Written by: Robert McAlister, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Why do some people and groups seem to be better able to cope with hardship or perform better within a crisis than others?
While everyone’s situation is different, it is true that people with resilience tend to have a higher tolerance for the emotional distress generated by hard times. The more resilient you are, the better you’re able to tolerate the feelings of stress, anxiety, and sadness that accompany trauma and adversity—and find a way to rebound from setbacks.
I have worked in many parts of the world, often in challenging or fragile environments and the one thing I have witnessed is in the places that suffer regular hardship, crisis, or disaster the more you find resilient people. I believe that the key to building personal resilience is repeated exposure to difficulties, challenges, and complexity.
Building Resilience
Resilience isn’t a macho quality, and it isn’t fixed; it’s an ongoing process that requires effort to build and maintain over time. Unless you’ve faced adversity in your life before, it’s unlikely you’ve had the need or opportunity to develop resilience. Drawing on past experiences can help you cope with the challenges you’re facing today.
While it’s often difficult to imagine anything good coming out of tough experiences, building resilience can help you find any positives in the difficulties you’ve faced. Surviving hardships can teach you important things about yourself and the world around you, strengthen your resolve, deepen your empathy, and in time enable you to evolve and grow as a human being.
Building resilience can also help you to:
Stay focused, flexible, and productive, in both good and bad times.
Feel less afraid of new experiences or an uncertain future.
Manage and tolerate strong emotions outside your comfort zone, even those you’d rather avoid like anger or despair.
Strengthen your relationships and improve your communication skills, especially under pressure.
Bolster your self-esteem.
Be confident you’ll eventually find a solution to a problem, even when one isn’t immediately apparent.
You can develop and improve these qualities of resilience at any time, regardless of your age, background, or circumstances.
Changing Mindsets
It is quite common for clients to come to my sessions with past experiences that have left them feeling like they can’t move forward when a task is overwhelming.
I can help them overcome that negative mindset by building their confidence through experiences that develop their competence. One activity I run involves showing clients that some things, which seem impossible or too confusing at first, can be broken down into easy-to-understand parts. I use puzzles that appear complicated and sometimes impossible to complete.
When they have been given the challenge, I ask them to discuss how it might be solved, the object is to build their resilience to feeling overwhelmed by letting them discover, on their own, how complex things can be broken into parts. When they’ve completed the task explain that they have just experienced their ability to break something down into more understandable parts.
The experience will build their competence awareness. Dividing big assignments or jobs into small tasks will give them the confidence to get started and the resilience to persevere.
This resonates with my many own experiences of personal challenges over the years where resilience has been essential. I remember recently having to dig deep into my personal resilience when to make up the miles for an extreme walking event I had to keep forcing myself to head away from comfort and warmth into the cold and darkness whilst tired and injured and that takes a certain mindset. What helped enormously was breaking the task down mentally and the many hours of preparation and conditioning.
Achieving the Impossible
In his book The Art of the Impossible, Steven Kotler explains that top sports stars who achieve what we perceive to be impossible feats, come from those individuals’ mindsets of pushing themselves a little farther each time.
To the outside world, it looks like they are accomplishing the impossible and they are but only by first achieving many smaller impossible challenges and goals on the way.
He goes onto explain the four steps to peak performance and you will see that persistence, grit, and resilience are high on the list for achieving sustainable high performance.
Motivation. This means stoking your intrinsic curiosity and passion, as well as developing the skills needed to sustain motivation over the long haul—skills like persistence, grit, resilience, and the ability to delay gratification.
Learning. This refers not only to the ability to acquire new skills and knowledge but also to the ability to understand the process of learning itself, using tools like the scientific method and first-principle thinking. It also means cultivating the self-awareness needed to know where you need to improve.
Creativity. Technically, this means the ability to produce novel and useful ideas. In practice, it means mastering a whole subset of skills, including idea generation, pattern recognition, and risk-taking.
Flow. Finally, learning how to get into focused and absorbed flow states is the master skill that will turbocharge all the other steps, and power you to peak performance.
Self-Awareness
I personally think that the above point made regarding self-awareness is key to developing strong personal resilience. Self-awareness helps you build resilience, so you can bounce back from setbacks and difficulties. When you understand your own personal strengths and areas for improvement you can adjust accordingly, acquire extra knowledge when necessary and make positive decisions.
I like the term personal strengths, and this is something I feel many of my clients overlook or simply do not understand about themselves. It is an area I tend to focus on and use as a foundation to build their capabilities upon.
Over the last year, I have used this baseline approach when coaching a senior executive and she has found the results very practical and useful across many diverse areas of responsibility. But most importantly the ability to embrace those personal strengths to build relationships and reduce conflict.
Learning from failure
When you incorporate opportunities for clients to experience mistakes as an expected part of learning, you build their resilience to setbacks. Through individual or group discussions, their own mistakes, and building knowledge of their brain’s programming, your clients will gain the competence, optimism, and understanding to persevere – and even make progress – through failure.
Henry Ford is quoted as saying, “Failure is simply the opportunity to start again, this time more intelligently.”
This quote reminds me of a lovely restaurant I pass daily, the owner spent months trying to make his vision work but realised he was not making the money needed to return his investment. I thought he would close and sell by his downbeat manner but to his credit he and his team are learning from their mistakes and changing strategy accordingly, it will be interesting to see the impact of these changes, but one thing you can visibly see, is his remotivated outlook and determination.
I feel the most important part of this story is the owner’s ability to not remain fixed to his original vision and be self-aware and flexible enough to change the plan once required.
These are the types of routine daily challenges we all face, overcome and in doing so develop resilience, from these small incremental steps and lessons learned.
Beyond the Plan Thinking
When I coach, I call this ‘beyond the plan thinking’ the ability to adapt and think differently when the context has changed, and the plan no longer fit the new context. I have written about this in my previously Brainz article “Threats Change So Must Our Thinking” and the perfection traps we set ourselves.
The military has an old saying “no plan survives first contact with the enemy” and there is some truth in this. You need a plan, but you cannot remain fixed to that plan if it is failing or not working. The ability to quickly adapt is easier for some than for others, particularly individuals with a fixed or rigid mindset, but again it’s about confidence through exposure and conditioning. If you do not like the military version, Mike Tyson (Boxer) said the same about having a plan until punched hard in the mouth!
So, when your coaching clients and they are beating themselves up for making mistakes, explain that these are not failures: they are opportunities for the brain to build a bridge that will bring them success in the future. More importantly, when you correct an error, your brain builds new wiring to guide you to make a better choice next time. So doing something wrong can be beneficial in the long-term, replacing misinformation with firm experience. The strongest understandings we have do not come from what we’ve memorised but rather from what we’ve learned from failure.
By building clients’ resilience in this way, you can help them realise that when they engage confidently with a challenge, anything is possible, and failure is not something to fear.
This is vitally important. After all, it’s not what they know, but what they can do with what they know, that is the first step of coaching them for the impossible.
Robert McAlister, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Robert’s mantra is ‘think differently’ and he certainly walks that talk in everything he does. Certainly not one for taking the easy path, he thrives on a challenge and the words ‘the most tenacious person we know’ are a major understatement. He is a recognized leader in the field of leadership and team coaching. and is the Director and driving force behind Glenbarr Coaching, who offers a very different coaching experience. For over 30 years he has worked globally with a diverse range of high-profile clients from Governments to NGO’s, Private Sector Corporates to Public Sector Agencies. Celebrities and Senior Executives who have all benefitted from his sought-after talents. Such a wide portfolio and body of work has provided him with very unique insights and approaches to training and coaching strategies that work and are sustainable. The central theme to Robert’s career has been people development and growth. Specialising in mindset, behaviours, and team dynamics to effect positive outcomes and increased performance. Equally, at home in the boardroom or challenging field environments getting his hands dirty, Robert’s real magic is bringing the best out of individuals or teams to achieve their goals. If you are looking for a truly transformational experience that is remembered and relived long after any official training or coaching session, then Robert is the guy to talk to!
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