Harmonics

The stresses and demands of daily life, not just life transitions, can take its toll on us physically and psychologically. We are living in a world where uncertainty is constant, we have 24/7 connectivity and where we are continually being asked to take on more change in our home and working lives. We need to be able to react quickly to change, achieve more with less, and ensure we don’t become overwhelmed. We need to be more resilient, but sometimes that’s easier said than done.

Next week, on Friday 31st March, Ireland’s third National Workplace Wellbeing Day will take place.  The purpose of the annual event is to encourage employers across Ireland to promote employee wellbeing.  So it’s timely to remind ourselves of the importance of wellbeing and building our personal resilience. There’s a message here for employers too as workplace stress can contribute to absenteeism and can impact on productivity.

Resilience, which is directly related to wellbeing, is about our ability to cope and “bounce back” from difficult situations.  The World Health Organisation defines wellbeing as “the state in which an individual realises his or her own abilities, can cope with normal stresses of life, can work productively, and is able to make a contribution to his or her own community.”

But people do not respond to stressful events in the same way.  Some of us seem to be more resilient and cope better with challenges than others.  Resilience is a characteristic and, like all characteristics, the amount we possess differs from person to person. Developing resilience is a personal journey. From the day we are born our resilience is being developed. Whether it’s when we are learning to walk, to make friends, to do exams, manage the demands of work or most importantly manage the way we interact with those we love.

Our need to be able to deal with the hard times calls on our resilience.  While many of us want to be perfect, the harsh truth is that none of us are. It is in dealing with our mistakes and foibles that we need to draw on our resilience.  When things go wrong (as the often will), we have a number of choices; ignore them, learn from them, or crumble under them.  By learning from the hard times we grow our resilience.  The good news is the learning from Positive Psychology tells us that we can all develop more resilience.

How to build personal resilience in a demanding world

1. Stay Connected: our relationships with close family members, friends or others are important in strengthening our resilience and so, be open to help and support from those who care about you.
2. Don’t see a crisis as “the end of the world”: we can’t stop difficult and stressful events happening in our lives, but we can change how we view and react to them. So, keep things in perspective, try looking beyond the immediate difficult situation and consider how the future might be different or better. Listen to your body to see how it reacts to this change in your thought process.
3. Have a strong sense of purpose: resilient people have a strong sense of purpose and meaning in their lives. Develop a vision of what gives meaning to your work and life, write it out and be guided by it.
4. Consider lessons learned: how you have successfully dealt with difficult situations in the past and trust yourself to do so now.
5. Accept that change is part of life: There is only one thing that is certain in life and its change, at the same time there are occasions when things cannot be changed. Focus on the things that you can change and look to the future. Consider change as an opportunity to reflect on what is and look for opportunities to learn and grow.
6. Take decisive actions: don’t just hope that problems will go away; use sound problem-solving strategies to consider what actions you can take in the situation and act!
7. Set goals and take actions to achieve them: make sure your goals are realistic and taking steps, even small ones, towards them is powerful in developing resilience.
8. Work on being flexible and adaptable: resilient people are able to adapt to new people and situations quickly; they let go of the old way of doing things and quickly learn new procedures and skills. They can also tolerate high levels of ambiguity and uncertainty in situations.
9. Cultivate a positive view of yourself helps build resilience; be confident in your ability and trust your instincts. When you find yourself having negative thoughts restate them positively. Be optimistic, good things do happen, visualise what you want instead of worrying and being fearful.
10. Take care of yourself. Eat well, exercise, focus on continuing the things that help you relax and actively work on developing and maintaining a positive work life balance.
11. Keep your sense of humour!

If you are having difficulty, and finding yourself overwhelmed, then the first point in the list above is the most important tip.  As Dr Damien Amen put it, “all of us have problems, the smart ones get help.”  Our advice to you: if you are struggling, be smart and reach out and get the support you need to grow your resilience. Very often a coach can help you with this.

Diversify your thinking

I confess that I had my eyes opened wide recently when I saw a group of transgender men thrust themselves towards us provocatively wearing Knee High Kinky Boots. What was more embarrassing, I was sitting beside my 14 year old daughter watching this spectacle and had to provide a very fast forward running commentary to update her on the facts of life that I had omitted in previous chats. We were on a weekend daddy and daughter trip to London and a lovely lady at the ticket booths earlier that day had recommended this Olivier award winning West End Show “Kinky Boots” as a must see. We booked immediately and we weren’t disappointed as the show was a knockout.

It told the story of a traditional English shoe manufacturing business in freefall and a son who needed to turn it around after his father’s death. He was fresh out of college when he had to return from London and save the business. He had little experience of change management and was very unsure of his own career path. The musical has some core messages running through that we can apply to change and career planning.

Parents Career advice

The career advice the son received from his father was to take over the business. The son wanted to head to London and enjoy a different life but his father was interested in legacy and passing the business onto the younger generation. But less than one third of family businesses survive the transition from first to second generation ownership. There is enormous pressure on many children to do what their parents believe is the best career choice for them.

My career advice? Never take a job out of duty or responsibility to your parents or another person for that matter. This leads to unhappiness and a growing resentment as you get older. Your parents, while well-meaning, only see the world from their perspective, they’re from a different generation and their career advice is not always right for you, especially in this much changed world of work.

Following someone else’s dream

In the show, the son’s girlfriend was very pushy, she wanted the expensive boots and the dream lifestyle associated with being attached to the business owner’s son. She had created her dream of living in London but had not taken the time to truly understand what motivated him. He was unwilling to let her down and was following her direction because he did not know what he wanted himself. He did not trust his own opinion. He depended on his father for his identity until he ran away. He was torn between a father that saw him as the heir and a girlfriend who saw him as the answer to her upmarket dream lifestyle.

“To thine own self be true are wise words” from George Bernard Shaw. Don’t get caught up in someone else’s dream. Seek help to become brave enough to call it out early before you feel you don’t have the power to turn back. It doesn’t matter how far you have gone down one road, remember you can always turn back.

Don’t worry what anyone thinks

I attended the Talent Summit recently where Dan Pink spoke about the benefits of enabling Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose in the workplace. He was asked after his talk what advice he would have given to his 18 year old self. He gave two answers. (1) Marry well – by that he meant marrying not for money (yet he did say it helped!) but someone with whom you can be yourself and (2) “Don’t worry what others think”.

In the west end show, the son was diversifying into producing kinky boots for drag queens. It was a niche but profitable global market replacing his traditional British men’s shoes market which was literally dying on its feet. Initially, he was worried what his employees and the locals in his home town of Northampton would think. He overcame initial resistance, believed in himself and is building a global business now. We all need to diversify our skills for the future to stay ahead of the change curve. We should not worry about those who want the world to stand still, they will be found out in time.

Diversity – We also saw a transgender man in the show not accepted by his work colleagues and his fellow workers refused to use the same toilets as him. I witnessed this early in my career when I worked with a gay colleague and some of my workmates refused to use the men’s toilets at work because he used them! We work in a more multicultural workplace now and we need to resist the mentality that says “we always did it this way” as this type of thinking silences new ideas and inhibits progress.

MIT’s media lab has a long tradition of encouraging unorthodox ways of doing things. Its Chairman Nicholas Negroponte notes: “New ideas emerge from a heterogeneous collection of edgy, unorthodox people, from architecture to arts, from maths to music”. Today, new ideas are not coming from the top of organisations, they are coming from the edge, from those who may not conform to our traditional ways but who have a lot to offer if we only listen and engage them.

In summary, the message from Kinky Boots is to back yourself, worry less about what anyone thinks and embrace diversity as an opportunity to change your thinking which could indeed change your life direction. This quote from Einstein rings true when we take the learnings from Kinky Boots.

“We can not solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them”  Einstein