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Should Resilience be our ‘North Star’ Skill in the Workplace?

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I’ve been promoting building personal and team resilience for more than 12 years. Never have I seen a time when its needed more, than now.

In May 2023, the World Economic Forum published its ‘Future of Jobs Report’. What didn’t surprise me is that Resilience in the 2023 report went to number 3 as a top skill, from number 9 in 2020.

Analytical thinking is at the top of the list for both reported years. Creative thinking went from number 5 to second place.

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My potentially controversial thought for the future of work is since without resilience during stressful, challenging times, you can kiss Analytical and Creative Thinking good-bye – shouldn’t Personal and Team Resilience be desired skill #1?

Our analytical and creative thinking functions get hijacked, if our ability to be emotionally Agile and Flexible ‘in the moment’ isn’t highly developed. Staying calm is of paramount importance in the face of disruption and uncertainty.

A variable of resilience, according to the University of Pennsylvania’s Positive Psychology Dep’t, is Self-Awareness (#4). Building resilience means building self-awareness. It’s actually the first stepping stone to being able to ‘bounce forward’ and not just ‘bounce back’ from adversity. Bouncing forward means we’ve learned something from what we experienced.

Another of the variables of resilience, as mentioned above, is Emotional Self-Regulation or Agility. With this, we can make choices that are much more likely to serve us.

Curiosity and Life-long Learning skills are also dependent upon being resilient and developing stress ‘hardiness’. When our pre-frontal cortex is heading down the proverbial drain, we start to narrow our focus, which means we’re less likely to be open-minded and have the mental agility we need, when we need it.

When we are self-aware, emotionally and mentally agile, we can be more analytical, more creative, more curious, and more open to learning.

Am I biased in thinking that in addressing the shortage of resilience skills (most of us haven’t received this in our education or in our upbringing) might just be the antidote to many of the other skills we need?

I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts on this!

Unleash the Full Human Potential in Your Organization

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My friend and colleague, Vivian Acquah, has regular live LinkedIn webcasts entitled ‘Let’s Humanize the Workplace’.

So I was happy to read in a recent McKinsey article that: “Unleashing the full human potential in an organization is why forward-looking companies work so hard to create environments of belonging and psychological safety.”

This article states that one of the critical shifts in leadership, for a company to thrive, is to show up as an authentic human being and not only as a professional.

What this entails are three critical factors:
* increasing (self)awareness
* emotional regulation (or emotional agility, as I like to call it) and
* total or integrated wellbeing, embracing the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual pillars

I was extremely pleased, since ALL of these factors comprise what I and the network of partners I work with, share in knowledge and experience, from when my company started in 2011.

Why are these factors critical for a sustainable future? Without these being part of your DNA, you are unable to let go of instinctive, fear-based reactions; exactly the opposite of what’s needed in this changing and disruptive world.

Diving into your most creative, innovative, and logically reasoning mind is imperative. These can only be tapped into when you are calm (in control of your emotions), energetic, and collaborative. And you will achieve the inclusive cooperation from your teams by becoming so.

As any caring, professional facilitator will tell you, these qualities aren’t developed in a one-off workshop or one-day training. You would be well-served to take a very close look at your leadership team and make a commitment to provide them with the knowledge (training over extended time) and coaching (long-term) most of them will need to become leaders of the future.

Much of the training and coaching on these kinds of topics can be done regularly, at an interpersonal level among team members. However, periodically, these in-context sessions need to be augmented with a professional facilitator and/or coach who are experts in these topics. They can evaluate the progress being made and whether there are interventions needed to accelerate the learning and implementation.

The benefits more than outweigh the costs, when implemented correctly. When respect, appreciation and trust are core values expressed by leaders to their team members, mountains can be moved. Mindsets will be open and limiting beliefs will be challenged to find new solutions to existing challenges.

How Full is Your Battery?

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“People spend too much time finding other people to blame, too much energy finding excuses for not being what they are capable of being, and not enough energy putting themselves on the line, growing out of the past, and getting on with their lives.” J. Michael Straczynsk

Awareness – A Better Coping Strategy

  • The first step to creating more harmony and balance in your life is through awareness. Start with something ‘simple’: what gives you energy and what drains your energy? Low energy levels make you more susceptible to reacting to stressful situations. If you take this one step towards developing insight into ‘what makes you tick’, then you have a greater chance of taking the necessary steps towards ensuring you have more energy gainers in your life.
  • What can’t you say no to or perhaps better phrased: what do you say yes to, that might drain your ‘battery’? Is it a lack of exercise or a friend who weighs you down with their problems? Is it too many late nights? Fast food? What unhealthy choices are you making for yourself? It comes down to – what brings you short-term pleasure but coupled with long-term pain? We all know what we should be doing, often we just don’t do it.
  • If you’re not even aware of what’s triggering your energy drain, then you can’t do anything about it. Stop and make a list of habits, situations, people, and environments that aren’t serving your best needs. Analyze the list and ask yourself what can you do to change just one of the items on your list. Once you have thought out a game plan, put it into place.
  • Search for help. If it’s a habit you want to change, then research how habits can be changed and how you can develop new ones that are more supportive. Charles Duhigg wrote a book about this and there are a couple of great videos on You Tube describing the process of changing habits.

Other Helpful Tools

Perhaps you might need coaching. There are a lot of us ‘out there’. You need to find the one best suited to you. It’s an investment in yourself – don’t wait for your boss to reach into their budget to help you. Take the initiative for yourself.

If it’s an improvement in your diet, then look to a nutritionist/food specialist for help. And there are thousands of books on the subject. Ask someone, who seems to have a good handle on their personal nutrition, what they are doing. You know them! They are that person who looks great, exudes energy, doesn’t get easily irritated and has enough left over at the end of a long work day to still do something interesting for themselves. See if just one thing they are doing will make a difference in your life.

A Last Thought

The bottom line is this: if our battery is running low, then we won’t be able to come up with creative solutions to the challenges life throws our way.

Please share your comments and questions in the comments section below.

The Gift of Time

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This isn’t what you think it will be about. It’s not about time management or getting things done in a more efficient manner, though both are important in the context of well-being.

The gift of time I’m referring to, is the one which exists between a trigger and your response. In the words of Viktor E. Frankl “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

It is our subconscious perception of a stimulus – that situation, person, or thing – which repeatedly triggers the same (sometimes explosive) reaction in ourselves. We experience something as irritating once, twice, maybe three times and the next time it happens, we react predictably – often called a knee-jerk reaction.

We may not be happy with our reaction. In fact, we may realize that our reaction isn’t supporting us at all but we continue to react in the same way. It’s not always easy to pinpoint the reason for our discomfort or stress. Our brain filters and stores so much information, most of which we aren’t conscious of. Researchers have indicated that only a fraction of the stimuli from our surroundings reaches our conscious level.

Underlying every not-so-feel-good emotion we experience (e.g. irritation, anger, frustration, fear), is a need we have, which isn’t being met. Something we value. A need such as respect, love, being seen, being heard. We have many needs, some more important than others. The more important the need, the faster and stronger we will be triggered.

Knowing what your needs are, can go a long way to choosing the right response. In order to understand which need isn’t being met, you need to give yourself the gift of time; ‘the gap’ between stimulus and response.
Self-awareness is key to achieving the gap. Knowing your stress signs and signals when you are being triggered, is of paramount importance. When you become aware of the first signs that something is generating a not-so-feel-good feeling in you, this is the moment to start breathing slowly and deeply. The act of breathing slow and deep has an immediate response on your autonomic nervous system, telling your brain that you are relaxing.

By knowing and being able to name the need that wasn’t being met, you are able to take some of the significance out of the situation. When you feel ready to respond, you’ll be ready to make a choice that is going to support you, rather than being hijacked by your emotional brain. When we allow ourselves to be triggered into a full-blown stress reaction, our pre-frontal cortex, that part of the brain responsible for creative, logical thinking, shuts down to one degree or another.

Become resilient and practice finding your gap. Breathe and thrive!