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The Power of Inspiration

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inspiration in three steps

Ever find with your clients that their inspiration has dissipated somehow? Hidden because of the busyness of their world?

What about your own inspiration? Can you get hold of it quickly whenever you need that extra oomph in your day?

The power of inspiration is phenomenal. And being able to get hold of it – whenever,wherever – is also phenomenal, and part of a personal resilience toolkit. People often seek inspiration from outside themselves as a primary method – people they admire; places that are lovely; books that lift the spirit. Or via social – stories that inspire; funny videos.

And yet there’s another way available to you, to your client. Right here, right now. Inside.

You have, at some point in your life, inspired yourself or someone else. You will have been operating near your best at that moment. And to connect with that can re-inspire you. That doesn’t mean rolling about it self-congratulation, but instead, accepting that for at least one moment in your life, you inspired!

Try it!

  1. Recall one such moment when you inspired someone else, or indeed yourself.
    Maybe it was with one of your kids. Or one of your team.Or with a friend.
    Or maybe it’s something you managed to do, to pull off.
  2. Bring it strongly into your mind.
    Who were you with? What were you doing?
    Just remember fully. The feelings, the thoughts, the pictures you may have of what was going on around you.
    Who were you in this moment?
  3. Remain in the memory a little while.
  4. Now notice how you feel.

You are likely to feel more energised. And if you have done this truthfully, a lot more energised! Your memories of when you inspire are a resource available to you, sitting inside. It’s just a matter of getting hold of them.

Go help you and your client get inspired.

 

 


Author: Jenny Campbell, CEO of The Resilience Engine

Looking for inspiration for your own practice? Join the Resilience Engine Community of Practice, a learning community whose focus is to extend our understanding of resilience. Join the next Resilience Engine programme starting the 5th February 2019. More info here! ; Academy of Executive Coaching.

If you have an internal bank of coaches interested in building an internal resilience support capability for your organisation, please get in contact directly via info@resilienceengine.com.

The brochure can be found via our website.

 

 

Inspiration in three steps

You can find here all of our publications. In the following list, choose which filter you would like to apply:

inspiration in three steps

Ever find with your clients that their inspiration has dissipated somehow? Hidden because of the busyness of their world?

What about your own inspiration? Can you get hold of it quickly whenever you need that extra oomph in your day?

The power of inspiration is phenomenal.  And being able to get hold of it – whenever,wherever – is also phenomenal, and part of a personal resilience toolkit. People often seek inspiration from outside themselves as a primary method – people they admire; places that are lovely; books that lift the spirit. Or via social – stories that inspire; funny videos.

And yet there’s another way available to you, to your client. Right here, right now. Inside.

You have, at some point in your life, inspired yourself or someone else. You will have been operating near your best at that moment.  And to connect with that can re-inspire you.  That doesn’t mean rolling about it self-congratulation, but instead, accepting that for at least one moment in your life, you inspired!

Try it!

Make sure you give yourself a few minutes without interruption as you follow these simple steps:

  1. Recall one such moment when you inspired someone else, or indeed yourself.
    Maybe it was with one of your kids.  Or one of your team.Or with a friend.Or maybe it’s something you managed to do, to pull off.
  2. Bring it strongly into your mind.
    Who were you with? What were you doing?
    Just remember fully. The feelings, the thoughts, the pictures you may have of what was going on around you.
    Who were you in this moment?
    Remain in the memory a little while.
  3. Notice how you feel.
    You are likely to feel more energised. And if you have done this truthfully, a lot more energised! Your memories of when you inspire are a resource available to you, sitting inside. It’s just a matter of getting hold of them.Go help you and your client get inspired.


Author: Jenny Campbell, CEO of The Resilience Engine

Looking for inspiration for your own practice? Join the Resilience Engine Community of Practice, a learning community whose focus is to extend our understanding of resilience.  Join the next Resilience Engine programme starting the 5th February 2019. More info here!  Academy of Executive Coaching.

If you have an internal bank of coaches interested in building an internal resilience support capability for your organisation, please get in contact directly via info@resilienceengine.com.

The brochure can be found via our website.

 

 

Have a laugh

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When is the last time you really had a laugh?

Think about it.

Do you seek out ways to get a laugh? Or are you just keeping it together, often feeling tired, perhaps distracted because of work or home life pressures, and need to wind down before you’re in the mood to even think about anything remotely funny? (thank you very much!)
How many of your clients are in the same position?

The ability to laugh easily and frequently is a tremendous resource. Laughing is good for you and your resilience and wellbeing! Laughter stimulates the immune system and counteracts the effects of the negative stress reactions when stress hormones hijack your brain and your body. It is a natural stress reducer that has been related to improved health, increased life expectancy, and overall wellbeing. Being able to get at this marvellous resource inside you needs a little nurturing.

 

Here are the Resilience Engine’s steps to laughter, no matter what you’re feeling. Give these steps a go for yourself. And give them a go with your coaching clients:

  1. Decide you want to laugh more

No need to argue this one out. It’s good for you. And therefore it will be good in your service of others as a coach.

  1. Decide you deserve it

You always do, no matter how much of a schmuk you might have been. (And remember.  Everyone else deserves to experience you the way you can be when you are fun and laughing.)

  1. Seek out other people and situations that make you laugh – as often as you can

Go outside of yourself and seek the sunny people and stuff that exists all around. (Don’t expect that sitting in a room by yourself when you’re feeling dismal will make the difference.) And if you can’t do that because of constraints of time or location, remember a funny moment, several if you can, and bring them into you right now. You’ll find yourself at least giggling…

  1. Laugh at stuff now

Since laughter is a reaction to a current stimulus, it involves an acceptance of the present. When you laugh, you let go of thought and inhibition–which is why laughter is the greatest medicine against negative stress. You cannot laugh while your mind is preoccupied with stressful thoughts. Give power to the present moment, and be grateful for your life as it is now.

Have a laugh. Go and get some for the sake of your resilience!

 

Author: Jenny Campbell, CEO of The Resilience Engine

Client story: Coping vs Breakthrough

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Resilience is your capacity for change.

Stories from the Resilience Engine Community of Practice: Yvette Elcock

 

Read this client’s story of resilience coaching. The Resilience coach is Yvette Elcock, one of our Accredited Practitioner from the Resilience Engine Community of Practice.

 

“Working through the difference between soldiering on or what you described as breakthrough is very powerful. The difference between soldiering on and breakthrough is significant. The unfortunate trap here is that tenacity and endurance are seen as virtues, which they are and the ability to keep going has probably served as well in the past.

However, I would suggest that just coping is a very passive way of responding to a situation and comes at considerable cost which becomes attritional.

‘Breakthrough’ is the active management of a situation where one might decide it’s appropriate to endure for a short period, or change the circumstance, but either is an active decision and strategy. This can be more demanding initially because we have to maintain a broader perspective, assessing both the situation and our own state, and consider options. One has to resist the ‘perceptual narrowing’ that pressure and stress can generate.

For me tai chi gives a very useful, physical example and analogy. The principle in tai chi is to keep contact and so remain engaged and ‘listening’ to one’s partner/opponent whilst also staying soft, moving and turning. Again for me, the warning signs are the sense of pressure and when the focus is on the very immediate, or if I am thinking’ I just need get passed that Board meeting or those dates…

Just coping is a very passive form of endurance. ‘Breakthrough’ is more skilful, and so requires an initial investment of effort; but is empowering and more sustainable”.

CEO of mid sized organisation

 

We couldn’t say it any better.

If you want to coach to create these kinds of insights and impact, please invest in your own resilience and learn to become a resilience coach with the Resilience Engine Accreditation Programme.

 

Resilience Lens: Coaching Challenges

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Resilience Engine, Resilience Engine Blog post, Not Coping

The Resilience Lens is where the Resilience Engine offers in-depth analysis of different coaching challenges, using our ten years of resilience research.

Here’s our first example.

Your Client Is Not Coping. What do you do?

You are running a workshop aimed to help enable change, and have some exercises that the participants will try out in small groups. Everyone stands up, gets into their groups, and go off confidently. But one person is still sitting. You sense something is wrong. You approach them kindly and ask how you can help. The participant starts to cry, and in a stuttering way, peppered by many tears, explains that they feel just overwhelmed. Other stuff spills out.

You only have ten minutes left before the other participants are due back. What do you do?

The participant is crying, and in a stuttering way, has explained that they feel just overwhelmed, that although this stuff is important to them and their teams (they are a senior leader in the organisation), they don’t think they can face talking about it all right now. They have shared all sorts of fragments of their story right now, both personal and work issues. They are overwhelmed, embarrassed, and stuck in what to do.

How can you help this participant be resourceful enough to make a good decision for themselves and how to make the right choice – whether to stay at the workshop or return to work, and if they stay, how they might be able to continue on with their day?

And with this in mind, how are you also able to continue working with the other participants in an appropriate manner?

 

The Resilience Lens

Let’s look at both of these clients through the lens of the Resilience Engine research.1

This is a resourceful person with a senior role; you don’t get to these roles without being resourceful in a pretty significant way.

The client is rendered unresourceful, because of their stress reactions: fight or flight, which we all know about, or freeze or appease. In this case it’s freeze. Gaining an understanding of these latter two stress reactions gives a resilience coach more in their toolkit to be able to help a client understand what the underlying problem might be.

The client demonstrates stuckness, and one that has been going on for a while. The client is stuck in many ways – even being physically stuck in their seat. This plus the fragments of their story, quickly highlights that they have been in Fragmentation2 for some time – a critical state of resilience depletion that demonstrates a strong risk of breakdown in the near future. The only way that person can become more resilient, and more healthy as a result, is to take time to recover their energy. The onus as a resilience coach, is to offer that set of resilience insights clearly and kindly. This means no rescue, no reassurance, no trying-to-get-them-to-feel-ok-enough-to-rejoin-the-others. As anyone who is Gestalt trained will will know, recognising the ‘is-ness’ of any situation allows for the space to shift it.

What really happened? Within ten minutes, the participant not only recognised where they were but they were grateful for the clarity of that understanding, and were able to re-join the group for the remainder of the day. In the few days thereafter, they also requested a leave of absence for a time to recover. They became healthy and happy again in that period, and returned into the organisation with a different set of priorities and work-life balance habits. No coaching was offered in that time – it was just that initial 10 minutes, which turned out to be critical for that participant’s wellbeing.

 

What’s the bottom line? Coaches need to learn more about how to judge the capacity for change of their clients. This is the heart of resilience coaching. To learn more about how you can become a Resilience Engine accredited coach, click here.

Author: Jenny Campbell, CEO of The Resilience Engine

 

 

 

Footnotes

  1. Resilience Engine accredited coaches will use The Resilience Dynamic® and Resilience Engine® models, based on ten years of research, within their practice. These help the coach ‘co-diagnose’ the client’s resilience level, understand the implications of that level very specifically, to know the key enablers for the client for that level that can be acted on at that time. Whilst resilience is dynamic, pacing the coaching specifically according to the capacity of the client brings about immediate resilience increase. And since resilience enables increased wellbeing and performance, this is only a good thing.
  2. Fragmentation is a state named and explained in the Resilience Dynamic® model, a map of what resilience is, and how it shifts.

When goal focus is futile

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Much of the coaching industry lives or dies by the idea that coaching is focused on goals. John Whitmore’s GROW model, which leads from goals, is a bit of a rock within our world. There is no doubt it’s really useful, and indeed most other coaching models have been spun out from GROW.

However. Focusing on goals as the primary objective of a contract can sometimes be dangerous. Look at this next case study.

My client is a senior director of a large institution, running effectively one third of the organisation’s resources. They have a large team, they have a lot of complexity, work stacks are high, stakeholder management is never-ending, and so my client has got very adept at juggling, prioritising, getting time to learn, deciding fast or slow depending on the context, investing in the right things, taking time with his team. And more. In other words, they are a high performer.

They are asked to lead on the joint venture negotiations with another large institution. It’s not an easy one at all (none are), but it’s essentially an attempted take-over made to look like a joint venture. Mega. Only the life and death of what they have been leading in for many years, and in which their people depend for their livelihoods.

HUGE amounts to be done. Scoping the work, mapping the key players in the negotation, setting out a plan. Ensuring that someone else picks up the normal day to day running of the division. More and more. Lots and lots and lots of goals are easily identifiable. Lots of really interesting stuff for me as a coach, great work!

And yet I do not enter into this work, there is more data that is presented, and I know from resilience coaching that this is a show-stopper. The client is knackered.

How do I know? The client is tense. They lean back often in their chair when talking about all the things they have to do. Their voice is strong but tense and somehow has a tone of weariness. I sense overwhelmedness. Of course who wouldn’t be, faced with this huge task. And yet, and yet, there is something deeper. I am aware of my own sense of the coaching feeling unmanageable. There is too much stacked up here.

So what do I do? I ask permission to name this sense and ask if there’s any substance in it. Whew! Damn bursts in the room, floods happen. I state I ethically cannot work on the original goals of the contract until the client has re-energised themselves more.

And so we are in the work of resilience coaching. It’s about energy and perspective initially – and it will later, across the year, lead to inner work around balancing dependence-independence, connecting with inspiration, learning how to learn better. And although the goals of the joint venture start into the work 3 months in, every session includes time on resilience.

Two years of coaching. One mega goal. The goal gets delivered in the middle of this – the client often uses the coaching for reflecting on the stakeholders and negotiations, seeing it from all sides, influencing and nudging behind the scenes. It’s hard, sometimes it’s so new the client doesn’t know what to do, but overall, they perform well.

And the resilience coaching? They need this re-resource themselves, regularly, often, and with real support and challenge. In total, one of the best coaching contracts for me ever!

The key when facing your clients is to be open to all data – your own senses, the client’s data, and check out whether the client has indeed capacity for the work outlined in the contract. Resilience is your capacity for change. If there is little in the bank, forget about goals.

 

Author: Jenny Campbell, CEO of The Resilience Engine

To learn more about how you can become a Resilience Engine accredited coach, click here.