some of them would fit, and some of them don't.

As for me, I love to listen to music and to get out in nature. I love to read and challenge myself and keep my brain, my thoughts, and critical thinking muscle built all the time.

It's important to give yourself the space to be able to do these things. Once again, that goes back to your identity, which is being able to be okay with self-care.

The fourth area of resilience is Social Resilience.

Social resilience is something we really want to work on here. This is being able to be a part of the world, the human being community, and see all the good and the not-so-good that goes on in that. To be listening and involved in conversations around different topics that you may not feel comfortable about. It's about being able to navigate the time and energy that you are putting in with other people in a way that's mutually beneficial, and it increases your energy more so than decreases it.

Resilience is the shift that helps you go from stressed to strong.

There are a lot of things that you can look at in terms of how you can reduce and manage your stress.

But the biggest one for me (we’ve talked about this before) is that saying that says: “There's no problem around what happens to you in life; it’s what you make that mean.”

And for me, the stress that was coming in my life was around how I interpreted and decoded what other people were saying to me, what they were expressing, and what I was seeing. It was also because of my internal dialogue (the conditioning both you and I have) that has been filtered and distorted by my past experiences. All these things can create a lot of mental stress, physical stress, and conflict.

Resilience is a key shift that you and I need to make when we’re in the area of People Leadership.

Leading people is not easy. There are some simple concepts and things that you can apply but remember (we had a conversation about this when we were talking about personal leadership), most of us find that we are the hardest person to lead in our day-to-day life. So, when you throw in some other people who are different from you, people who have their own uncertainties, their own way of looking at things, their own ways of operating in those three universal fears of not being enough, not belonging, and not being loved, no wonder there's stress.

So, instead of just learning the skills of how to lead people, you want to make sure that you build and continue to grow in your resilience.

Well, that's it for me for another week. Join me again next week as we go into the next shift, which is all about, what I believe is the most relevant part of everything that we do in life, and that is our relationships.

I'll see you then.