Written by: Bruce Alfred, 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.
Covid is relentless and hard, you’re overworked, your direct reports are underperforming. The baby’s keeping you up all night, your social network is pretty much absent, your spouse is snapping at you and you snap back. At everybody.
One way or another, you’ll hear in your mind or perhaps from your boss (or spouse): “You need to build up your resilience.” It sounds like a punishment.
Two things:
Building up your resilience does sound like a punishment. And hard work. But, actually, it is the same thing as building more joy in your life. More joy is good. And the work is not that hard.
Resilience is key to high-performance leadership. The skills that allow you to build more resilience are the same skills that will allow you to lead at your highest level.
What can building your resilience do for you as a leader? It can help you foster a psychologically safe workplace that is far less reactive and far more strategic, creative and productive. It helps you work at the top of your game, lead from your best place, and it makes it a whole lot easier to create higher-performing teams. It helps to create more joy at work, and since we spend an awful lot of time working, more joy at work makes life better.
If you are skeptical, as you have a right to be, you might be asking yourself several key questions:
What the f*$čK is resilience, anyway?
What skills do we need to learn to become more resilient?
How does resilience lead to higher performance?
How does it help create a psychologically safe workplace - and is that a New Age-y, hippie thing or is that really something important?
How does building resilience build joy?
If I don’t have time to sleep, how can I take time to add “Build Resilience” to my to-do list?
Let’s address time constraints first.
How to make the time to build your resilience skills
At BolsterUp, we’ve worked with quite a few new doctors – residents and fellows – at some of the most respected medical institutions in the world. They are on the bottom of the doctor food chain, massively overworked – 100+ hours many weeks – and they often are just starting their families. When we ask them what they do to relax and recharge, the answer we hear almost 100% of the time is this: “I stumble to the couch and turn on Netflix.” Totally understandable. When you have nothing left and need a few minutes before bed, Netflix.
Here’s what we tell these overworked docs: take exactly five minutes before Netflix to work on filling your cup. Before long, you’ll have the resilience skills that will help your entire career. After all, yelling obscenities at your attending physician is known to put a damper on career advancement.
Small and regular steps practiced every day will take you a long way. Five minutes a day is better than no minutes a day. There have been studies.
“A swim from the Barrier Reef to Sydney Harbour starts with one swish of the tail. Just keep swimming.” – Dory (paraphrased)
What is resilience?
As my duck friends have told me, it means to let the ice-cold, driving rain roll right off your tail feathers.
As my friends in the military have told me, it means to embrace the suck.
Here’s how we put it:
Resilience is not about being stoic and toughing it out. It is about skillfully managing your inner world such that you feel better in your body and mind and can be your best self for you – and for those you serve and lead.
Less esoterically: resilience is that which results from learning and practicing a few key skills that reduce stress and reactivity and increase your ability to adroitly manage all the shit the world throws at you.
How do I develop more resilience?
We build resilience through training – just like you’d train for a 10k or to be the next Lebron James. Except that you can do it with a few minutes of daily practice on your couch, as opposed to long, grueling sessions with other sweaty people.
How to be the Lebron James of resilience:
Learn how to manage thoughts so they don’t manage you
Develop early warning systems (mindfulness/awareness)
Understand how to reduce bad stress
Recognize and harness good stress
Intentionally increase inner joy and well-being
Want to learn easy to practice skills to develop your resilience? Our free HeadTraining email series can get you started today. Learn more by visiting https://bolsterup.life/everyday-resilience/
How does increasing resilience lead to higher performance?
Do you perform better when you feel better? Of course you do. Practicing skills that build resilience helps you feel better from the inside out so you can perform better.
The more resilience skills you gain, the faster you will be able to bounce back from stress and move into a positive, focused, strong way of being.
Studies show the benefits of increased resilience include:
Reduced stress; increased sense of wellbeing
Lower rates of depression
Improved health
Greater satisfaction with life
And, yes, enhanced performance – because when you feel better you perform better.
Building performance through resilience boils down to working more from the newer part of our brains (the frontal lobes) which controls executive functioning, and less from the old part of our brains (the amygdala) which controls our fight/flight response.
When our resilience is low we are more quickly triggered into the amygdala where we are reactive. This is the place from which snap decisions come (the ones that lose accounts), the nasty comment, or even shouting diatribes.
Conversely, when we work from the newer, executive functioning part of our brains, we can be more strategic and creative and are better able to grow our interpersonal relationships.
Bottom line: if you are a leader of people, the way you interact with, support, and develop them is crucial to the success of your organization.
How does resilience help create a psychologically safe workplace – and is that actually important?
First, what the heck is psychological safety? While it sounds like something that the annoying HR rep would talk about, it is hugely important in the workplace.
Psychological safety is the belief that you won’t be punished when you make a mistake, and that you have confidence that you will be treated fairly and respectfully. It means that managers, leaders, and colleagues are supportive and understanding of one another even when they don’t agree; that they come to the table as collaborators, not adversaries.
If you tend to fall into the Tasmanian Devil camp of leadership, psychological safety is going to be in the dumpster. That is not good, because then your team will perform as if they live in the dumpster.
By Tasmanian Devil, we mean low resilience, high reactivity.
The less resilience we have on any given day, the more we are likely to act unskillfully, ie “punishing” more. Punishing tends to show up in the workplace in big and small ways:
The boss who explodes at you in a screaming tirade because you did not meet their expectations
The manager who (surprise!) throws you under the bus at the project debrief
The leader who makes a snide comment that only you can hear to make sure you understand that they are displeased with you
The over-the-top response from a colleague who thinks her frustration is all your fault
This “punishing” is so damaging because we, as humans, focus on the negative. The research shows that the negative is so immediately and firmly seated in our psyches that it takes five positive encounters to counter the damage of a single negative encounter. I think that is a bit rosy. Most people I have spoken with think that it takes multiple positive encounters for them to forgive the single negative encounter, but the negative is not forgotten – ever.
Let’s face it, you can’t be a high-performing leader without the ability to create high-performing teams. By definition (mine), high-performing leaders must have the leadership skills to create high-performing teams, otherwise nobody’s high performing. End of definition.
We need to create a psychologically safe workplace for ourselves and our employees because that allows us to do our best work.
Google ran a two-year study to discover the top needs of high-performing teams. The number one need, by a long shot: psychological safety.
Here’s what Google’s 2015 report said:
Individuals on teams with higher psychological safety are less likely to leave Google, they’re more likely to harness the power of diverse ideas from their teammates, they bring in more revenue, and they’re rated as effective twice as often by executives.
Psychological safety allows for moderate risk-taking, speaking your mind, creativity, and sticking your neck out without fear of having it cut off — just the types of behavior that lead to business improvements and even breakthroughs.
When you increase your resilience as a leader, you increase psychological safety, you increase your team’s effectiveness, and you increase the potential for everyone to perform at their best.
How does building resilience build joy?
The components that allow us to build more resilience are also the components that allow us to experience more inner peace and joy. Through our work with resilience, we build awareness, we learn to regulate our negative emotions more skillfully, and we develop a deeper reserve that allows us to better navigate everything from the small bumps in the road to the major upheavals that we all, as humans, will encounter.
By increasing our reserve and reducing the number of negative encounters, we increase positivity. When we work in an atmosphere that is supportive and positive, we all experience more joy.
We can all use more joy in our lives. Let’s all go out and grow our business and grow more joy.
Ready to learn easy to practice skills to develop your resilience and grow more joy? Our free HeadTraining email series can get you started today. Learn more by visiting https://bolsterup.life/everyday-resilience/
Bruce Alfred, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
In 2005, as a father of four young children, Bruce was diagnosed with stage four non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. He threw himself into learning everything he could about stress reduction, positive mindset, mindfulness, and resilience.
Over the last 15 years, Bruce has translated his personal deep dive into helping individuals and organizations. Together with his colleagues at BolsterUp, Bruce guides clients in improving employee experience, creating high-performing teams, and reducing stress and burnout while increasing well-being and joy. BolsterUp helps forward-thinking leaders make their organization the place everyone wants to work.
Bruce specializes in helping teams to work better together and managers to lead more effectively through better partnering, communication, and understanding. He coaches internationally, focusing on strengths-based development, professional capability-building, peak performance, resilience, and well-being. Corporate and individual clients attest to his ability to accelerate full-throttle success by driving individual engagement and team alignment.
Bruce’s corporate clients include Mayo Clinic, NYU Langone Health, University of Minnesota, University Hospitals, Be The Match, and others.
In addition to being a Gallup-certified CliftonStrengths coach, Bruce is a registered yoga and mindfulness teacher.
