E016: Resilience

This is the world of work podcast with James and James, hi. This is

James. Just before we start, I wanted to remind you that you can read our articles, explore more podcasts, and learn about our online personal and management development programs and workshops by visiting our website, www, dot. World of work.io. All right, onto the podcast.

Hi this James and Jane and we're back again for another episode of The World of Work podcast. We are up to Episode 16. Sweet 16. Sweet 16, very excited, nearly grown ups. We're going to be chatting about resilience today. So last week, we spoke about well being, and we kind of wanted to have resilience as a build on that, because it's a really similar and related topic. And as ever, slides are up on the internet. You can you can check them out at our website, www dot the WoW podcast.org where you can get these or slides from other episodes as well, yeah, and you can also come talk to us on Twitter. You'll also find the slides. We post them, post links in there, and we are at the WoW podcast. That's right.org,

always dot orgs, and that's where you'll find us. And as ever, you know we're going to do the same approach that we do in all of our episodes. So we're going to start with some definition. Some definitions related to resilience, and we'll do a bit of research round up in that. We'll talk a little bit about the accountability for resilience, some things about stress, some things about the importance of pressure, for performance and enjoyment of work, a little bit on how to measure some resilience, and some thoughts on resilience in action, and some specifics you can do to help with some resilience. Then we'll move on to our list of a week this time, it's going to be five things that you can do today to increase somebody else's resilience. You know, giving a little bit back. So we thought that's that's for plan for the list today, some stories from a keyboard, a couple final thoughts, and then we'll get out of your way and check out. But before we crack on to that, have you been I've been good. I've been good. We're getting ever closer, ever closer to Christmas. Yeah. So we just, so, you know, we're recording this just before Christmas. Yeah. So, yeah, I'm good. I'm excited. I I'm tired. Are you tired? Honestly, it's been a, I was looking so I do a, do a goal setting thing, which I used to spend ages on, and now I do, like, it takes me like, 15 minutes in November, okay, for the year ahead. Big things, right? Really big things. Yeah, how much income do I want to clear and not, not dig into my debt? And, yeah, you know, last I looked at last year's, and last year's is just hilarious, because a I've done it all, and that's quite rare for me. Normally, I I'd rather have loads of goals and then get some of them done. Yeah? Then have like, four and do them all, or fail at one.

And I just looked at it and I like, I've moved cities, I've started a business, I've started a masters. I've got a dog. What's left? What's left to do? There's two big things to do. Okay, well, they're not big. One is, and it's really boring. This is so boring for people. But the two things that left one is to have a proper holiday, because it's, it's been a couple of years since I've had a proper turn everything off. Don't let things affect Yeah. So that starts next Saturday. Super excited about that. Two weeks in the highlands, in the middle of nowhere, no phone. Are you doing? Yeah, are you doing the sort of digital detox and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, we've got no TV, or we've got Wi Fi, so much films and films and stuff, but we're not there's no TV, all of that stuff. So really excited about that, although, knowing I like, we get snowed in, have to eat each other, but we're doing that. So that's my that's another one. And then the last one really put it off, and I've got

to do is I set myself a financial target of invoicing a certain amount of work in my first nine months. And if I do the paperwork, I will have done it. Well, great, but I've put off the paperwork now, and now I need to do it five days. No, I got like five days. And the worst thing is, the work's done. Yeah, those

listeners will know I hate paperwork with a question of 1000 sons. Yeah, one day when I'm rich and famous, I'll have someone Yeah, exactly. You'll be able to divide it up people's promise me that can happen one day, right? Well, you know, keep dreaming. It's good to have stuff. So how have you been? I've been pretty good. I've not been as busy and tired as you. I'm still a bit poorly, but overall I'm pretty well, you know, nothing huge to call out. I've been working on some other projects that I've got, so that keeps me busy a lot of the time, as you know. And you've been decorating. Oh yes, we've been decorating. We've got, well, we've been getting Christmas already. So we've got a lovely Christmas. I should definitely shout out. So listeners should know that we record uh, podcasts in a mixture of places. We either do it in my front room, uh, or we do it in James is a spare room, spare room. It's like the fanciest spare room I've ever been in. It feels like like a very posh Harley street waiting

room. But we do it in here. And I walked into the flats today, and it looks like what an American imagines.

Posh British house would celebrate Christmas. There's the most immaculately decorated tree, there's stockings on the mantelpiece, there's there's Christmas coasters and, oh, it's just beautiful. So nice. So they get so we did do that. We had some Christmas drinks. We had people over to do Christmas drinks. What do you drink for Christmas drinks? Do you drink like mulled wine? Well, we did. We didn't actually just sort of one. Sort of wine and beer, okay, yeah, just normal drinks, yeah, but for Christmas, so we kind of get the neighbors over, at least. So I bought all the ingredients. American listeners, I'm excited. I bought all the ingredients for eggnog. Oh, nice, because I've never had it. Yeah, eggnogs lovely. So I said this, I said this, and my other half was like, why would we drink eggs? I was like,

not sure that's quite what it is. Yeah, it's not exactly. It's not like an Eggy, hungover drink. No. So yes, that's exactly. Yeah, good. And you're doing Christmas at night. We are. We've first time ever. We've booked two weeks in a very small, little sort of smithy house, cottage, nice

wood burning. So we've got an order in the local butchers. Good. It's all going to be very local near the beach. Wrap up warm, yeah, drink loads of wine. Yeah, it will be about minus four. It will be, it's beautiful, and the

days will last. Oh, I don't know, a couple hours, yeah, maybe, I think, I think, basically it gets properly light at like, half 10, yeah, and it will be done by like, yeah, so, yeah, interesting wearing this Christmas. So I'm going down to my partner's family. Well, not all the way down, but down to the Midlands. So down around already, um, so there's a nice house sort of in the country there. Last year they were about 14 or 15 of us nice. So it's like a proper English country house, Christmas kind of, yeah, a big, nice house. Will you be there for? So probably two nights there, and then drive back up and see some other people on the way back up. It sounds like a film. It does a little bit. Benches are gonna start, gonna pack up the car. So that's good. So we might have to get you stick photos at your

Yeah, yeah. That's easy. We can dress up with a little hat on, you know, the Christmas hats and all that kind of stuff. Had a great time. Christmas hats. We put the dog a Christmas hat. That's, did you open? Did you open Did you open the dogs Christmas present? Yeah, is that being saved? No, that's safe. Okay, those of you don't know a I've got a dog which is light of my life, but also she has her own Twitter profile, and on Twitter, the brief that she has has a whole like, posse, yeah? And there's an amazing owner who's organized a Secret Santa for the last few years. There's like 100 of us, posting presents all over the country, which I just loved. So she got very excited when she didn't know what it was, and she got, like, her first piece

of post and stuff anyway, right, right? So that's enough talk about Christmas and dogs and stuff. Let's talk about resilience of a follow on from well being. So do you want to run through some definitions for us? Yeah, I think so. I think for this episode, we've picked out a few pieces of terminology that if you're not familiar with this topic, you might not be. And unlike last week, those of you who listened last week, well, no, we've gone broader than came Yeah, we learned our lesson. I mean, last time, it was really interesting conversation, but there was some, some deeply deeply stressing definitions. The secret is we might have been being slightly lazy and pulling together that list last time. Might have had an example anyway. So this list is a really good one, resilient in the ox dictionary, the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties, or toughness alight. I've got slight question marks about that. I don't think it's necessarily about quickness, and I don't think it's necessarily about recovery. Also, I think it's about the ability to function. The ability to function during those difficulties. But yeah, maybe that's I'm in the minority of that well being from Oxford, the state of feeling healthy and happy. That sounds familiar. I think Oxford, I mean copy in Cambridge. Yeah, stress from UK, mental health.net

in a medical or biological context, stress is a physical, mental or emotional factor that causes bodily or mental tension. Stresses can be external environment, physiological, psychological, social or internal illness, medical procedures, etc. Stress can initiate the fight or flight response, a complex reaction of neurologic and endocrinological systems, and we talked about that in one of the earlier episodes, when I think we looked at emotional intelligence, I think, I think that's when we talked about it. We talked about, like, amygdala hijacking and stuff like that for fight or flight. Yeah, it is, although there's also freeze they recommend, yeah, please, which is probably where I end up fight flight, freeze or appease transaction analysis.

I really, I just, I really want to emphasize to our listeners about stress, that ultimately, stress, in itself, is nothing more than the application of tension or the application of pressure,

and what happens to the thing that's being pressured on. However, when you're talking about your brain. In and when you're talking about how you behave,

it has all sorts of unintended consequences. So, but it's really, I think it's a really important like a visual. Think about when you pull something tight, or when you put something heavy on something that's not really designed for it, you see that stress in the material, in the body and the physicality, or even, you know, on a table or something. And it's a really good visual for me. And I think it's a really important one, because sometimes it's easy to think about yourself in that way visualize it so as an object, yeah, and when things are stressed like that, sound kind of more liable to be damaged. It's sort of easier to get a fragile right. So I was, I always think about it. To me, if you take a rubber thin, my piece of rubber or rubber band, yeah, and you were to clamp one end and clamp the other and pull them apart, and you see it stretch right, and then you see the tension, and then sooner or later, it either snaps, or at very least, it doesn't come back, yeah, yeah. So you can't recover. It's not where, how quickly it recovers. It's about how well it recovers and how much it endures that pressure. So for me, that's that's always the the analogy in my head, or the visual that I have. Yeah, James has included self talk in here, and he's kind of put his own definition on it, and I think it's really important. One, do you want to share it? Because it's yours? Oh, yeah, I'm happy to share it. So, so what I did with this one is I actually started with, was it Psychology Today? I think I started with and I just kind of condensed that definition down. I kind of liked it, but what I've gone with is self talk is your inner monolog. It combines your conscious thoughts with unconscious beliefs, and its function is to help a brain interpret and process experiences. It can be helpful or it can be self defeating, negative. Self talk is often unrealistic and harmful, but can be overcome with practice. So it's kind of a definition, but it's more of an explanation. I guess I think it's I think it's really good explanation. I think it's really important concept here, particularly because I think if you are not aware of it, it does not mean it does not exist. Yeah, and I think it's a for me, it was a massive switch in my the way I think about things. When I realized it existed, because I was like, okay, but there's still some negative stuff coming out there, but I'm not even gonna fix it. I just need to know it's there seriously, yeah? And knowing that it's not just you, right? Everybody has self talk. Everyone's got that. Everyone has voices in their head, yeah? We

think in words, you know, and and we think in these voices, and they're positive, or they're negative, or maybe they're neutral, maybe they're gonna be boring, right? I mean, but they tend to be positive. And a great example, if you're not sure, listen to what you say when there's awkward pauses, because you've either made a mistake or you're under pressure. So I want to give a really practical example, James, earlier, we were recording the podcast, and we haven't done it for a week. And he started podcast, and it, it, we got a bit at the middle not so you paused it, and you stopped it as if start. And then you said something like, Oh, look at me fluffing it, yeah. And you said it without consciousness. And I was like, I don't think you'd yes, me, yeah. And it's a really interesting thing where you it's literally you going, Oh, in your head, oh, is that me? What have I done? I'm not sure, yeah, so I'm just going to apologize in case it was me. Yeah, so British, yeah. Well done. You're now. But it is. It's interesting. And I think, I think this concept of self talk is really important. I think there's lots of there's loads of stuff around about affirmations and stuff like that. And yes, I get all of that. But I think for me, the biggest thing is understanding that there is a voice Yeah, and that the words that you put to it, yeah are probably in some way representative of how you feel about stuff. So just three more trigger, triggers

I've got issues with. But anyway, yeah, trigger, it's been hijacked the word. That's why I've got issues with it. It's because I disagree with it. From mental health, triggers are external events or circumstances that may produce very uncomfortable emotional or psych

psychiatric symptoms such as anxiety, pain, discouragement, despair or negative self talk.

I think that is triggers in a specific context. But I think even broadly, just thinking about triggers, are things that exist externally, that might cause something to happen in you, and that could be internal or external. Yeah, right. And it could be bad or it could be good, because there are actually, you know, there's some great ways of using triggers to really have meant to kick off mental, really healthy approaches and stuff and on that. You know, we'll speak about them later. When we touch on one of the models we look at and they're called, they're activating events basically, yeah. And that's the same thing, right? I mean, you pull the trigger, much prefer that. It's a bit clunkier, though, isn't it? I mean, the language is better and it's more precise, but it just takes, I will always take precise over clunky, precise over simple, yeah. And for me, that's, that's a, I don't know, I just, yeah, activating, right? Yeah, okay. And then an interesting one in here, which I haven't thought of, actually, but I think it's really, really important, which is tipping point so Cambridge, talking about it, is the time at which a change or an effect cannot be stopped. And.

I'm not sure that's what I call it. I think it's the point at which the load, in any sense, whether it's in a catapult or something else,

causes, for me, a tipping point is not necessarily about when things can't be stopped, but it's a work about causing something that's been a build up of 10, point of inflection. That's the word Thank you. That's why I like correct language. It's a point of inflection. And finally, presenteeism, which some of you may be familiar with, but it's the practice of coming to work despite illness, injury, anxiety, often resulting

in reduced productivity, or the practice of working long hours at a job without the real need to do so I would also argue it doesn't necessarily have to be honest or injury. I would argue sometimes it's about coming to work when you're meant to be on holiday, because there is a sense of importance, and that importance might be real, but that you have an over inflated sense of importance in what you're doing, or that's been put on you, or you've got a bad culture, right? Yeah, or somehow you've been told that this is important. So I think I don't think that it's necessary, because there isn't a need, yeah, but it is about being there when you shouldn't have to be Yeah, and not always Yeah, but feeling like you should, I think the feeling like you should is a really important thing, yeah, and I was just looking very quickly to see if I could find the definition of something else, but I can't, which is really annoying, so I'm going to look for it during the thing. But one of the things I think that I mentioned earlier was the concept of being in the grip. Oh, yeah. And the idea of being in the grip is basically when you start to behave in a way that's different from your natural personality.

Because you are under sustained levels and continuous levels of stress. And it's it. I know the place I saw it was on the Myers based company, on their website, but I've heard it talked about quite a lot, and it's basically where you have a natural way of behaving, and then when you're put under sustained stress, you flip that, and you behave in a way that is surprising to people and confusing. And the very practical example I would give you is that when I'm when I've experienced this, I've gone from being very care, caring of my team, to being quite distance emotionally and not really worrying about, yeah, they become a resource. Yeah, they become that's exactly what happens. They become a resource. And if they're baggage, they've got it. They've got twice in my life, and they didn't like it. But it's a very interesting concept. Yeah, so the phrase that I've used for that is in the box, which is kind of a similar thing. So you're kind of hemmed in and constricted, and you're not free to be yourself, and you're not at your best to some of the language I've used. Okay, so that's some definitions for you. What do you think those? Yeah, I like a lot of those. I like what we're trying to cover with them. I think, I think things like tipping point is a great concept when you speak about resilience. Because, you know, resilience is about being knocked over and getting back up. There's something about that, the sort of oscillation and the inflection between being, you know, in a good place and not so. I think that's useful. I think self talk is a great thing to get out into conversation. I think, you know, the more people that are aware of that, the better.

So overall, I think it's good. And I think we see presenteeism in a lot of places, and it's something that we should challenge. So, yes, I do. I've been there, and it's worse. I've been proud of it, yeah, yeah. And I've been smug about it. You compete on I used to think about, I think about what impact that might have had when I was a lot, this is when I was younger, and I think about the impact that might have had a bum people around me, in my team, it puts pressure. I dread to think, no wonder half that team don't talk to me anymore. They do. I'm teasing, you know, they didn't like me very much for what? Okay, so research round up. Yeah, cool. I'm gonna jump into this, and I'm gonna start with not quite a vocal rant, but something that I'm really passionate about in the world of resilience, and this is around

accountability for the well being of people. So if we think about resilience, as we said in my definition, it's about the ability to return to normal. When stuff gets hard, you know, something happens. It knocks you down, you bounce back up, whatever speed that is, and you return to your normal state and can function really well. That's that's kind of your resilience piece. One of the things that I think happens, though, is that when you speak about resilience and you speak about resilience training and things like that, what you're saying is you're saying to individuals that individuals need to have more accountability for picking themselves up when they get knocked down, right? So, so resilience is very much of an individual responsibility in that sense, right? So, whatever life throws at you, you need to be resilient to pick yourself up. And part of me just wants to call out or not. Part of me, all of me wants to call out, but there are multiple sides to this, right? So, so resilience is several different things, but it's for product of your environment, and it's a product of what's being asked of you. So yes, as an individual, you have an obligation to pick yourself up when stuff gets hard, but at the same time, organizations and leaders, in my view, have a really strong obligation to not set unrealistic goals and unrealistic expect.

Conversations on people. So, you know, there's a phrase that I've heard a few times around the weaponization of resilience, and effectively, what that's saying is that organizations can set unrealistic goals and then blame the individuals in their teams for not delivering against those goals and say that they're simply not being resilient enough. You know, we can create a hard environment and overstretch people and then blame them for not succeeding in those environments. And I think that's hugely dangerous. So for me, I think, I think that the responsibility for the well being of individuals in organizations is a mixture of responsibilities between responsibilities of the individuals who need to look after themselves, they need to maintain their own well being. They need to, you know, make sure that they're able to do a good day's work for their employers. That's what they're paid to do. They need to be resilient enough to pick up and deliver when things are hard, and of course, they benefit from it. But at the same time, organizations really have an obligation to set reasonable targets, to manage workloads. They owe their employees a reasonable existence, and should help them be their best, and in doing so, it benefits them. So that's just a little bit of a viewpoint there, that

resilience, you know, can be addressed both by being resilient and taking away the need to be resilient. And sometimes organizations need to take away the need to be resilient if they're going to be treating people with fairness. So don't weaponize resilience. Don't blame people for not being resilient when you set preposterous examples for them. I heard this described to in an article I read a couple weeks ago. As you know, resilience training is kind of like breaking my leg and then trying to teach me how to make a splint.

Sorry, I didn't mean to stop. It's just a good it's just a good it's a good example, isn't it? Right? Like,

you know, I'd say I'm really sick and tired and I'm guilty of this, of hearing the message, you know, if you're struggling, you need to tell me, yeah, yeah, you know what? If you're my boss, you need to keep your eyes open, because, just because I'm prepared to flop. And this is not a reflection. My boss has actually recently, have been, over the last 1015, years, been amazing, but I hear it quite a lot. Oh, well, they didn't say anything. They didn't speak up. Do you know how hard it is to speak up when you're struggling, particularly when the culture is like that, and particularly when you're not that person that has had that experience before? So maybe you thought you were really resilient. Maybe have had the experience of being the more resilient member of resilient member of the team, or, you know what, as a leader, it's your job to look and to see and to understand what their workload is. And that's the other excuse. I hear loads. Oh, I didn't really understand the detail of the project. Well, that's kind of unacceptable, isn't it? You know what? I get that there are technicians working under non technicians. Yeah, lots of things, but then have an open and adult conversation about how many hours they're spending on it, and also what level of expectation you have. Yeah, you know, do you do you want good enough? Do you want the best, which is the flex on the time or the money? Yeah, talk about it. Don't just say, Well, you didn't tell me, because you know what? Very quickly, things unravel, very quickly, and suddenly you go from someone who was struggling a little bit and just needed a little bit of space to someone who has got major concerns. Yeah, you might reach that tipping point before. You know, it triggered. And let's string together. No, you're right. You might reach that point very quickly. Yeah, so just, you know, a thing that I'm fairly passionate about, the next point from resilience that I want to touch on was a few facts about stress, just some things, just to get it out there. So

people are often resilient, to overcome stressful events and things like that. So I think it's worth reflecting on stress. So three things I want to call up in the UK, in the year 2017,

15 and a half million working days were lost due to stress related absence. You know, that's according to a website. I can't remember which one, one of the government statistics websites, so that's 15 and a half million working days. Now, for context, the UK is about a quarter of a size of probably actually about a fifth of the size of the US in terms of population, right? So if you round that up, that's what 75

76 million working days lost in the US, assuming it's similar. But if we just focus on the UK, about 15 and a half million working days lost to stress works out at 62,000, years. If you're assuming, you know, standard number of days in a year, and that works out as 775

human lives. If you think people live to be a to baby. I mean, that's just a huge amount of lost time. That might be the most depressing thing I've had in a long it's pretty grim, isn't it, anyway. And those are, I want to be really clear, those those lost days are not just lost days to the economy or to organizations. Those are people, yeah. Those are people whose days of their life, of which a limited resource, yeah, are wasted, not being purposeful, not feeling good about themselves, yes, and having to focus on how to get themselves back.

Transport themselves back up, and that's, that's utterly unacceptable. Yeah, the human cost is huge for an economy that supposedly, let's not even go into this, but supposedly doing well, how is that okay, that we're putting that level of pressure on people, and how do they feel that that's the job they need to have do? Yeah? So curious. You know, if we were going to talk about, say, a chemical or a food additive that resulted in 775 lives being lost a year. Whatever, you'd have outcry, and you'd have all kinds of action against it. But you know, stress doesn't have as much of that, though, the stress and mental health pace is huge anyway. So next, a point around stress is that stress, though predominantly mental in origin, actually does lead to long term damaging physical ailments.

And these aren't psychosomatic. These are actual physical things that happen. So I guess heart attacks as a stress related thing is quite a common thing to be aware of. But also, stress can lead to lasting chronic pain. It can lead to things like irritable bowel syndrome, and it can lead to, you know, stomach related ailments as well. So you know, something to be aware of. It's not to be sniffed after that. And the last mentioned blood pressure issues, no, by the way, yeah, got pre existing certain things, yeah, the whole blood coronary

piece of stuff. And the last one is that stress, like a lot of emotions, is contagious. You know, once you start to get a stressful environment, what you see is that individuals become stressed,

and their neighbors, the people around them, get stressed. And you don't even need to speak to people to How about stress be contagious? So you just need to be near them, and that's enough that the stress will spread. So those are three things about stress, number of days lost, the fact it can lead to physical ailments, and the fact that it's contagious, right? So clearly, stress is not a good thing.

However, that said, you know, we're not totally anti pressure on people, and what we wanted to touch on now was the performance and pressure curve. And I'm sure a lot of you will have seen this. Sometimes it's called something like the flow curve, or sometimes something like a mood curve, and it's by somebody who I can't pronounce, even if I have a name in front of me and I don't have it in front of me, like Scentsy sensei Mihailovich or something go that I've no idea the world's worst. People can get back to us and correct me on that anyway. He wrote a lot of stuff about flow and the optimization of work experience and things like that. But what, what he's got in this graph? It's obviously, or like a lot of graphs, two dimensional graph. On the horizontal, we've got performance, and on the vertical, we've got pressure, and the line that's drawn is basically a bell curve, right? I mean, it's it's an evenly distributed curve. And what happens is that with low levels of pressure, you get low levels of performance. People are bored and they don't have enough pressure to work. As you increase for pressure a little bit more, what you get is that you get, you get an increase in performance. They get a little bit more comfortable.

Then once you get to an optimal level of pressure, people perform really highly. So there's an optimal level of performance that people have. However, once you get the once the pressure gets even higher, what happens is that people start to get strained, right? So as pressure goes beyond the optimal amount, people get strained and their performance falls off. And then once you get the pressure to be really high, performance falls right off, so people fall into that stress zone. And I think what I said earlier, I think I said performance was on the horizontal, performance is on the vertical, sorry, and pressure is on the horizontal. So that bell curve shows, you know, under low levels of pressure, you get low levels of performance. Under really high levels of pressure, you get really low levels of performance. But there's a right amount of pressure in the middle to help people have an optimal level of productivity and performance. And with that comes not just, you know, good levels of output from them, but a good level of work experience. So that's when work is fulfilling and you're learning and you're developing, and you're operating at some sort of the edges of your ability and feeling good about yourself. Have you seen that performance pressure curve before?

See now, I think I have, but I certainly didn't know that was what it was called. Okay, and I'm not sure I've seen it visually in that way. I think I've seen it in a sort of a list of, here are the stages. But definitely I recognize it, and more importantly, I recognize it like I recognize that at various points on that, yeah, in my life and in my team's lives and in the people that I've worked with, yeah, it's a good one. I mean, it's something that's a useful way to think about and reflect on this. And you know, really the key call out is that too much stress and pressure, sorry, too much pressure leads to low levels of performance, and it leads to stress. So just something to think

about. Next thing we want to touch on is around measuring resilience, right? So resilience is a kind of a.

A kind of a funny thing. It's not always easy to measure, but if you if you look around, there are loads of different ways out there to measure resilience, but it's such a personal thing that the measurement of resilience is hard, you know, so so people don't always disclose the right way. People might not want to be honest about things if they're disclosing things about resilience to others. They might overstate, they might understate all that kind of all that kind of stuff. But there's one tool that we just wanted to share that again, you'll be able to look at on the website. You'll be able to find it other places. This is the brief resilience scale. It's really, really brief, but we just thought it was worth touching on so you can see the type of thing that's out there. This as is a self assessment tool. You don't need to use it with anyone else, and it's only got six questions in it. So all you do with this tool is you go through and you read these six questions, and for each one of the questions, you ask yourself whether you strongly disagree, disagree or neutral to the statement, agree with it or strongly agree. So you go through the six statements and you score yourself, and then at the end, you taught up a number of points in there. So each one of those answers for each question has a number of points next to it. You taught it up. You give yourself a total score, and that's your resilience score. That's your brief resilience score. And there's no guidance around what that score means, or what averages, or any of those types of things. So it's really a self self use tool, but if you use it, then you can assess a little bit of what your level of resilience is right now, and it's the type of thing that can be used over time. So you could come back to it in maybe six months time or six weeks time and see if you've improved through some of the things that we'll talk about later around how to increase resilience. As I said, there are six questions, so I'll run through them quickly, just so you can know the types of things. And of course, you can look it up online if you want to check it out in more detail. So question one says, I tend to bounce back quickly after hard times and again. You know, disagree through to agree.

Question two is, I have a hard time making it through stressful events or statement I should say statement two, statement three is it does not take me long to recover from a stressful event. Statement four is, it is hard for me to snap back when something bad has happened.

Statement five is, I usually come through difficult times with little trouble. And question six is, I tend to take a long time to get every setbacks in my life. So, you know, fairly similar sets of questions, but it's just a good way to think about a necessity around me. Have you seen anything like that before? Do you? Yeah, interestingly, I have, I've seen that. Or, if not, that's something incredibly close. And it was, it was something that I think I and my then

boss found to start a conversation when we had a little bit of a problem that we had created, sure, when we were a two man outfit, yeah? And I think, I think we talked about it, and we were like, we've probably, we've been comfortable pushing ourselves, but we now need to think about how we make sure that other people feel, feel okay to talk about this stuff, and that it's easy. And actually, you know, how do we manage the workload a bit better. Yeah, is it making a good conversation? Starters, like you say, for a lot of this stuff, if you're in a place where it's not, it's not critical, yeah, but it's not you're you've got that sense as a leader, that you're not quite in the right place, yeah. I think sometimes just having the conversation, yeah, yeah. You know, we tend to look to ourselves to have all the answers. And really, in my experience, very rarely do we have the answers. Mostly our team have got them, yeah, but you need, you need to give them the space to talk about it you do, and some other language to talk about, as well as help through tools like this. So give some space, yeah? But also it introduces because if you don't, what you're reliant on is whoever's the loudest speaker to speak up when, when they feel they need to and you really want to be having a conversation. Yeah? Wave. Well before that, absolutely okay. So that was a little bit of a look at a way that you can measure resilience. What I

wanted to touch on now is something that is to do with how, I guess, you can be resilient. So we know what resilience is. We've talked a little bit about it. We've talked a little bit about whose accountability it is. We've talked a little bit about stress and how that's relevant. We've talked about the fact that some pressure is really helpful, and you want to have some of that pressure that pushes you towards being knocked over, because it helps your performance and helps you have more fun, but you don't want to go too far and get into a tipping point. We talked a little bit about how to measure some of the resilience. And now what we're going to talk about is, you know, some specifics, a few specific things that you can do to be a bit more resilient. So just some things to reflect on.

I guess for me, the starting point in working on your resilience is kind of building up your self awareness. And we've talked about this again in other episodes where we've looked at, you know, emotional intelligence and values and self awareness and things like that. And specifically in relation to resilience, what you want to start to learn is what your signs of stress are. So you know, what are you like as a normal person? You know when things are going smoothly, what do you like? And then when you start to step away from what you normally like, what are those signs of stress? So what, what are the things that you do differently? Are there mental things that are different?

It are there physical science that you get with stress, and starting to identify that so you know what those are, and you can start to see when you start to come under stress. Also, within that self awareness piece, it's good to start to learn the types of things that could be triggering or activating events for you. So what types of things happen in the world that set you off and put you into that kind of bad place. And the more of it, you start to recognize those types of things. For more of it, you'll be able to say, Oh, this event's happened. That's why I'm not myself. And you get the awareness of where you are sort of emotionally and that helps you manage through that, that sort of challenging time. And for me, the last bit, in terms of the sort of awareness piece that's the starting point of building your resilience, is trying to recognize the different signs that mean you're in a vulnerable state. So we talked about the signs of stress, but there are other things you know that are maybe not stress related, but that just demonstrate or indicate to you that you're maybe not at your best and maybe a little bit more susceptible to to going into one of these more negative states. So maybe knowing that if you've not had enough sleep, you might not be stressed, but you're just a little bit more likely to be affected by things. So if an activating event happens when you're tired, you're more likely to respond to it, then if it happens when you've had a huge amount of sleep and up to exercise and feeling fine. So building up that understanding of who you are, what your signs of stress are, the types of things that lead you to be triggered, and the types of things that are indicators that you're in a vulnerable state, it's a great starting point. It lets you assess the landscape in which you might be susceptible to being knocked off your perch of goodness, if you will. So that's kind of step one for building up your resilience,

is the awareness and knowledge. Step two is jumping back to our last episode, really, and it's investing in your well being, right? So if we think about resilience as getting back up when you've been knocked down. There are a couple of things going on. So you know, there's knowing when you're going to get knocked down and what it means to be knocked down, which is what we just spoke about. There's

being better at getting back up when you've been knocked down, which is what we're going to speak about next. But this piece here about increasing your resilience is around making it less likely that you will be knocked down. So if you got a really high levels of well being, then it's just less likely that something's going to knock you off your kilter and activate something negative in you, or trigger you or whatever these languages are. So by investing in your well being, you kind of increase your emotional reserves, and through that, you reduce your likelihood of being triggered or upset by something or emotionally hijacked, and we talked about some of the things you can do to increase wellbeing in the last episode, but just as a brief recap, it's things like connecting with others, being active, taking notice of what's around you, and being mindful, learning, giving to others, looking after your environment, getting sleep, getting regular exercise, having A healthy diet, having a support network, giving yourself time to relax, doing activities that energize you, all that kind of stuff. So you can go back and check out the last episode if you want to know more. But, but that whole um, investing in your well being is really important from a resilience perspective. So that stops you being able to get knocked down. And that leaves us then with, how do you get back up when you have been knocked down, right? So, so that's kind of a last pin of resilience. And there's several different things in this space, but one thing that people do that helps with their resilience is they actually they plan for this, right? They develop coping strategies, and they know that they're going to get knocked down. And having done the self awareness piece, they know the types of things that are knocked them down. They know how they'll feel when they've been knocked down. And by, you know, assessing that awareness that they've built, they can develop coping strategies that help them deal with different types of events that knock them down. And we're going to reflect on a few of those, and then Then talk through a specific example of something that people can do. So one type of coping strategy that people have is something like buying themselves some time. So I like this example, because I think pretty much everyone knows about, you know, if something happens and makes you angry, you know, take a deep breath and count to 10 if you're really angry, count to 100 you know, that's a great example of a little way to manage yourself for an activating event. So you've got your coping strategy. Somebody says something, It enrages you, and your immediate response is to attack in the fight or flight words you want to fight right back and say something. But your coping strategy that you've defined based on knowing who you are and what types of things that will upset you is that whenever somebody mentions, I don't know the color green, which you love, instead of being angry and shouting back at them, you say, Well, you say, Well, you know what? I'm just going to take a minute. I'm going to count to 10. Maybe I'll count to 100 maybe I'll go for a walk around the block, and that'll buy me time to return and to be that self writing resilient person that gets myself back to where I want to be and from which righted state I can behave more rationally.

Helpfully. So you know, having something like a buying your yourself time coping strategy is useful. There are a couple of other ones. So one is around using support. So you might know that you're likely to be stressed, but you might have a good support network, and you might know that you're going into a difficult situation that'll knock you down. So maybe you can speak to your support network in advance. You can say, I'm doing this. This will be difficult. I'm nervous about this. It'd be great to be able to catch up with you. And if that happens, you can reach out to somebody. Some people have family members, some people have partners, some people have coaches that help them with this environment. So using your support network helps with your resilience. And there's another thing that people often do around challenging the situation, which is around,

maybe not getting into a situation where they know we'll get them into trouble. It's around, maybe trying to control a bit of a situation, exploring the physical space, maybe trying to bring other people into the situation with you, all that kind of stuff to help prevent, prevent some of the negatives happening if you get knocked down. But there's another one that we want to reflect on here really, which is around helping you get back up when you've been knocked down, which is around self coaching. So when we speak about coaching in the context of sort of the world of work, we tend to talk about different types of coaching. We talk about solution focused coaching. And occasionally we talk about sort of what I call Rational Emotive type coaching models that help deal with emotion and get you through emotion. And one of the things you can do if you found yourself

knocked down by something is to use some self coaching to help you through that difficult moment in time or that difficult half hour or day and help you continue to function well in that space. So we're going to talk a little bit about a self coaching model in a minute. But first I want to touch on a model called the ABC model, and this is around responses to stress and responding to these difficult situations. And really all it says is that several things happen, right? So we've talked about your activating events, your triggers, your things that knock you down. And what we say is, well, those events happen, but you know, those events alone aren't the only things that make you think and feel the way that you do when something's not your resilience, it's really the combination of those activating, activating events with your beliefs. So this is the self talk of a mind talk that we talked about earlier. So these are the, you know, the internal monologs that you have that bring together your thinking and some of your beliefs as well. And it's the combination of the activating events and the beliefs that lead to the consequence. So something happens, it knocks you down,

and the negative self talk starts. And from that position of negative self talk, you tend to take an action and initiate another thing, and that tends to lead to the consequence. So what we're really saying here is that consequences of these trigger events aren't just to do with a triggering or activating event. A lot of them are to do with the way that you think about them and the way that your self talk or mind talk, changes your perception and changes, ultimately, your behaviors and responses to those situations. So a real call out is that we can't affect the triggering events. We can try and limit the likelihood of them happening and things like that. We can try and limit the effect of them on us in terms of how much they knock us down, but ultimately, a lot of it's for beliefs that get us, you know. So the event itself is important, but the belief is really what's, what's driving a lot of this stuff, yeah, and that's, and that's where you get to influence your reaction, right response? And I think so for me, I've got a real I'm reading a lot of the moment about how you make sense of things as a human and particularly around how you use narratives and stories. So how do you what the stories you tell yourself that makes sense of your behavior in the past, in the future, and your reaction? And I think there is something extraordinarily interesting and helpful, certainly for me, and I use it quite a lot of my coaching around what are the stories we tell about ourselves, and how do we then tell ourselves those stories in terms of influencing how we react? Let me give you a really practical example, right? So I have in my head this story about me going back to do my Masters, and partly it is about me being a rubbish student as an undergrad, right? Yeah, I've heard that story. Okay, you've heard that story, right? That story, right? Everyone's heard that story. I still tell people, and I still do have nightmares about my undergraduate finals and thinking, not thinking that I failed, thinking that I haven't done enough credit to graduate because I've somehow messed up. I was not a great student. I wasn't terrible, right? I got my degree, I got a lower second, oh, it was fine, right? And given the amount of time I did, that's that was a pretty good result. But I've used that story to shape how I feel about myself academically, and I have to be really careful about it, because actually, what it means is that now I'm back at Union, I'm trying to address some of the you know, my desire to be a bit more academic.

Think about stuff and understand some theory underpinning what I do. I have to be really careful not to constantly go on about the fact that I was a bad student, a it makes other people feel bad, because it turns out some of them don't have undergraduate degrees because they're busy is crafting their own life, which is different. But also, I'm not a bad student, I'm not a brilliant student, but I'm not a bad student, right? And, but I need to stop that, because otherwise I find myself getting really, sort of not depressed, but I get really down about it. And, oh, this is so hard. It's not, yeah, and I, you know, so I did an exam on Friday, and if I don't do very well in it, I will be crushed, and I will be more crushed because I've told myself, it's because I've got this whole thing of what you knew this, you knew you were bad student. Why didn't you do better? Yeah? And I think there's a really, really interesting thing about how we've made these stories and then we build them into our systems, and we build them into our brain, and then when things happen, sometimes they can protect us and sometimes they can hurt us, yeah. And so it's about being conscious of those stories you tell people and thinking, hang on a minute. Why am I saying that? Am I saying that? Am I saying that to make me comfortable? Am I saying that to make you comfortable? And you know what I mean? I think that I think you're absolutely right. I think those stories fit with the theme of mind talk, and I think they fit with a concept of beliefs. But I think everyone's got multiple stories, and we choose sometimes for stories that are right for us at different points in time. So when we get an activating event that triggers us, we can have different responses, yeah. So if maybe an activating event in your example, could have been you turned over an exam and you thought it was topic, A, B and C, and it was actually B, C and D, you know, that would be a real activating event, yeah. And several different things would happen in that instance. So you'd have that event, and your beliefs and your self talk would come in, and the stories would be either, wow, I'm a dreadful student. This is, you know, I didn't do it last time. This is so me. I'm never going to get through this. Everyone's going to dislike it. This is what always goes on in my life. This is why I shouldn't do it. And that's really negative and self defeating, right? So, so sometimes those beliefs come in, and that in itself, would lead to your consequence. And that's, and that's literally almost exactly what happened. Okay, I didn't know almost exactly. I turned the guitar over and not quite like that. I was absolutely flying, yeah, got halfway through and totally lost the plot. Because I was like, rather than back in the old days where I wouldn't have known what was going on, and I had really high levels of resilience, yeah. And I was like, Well, this is fine. I always do exams where don't know anything, and I'll just make the best of it. I became infuriated with the exam paper because I was like, but I know all of this stuff, but I don't like how the questions are written. And I got that, it's really interesting what happens. And you know, we talked to ages ago about amygdala hijack as well, and this idea of you have a triggering event, and, you know, how quickly can you get over it, get over the fact it's not exactly what you want, and get back to functioning, or even free, you know, freeze that feeling. So I think this is one of the reasons I got frustrated with the definitions, is because they're always about bouncing back. For me, resilience is also about performing, even though it's got on the triggers ongoing, yes? So the, you know, I'm still frustrated with the I've got two hours to write an essay. Yeah, yeah. I'm still frustrated with the paper. I'm still sitting there telling myself stories about how I'm rubbish and what surprise I'm not doing I need to perform during Yeah. And I think what's been fascinating for me, and I guess this, the reason that I think this is so relevant is It's been 20 years since I did an exam, right? Yeah, I hadn't realized how frustrated and how much that was gonna how much being put under pressure, yeah, in a very narrow place where I'm I don't write, well, yeah, physically my handwriting, yeah, this is what I mean. So for me, it's a whole load of stuff. Well, hang on a minute. This isn't world work where I'm natural and uncomfortable and I know what I'm talking about. I'm being put in an uncomfortable situation. I'm not happy I've had what you would refer to in your in the notes you've got as a triggering event. Yeah, and I don't have time to be resilient or even get over it or punch about I just need to behave. Yeah? And it's that ability to switch off, I think, which was way out of practice for me, massively. Yeah, so this the all of your comments about that you're saying, the research about building it up and about what you can do, I think a hugely important, Yeah, huge they are, and then that lowers your probability of being knocked down. And so, so we know that the activating events only the start of this, right? So the activating event

coupled with beliefs and the self talk that go with that, or what drive the consequences, and that's what makes it hard in the moment for you to be, you know, in this example, doing your exam well. And the consequence of that is, the consequence of that is where you're spending your time churning over in your mind, thinking about this other stuff, when we outcome that you want is you want to be able to park that and actually do the thing. And you're wasting really precious results. You're wasting time. You're wasting emotion in an already stressful time. And actually, you know, the people we know this, we look around ourselves, right? And we see the people who are functioning best, and the people who are functioning best have put the blinkers down in certain scenarios, not all, but in certain scenarios, when they need to, they put the blinkers down and they said, you know.

Lot. I am not going to worry about any of this stuff peripherally. Yeah, I am going to focus on the job I want, whether they're in a meeting, whether they're an exam, whether they're public speaking company, they are able to say, This is my priority. Everything else I am not going to focus on, yeah, and I think that's hugely the correlation, I suspect, to being able to do that be focused, yeah, and resilience, I suspect, is huge, yeah, I think it is.

So we've got activating events combined with beliefs lead to consequences. We're fairly clear on that. So what we're going to touch on now is a brief coaching model that people can use to help in that specific situation, and it's something it really does work, like all these things, it takes a bit of practice,

and as ever, it takes a bit of time. But this is from the school of models that are kind of known as sort of Rational Emotive type models. And it's really about

bringing some rationality to a situation when you have an activating event, but get some negative self talk.

So what this model is, is the ETC model that stands for emotion, truth and conscious choice. There's about three stages. You deliver this with your you know, just on your own. You don't need somebody to help coach you through this. It's just kind of a process. You can go through that self coaching. So what happens when you're activating event goes off and you are triggered, and you've got this negative self talk going? What's happening then is you have all kinds of emotional responses to something, right? So the first stage of a model is the emotion stage, and here what you need to do is you just need to acknowledge your thoughts and feelings without judgment. So in your example, it's saying, Wow, I'm, you know, I'm feeling negative about this. I'm feeling stressed, I'm worried about this. It reminds me of all this other stuff, you know, just acknowledge and don't judge it. What's your mind saying? What's the voice in your head saying? What are your emotions telling you? So just acknowledge that. Just the first stage. And then the literature would say, take a deep breath.

Hmm, loves me, taking a deep breath and breathing out. And then that moves you on to stage two, which is the truth, right? So you've acknowledged the thoughts and the emotions that are going on, and now what you do is you think about the truth, right? And this is trying to step away from the emotional, back towards the rational. In here. What we're saying is, what's the truth of the situation, what's fact? What's you know, not down the rabbit warrens of mind talk that's getting you into negative places, but what's happened in the past? What's the helpful truth? You know, you said different people of these stories about their lives. What is the helpful truth that's out there? What part of your story and what part of your beliefs are really helpful? And also, you know, what's the reality of the situation? And let's focus on those and think about those. So in your example, you've done work with this exam, it's been 20 years. You're good at your job. It's a subject that you love. You practiced. You know the content, those are all helpful, truthful statements, right? So you give yourself time to think about the truth in that context, and then only once you've taken time to think about that truth, then you should make a decision to take a choice. And that gets you to stage three, which is conscious choice. So having thought about the truth, you take another deep breath, and then think about and make a decision in terms of the action you're going to take next based on that truth. So what is your purpose and what does your helpful truth guide you towards doing? And this is really about decision making in a moment when you need to respond. So the type of thing that would happen here is in terms of a meeting, maybe somebody says something, and it's an activating event for you, and it makes you feel like you're being judged, or it makes you feel like the world's not kind to you, or people don't value your opinion and your response in that instant might be to do something negative, but if you take time and say, Actually, last time somebody said that to me, they didn't mean that I misinterpreted. I know that the person who said that values me because they've said A, B and C in the past, that's the truth. So based on that, reassess position of the truth. I'll respond accordingly. So that's kind of what the ETC model is. So, you know, acknowledge the thoughts and feelings in stage one, emotion,

let go of them a little bit, and think about the truth in stage two, truth. Think about rationality and helpful truth. Then in stage three, you make a conscious choice. So this is C conscious choice based on the truth. So that's the ETC model, and that's something that individuals can use to help get them back towards a stable state when there's been an activating What do you think about that we should have done this podcast three days ago I was busy typing this out.

The irony is, what I would say is I can wholeheartedly endorse this approach because I've used it, but the irony is, I've used it in situations like exams and interviews and stuff like that, where I haven't been prepared. And I think what's really interesting is because the situation was so different for me and that I had prepared. Yeah.

Because I wasn't used to it. I and this is, this is what I would go back to some of the stuff you were talking about earlier, about how you can be better at yourself and help yourself. One of the things I would struggle I would strongly encourage people to do, go and put yourself in uncomfortable situations all the time, totally when you're feeling good about yourself, not really bad when you're feeling good about yourself. You know what that is, the exact moment to go and do something deeply uncomfortable. Because I tell you what, one of, one of the interesting things that's just occurred to me about why I struggled, yeah, was because it was completely unfamiliar. The frustration to know the material and still not know what to write panicked me, and I rushed it right. And what actually was used to happen is I used to be so used to being under the pressure of not knowing it and thinking crumble, how am I going to craft a decent answer out of this? And so I think just being in multiple different types of situations really helps. So something interesting, though, one of the things I used to speak to audiences that were fairly large to me, that were fairly scary at different points in time and theaters and stuff like that. And one of the things that I did to prepare to deal with the stress about is, obviously, you prepare a lot, but I also, I used to embrace the stress that I got when I was preparing. So I do like a dry run through in a venue, and I could feel my palms getting sweaty and my, you know, heart going and things like that. And I knew that that was good, and I started to embrace that and almost try and get myself as anxious as I could at that stage and do it anyway. So, amazing. You're talking about this. I was listening to Graham Norton. Okay, so Americans. Google him. You might have seen him on telly. He does an interview show on BBC, loads of famous people. Anyway, he does a radio show. This morning, he was talking to Joe brand, and Joe brand and him were talking about doing stand up for the first time in decades. And they were talking about how adrenaline gets you through things if you can use it, and how stand up comedians are really good at riding that adrenaline wave. And so what you're talking about that is exactly how I prepare for public speaking, yeah? And it's exactly what happens to me. I love the sense of heightened Yeah. Sometimes I don't get it right, yeah, but that's okay, because what's happening to me is, as I'm as I'm talking and as I'm behaving, it's like I'm hyper, mindful and hyper, yes, yes. It becomes this, and, you know, you feel it, yeah, when you're getting it wrong and you feel and you're pulling yourself back and forth, you've got to practice that, and you've got to work with it, and you've got to run through the it's like, so it's like plugging your fingers into a socket and then seeing if you can still cut someone's hair neatly, right, really, and you do have to practice it. And what I would say is, if you are someone who considers yourself to be naturally resilient, yeah, and if you are someone who prides yourself, and I'm the pride will relate later, but on being resilient, trust me, there are still things you can do to test that and stretch that and to improve it. So the classic I would give you is I am really bad at drawing, right? Really bad. I'm truly dreadful. Go to an art class and be the worst in the room for a while. It's really good for you. Yeah, it is. If you are uncomfortable. I'm really bad at keeping my trap shut, right? So I go to meetings and I challenge myself to see how long I can not talk speaking of foreign languages, one just try and learn. I mean, I'm not generally anything that you're going to embarrass yourself, because it's because those things really, really help build resilience, because guaranteed someone will judge you or laugh at you. I also, I would just mention that anyone who's got kids, you guys

manual. Maybe we should do maybe we should just get parents. Maybe that's it. Yeah, all right, so that's kind of end of research Roundup, quick review. We talked about who's accountable for the well being of people. It's a mixture of individuals and organizations. We talked about some facts around stress. We talked about the pressure and performance curve and how too little pressure leads to low performance. Too much pressure leads to low performance. So it's an optimal point that's good for the individual and for organizations. In terms of productivity, we shared a brief way to measure resilience. We talked about some things that you can do to build your resilience. We focused on the ABC model and then the ETC model. So ABC is the activating event, plus for belief leads to the consequence. With the emphasis there on the beliefs and the mind talk it goes with that, etc. Model is emotion, truth and conscious choice. And by going through those stages, you can tend to get better outcomes for yourself once you're in a sort of activating event or triggering type situation. So that's our research round up. So quite a lot in there. We're kind of hammering through it this week. But that brings us on to our list of the week. Would you like to run through that? Yeah, really straightforward list of the week this week. It's things that you can do to help someone else, particularly if they may be struggling with their own levels of resilience, or if they've experienced things that maybe have knocked down their levels of resilience a little bit. There's a few things here to go through. One is and some of these are really obvious. That doesn't mean you shouldn't do them. You should do all of them all the time. So saying thank you. If you see someone taking knocks or push themselves out,

or even if you see people who just maybe are stretching themselves a bit, say thank you, because if you think of it like a little battery.

You're filling it up for them because they don't have time to be kind to themselves. So be kind to them. Celebrate people's successes, call them out, recognize it, and also use language that makes people aware that they stretching yourself is not an expectation, right? It's not that you constantly should be and it should be out of the norm. But if you celebrate people doing it, and make it aware that that's not going to become the norm, I think is really important. Apologize and flag up when you're wrong, and be honest about it and share when you get it wrong.

A it helps them, because it helps them realize that it's not always their fault. Sometimes someone else is, particularly if you're their boss, but also apologizing.

It's a real shortcut to getting over pride. And pride is so often involved with some the ability to bounce back. Yeah, so quite often licking your wounds and your ego is, is it? You can't help it. It's just there. But learning to apologize more often, more frequently and over smaller things really helps. Yeah, ask someone about their hobbies and their interests, engage with them, talk to them about other stuff, right? Because sometimes that really helps see the bigger picture. For people, it really helps them think, you know what? This is one part of my life, and there's a whole load of stuff I love and I'm passionate and I'm good at it. Yeah, that's exactly it. It helps move them into a domain in which they feel a fair amount of self worth. Because these are things, they probably are similar, particularly when people are on stressful periods and doing stressful work projects, right? It's really easy to all consumingly only talk about a project and make them feel like they're only worth that project. Yes, exactly right? Having a lunch break and talking about, you know, the garden or their holiday they're planning, yeah, it just gives them some mental, mental space. Go for a walk with someone. Okay, so I'm a massive proponent of this, walking meetings, walking non meetings, walking lunches, walking ones, whatever it is, just get out there. Just take a walk, stretch the legs. And also, the other thing, if you see someone take a knock right, go talk to them. It's really easy to sit in meetings, and what happens is someone gets a hard time because something's gone wrong, and everyone just kind of drifts out of the meeting room. They won't look them in the eye. And I've been there status. It's all like, oh, I don't want to awkward, awkward, and just go and say, go and speak to them and go, huh? Wow, tough meeting fancy coffee, yeah. Well, don't mention it at all if you don't know them that well. And instead, wander over and say, oh, you know, I'd be really interested in talking to you about some of the other stuff, would be really helpful. They shouldn't feel like their failure is not the end of the world, and actually it's useful. So those are things that we can do to help people more resilient. Say thank you, celebrate successes, but carefully apologize if you've made mistakes you're in the wrong.

Ask people about stuff outside of the situation, about their hobbies, their interests. Go outside, take a walk go with people, and also just, you know, stick out a bit of an olive branch. If things have been tough, stick out a little bit of a

pool noodle in the pool to rescue them, because otherwise it can feel really lonely out there. Yeah, so that's list the week. No, there's another word for pool noodles. That's what I've taken away from that. Okay? Roller, foam roller. No, they're called, like, wobbles or something like that as well. Wiggles, woggles, I don't know. I know them as foam rollers in the gym and plum girls in American literature. Fine, okay, yeah, amazingness. There was some amazing stuff on the web on a complete tangent about, like, 100 million uses for noodles. It's incredible. Anyway, Episode 17 on we're gonna get riding on that.

Okay, so any stories from a keyboard for you, any specific, really quick one, and it's about, it's a in the spirit of what we've just said, I'm gonna Fess up. And I used to wear resilience like a badge of honor. I used to tell a story talk about stories. I used to tell a story about how I had to be dragged from my sick bed, and I'm rarely sick into work for a 48 hour shift to try and finish a project. And I still tell I still find myself telling that story with pride. There is nothing to be proud of my situation. I am proud of the work that is associated with it. We shouldn't have needed to get there. Yeah, and we did. And yes, I'm proud that I recovered from it, and I stayed at that organization, and I was happy, and I moved away from working that hard, but I have used that story with people younger than me in the industry to show how far you should have to push yourself.

Oh yeah, it's nonsense. It's absolute nonsense. And so that's me doing my thing, for anyone who does nobody listening, saying, I'm really sorry if I pushed you really Yeah, because, you know, I've grown up and I've learned Yeah. It takes time to do this stuff. It really does. My little story is kind of to do with weaponization of resilience, which was a topic earlier. One

of the groups I was in was rolling out a high level resilience training, you know, a one day program to people and part way through, part way through the day at sort of one o'clock in the afternoon, one of the people who was attending, there were maybe 20 people in there, basically put their hand up and said, effectively, I can't do this. I'm exhausted. I'm stretched. I.

I'm not in a great place, and now you're lumping resilience training on to me and taking my time with this when I'm barely functioning, and making it my responsibility to do all this stuff. I just can't really take it anymore. And so for me, that's just an example of of where you need to be careful and you can, you can make your people accountable for their resilience, but at the same time, ultimately, it's often organizations and leaders that create environments that are the things that are likely to break people, and when you see it in action, it's not great. So just, just, don't, I guess, just be conscious of what you're asking your people to do. When you're asking them to be resilient, if you're asking them to be resilient in a situation that's

inhuman, then that's not their problem. That's your problem as an organization. Obviously, the flip side of that is for employees, you've got to be tough enough to deal with a normal thing. It's just about where that balance is. So there we go. Talk about lowering the tone a little bit there. I don't think it is at all. I think that's really important. So my top tips would be, if you are feeling extraordinarily put under pressure and that your resilience is dropping. As an employee, keep a record of what you're being asked to do and where it's feeling like it's stretching. And as a boss, it is your I'm going to say again, it is your duty and your obligation to understand,

and that means talking to people about it. Now, if they are not being efficient in the way they do it, and that's why they feel stretched, then that's an efficiency issue. But if they tell you that they have issues, believe them, yeah, right, it's their truth. It might be your truth, and you might be able to perform under that level of pressure, they can't that's their that's their person, and your well being is their their well being is your responsibility? Yeah, absolutely. So believe them, yeah. And I guess my my final thought on this is to speak to people that you trust. So if you find yourself in a difficult situation, speak to the people that that you trust and what you value, tell them how you feel, be open, get their support, listen to them if they're in that situation. But communicating about this stuff is really important if you don't communicate, admit when things are tough and it only makes them tougher, and often, the first stage, like people say, of getting over these things, is speaking to somebody and putting words to how you feel. And that's hard. It really is. And you know what the easiest place to start is when no one's feeling low? Yes, you know, start talking about how maybe it's been a tough week personally, because, you know, the house is being done up or whatever, therefore you're feeling a little bit less resilient than normal. Yeah? Because that language, bringing that in then is much easier than when everyone's stressed at the end of a project and, like, hang on a minute. What do you mean? You're not being resilient? Yeah. So a great analogy that I've heard on this resilient stuff is around, actually, it was to do with sort of meditation and things like that, but it relates very much to this, which is, you know, you wouldn't teach yourself to swim in the open seas, would you? I mean, you don't go out to like a stormy Atlantic Squall and decide this is where I'm going to learn to swim. You start in calm, quiet waters. You'll start in a shallow paddling pool and learn there, and then progress to the bigger areas and the bigger areas. And it's the same with managing your resilience and having conversations about it. If you practice your management techniques in the shallower waters, and you'll be more able to use swim in the deeper waters when it's time. Yeah.

Okay, so that was quite a big episode. I mean, I think there was a lot in there on resilience. Oh, James, we could talk about resilience for ages, nearly as long as we could talk about well being

or actually, anyone still listening. Yeah, give us a shout out if there's anyone alive. Yes, here you go. There's a trick. But at the end of the podcast, if you're still listening to this podcast and you've heard the end, just tweet Wow podcast with I saw it through and I bounced back. Yeah, and I bounced back. Well done for surviving this about second resilience in itself. Anyway, we are getting to the end, so we're gonna check out of here. Please definitely get in touch with us on Twitter at the WoW podcast. We'd really love to hear from you,

and it's a great way to understand a little bit more about what your what your thoughts are, and what we're saying. Yeah, good stuff. All right, well, until next time, it's goodbye from me and it's goodbye from me.