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Busting The Myths of Resilience Series Myth 3 – Confidence is needed for resilience

Which comes first then, confidence or resilience?

Part 1: The Link with Secure Bases

“Much of the academic and popular management literature states that for resilience you need confidence: ‘Self confidence is a crucial component of resilience because it creates a forward motion of positivity and optimism.’1 Many resilience evaluation methods use confidence as a survey measure contributing to your output resilience level. The voice of this body of literature has resilience as an output of confidence.

A few writers and some researchers don’t try to distinguish one from the other and instead just conflate the two concepts. Resilience is confidence, confidence is resilience”.– Extract from The Resilience Dynamic® by Jenny Campbell

This type of thinking has two sources:

  • either from clinical research where there has been significant trauma with an ensuing period of major deficit of resilience, i.e. not coping

or

  • a limited definition of resilience and/or confidence itself

With the many sources of research taken into account, The Resilience Engine’s research has found that ‘confidence and resilience do not have a one-way relationship, but instead are interlocked and generative together.’

What’s more, confidence building is not a woolly thing, it is in fact a clear and actionable process.

The Resilience Engine sees the relationship between confidence and resilience as a generative loop:

 
Resilience and Confidence, “The Generative Loop”

Secure bases can be drawn on in the moment of any situation, by bringing them into your attention, your memory, or indeed how you feel. They give you a lift, a burst of energy, inspiration to keep going or to look about for other options, or to shift towards something more meaningful. Knowing that these secure bases work for real for you in your day-to-day work and life is what delivers confidence in your future.

The Resilient Way contributes to, enhances and indeed creates secure bases:

  • The learning from your past experiences contributes to how your secure bases support you and give you safety.

  • Difficulties of previous relationships, where maybe your boundaries were badly managed, will help you understand which people now really can and do act as a secure base for you.

  • Challenges that you have overcome will enhance your sense of purpose or meaning today and in the future.

  • When you do come through a period that is tough, you realise how important your secure bases are to you. And that enhances your level of security in what you’re about in this world.

  • New meaning in your life, whether new places, new relationships or new purpose, all can form new secure bases.

Living in a more Resilient Way in the present enhances your secure bases. The more you invest in your relationship with these secure bases, the more they provide that sense of both security and inspiration to take risks.

As the base layer for confidence, secure bases are therefore both enhanced and drawn on by living more resiliently. It’s definitely a two-way street.

What are your own secure bases?  For example, who inspires you to be both yourself and to be the best you can be? How often do you connect with these folk in your life? Are you enhancing this secure base in the way that you allocate your time across work and personal life? Or are you trading on what-was-once-upon-a-time and thus diminishing the confidence you might have?

Secure bases don’t stand still, you need to nourish and protect them. This is part of The Resilience Way, exemplified in the book The Resilience Dynamic®.

Got you thinking?

References: Hughes, R., Kinder, A. & Cooper, C. L. The Wellbeing Workout. (2018). doi:10.1007/978-3-319-92552-3
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Myth of Resilience 1: Resilience is being tough

The Resilience Dynamic, Jenny Campbell, Resilience Mith

Chapter 1: Extract The Resilience Dynamic®.

“Hands up, do any of the following statements resonate with you?
Or are they part of your organisation’s culture?

Don’t show your emotion unless you’re happy and smiling.
Just say everything is ‘fine’.
Don’t show you are feeling vulnerable.
Don’t show you are stressed.
Don’t show you don’t know.
Beat yourself up for being so stupid, but only after they have gone.

Do show when you’ve punched through the challenge.
Do show when you’ve beaten the opposition.
Do show when you’re ok.
Do show when you’re feeling smart.
Do show when you’ve done a lot of smart things.

Any of these statements running around your own head?
Unvoiced possibly, but still driving your action? Do any of these drive your organisation? You may have a lot of learnt values from your upbringing, your workplace, your friends. You may collectively live this kind of culture. And these result in a set of values, not necessarily your own, that drive the way you live.
It ends up a bit like a set of polarities that you have to choose sides on:


[…] Resilience defined as being all about mental or physical toughness can be a very strong driver within organisations, groups and teams. However, instead of enabling flexibility (which is true resilience), it encourages a resistance towards something, a toughening up ‘in the face of ’, a push against. If sustained, this forcefulness leads to brittleness which in turn destroys the possibility of a truer, more flexible set of responses. Being tough can lead to burnout. If this is one of the myths that you are attracted to, you can start to shift your thinking. Start by noticing”.

Chapter 1: Extract The Resilience Dynamic®.

Interested for yourself or your staff?

– Do you find yourself with this kind of either-or thinking?

Being resilient shifts all that. Your first step is “to be present” to your own thoughts and feelings about a situation, and to others’ thoughts and feeling too. 

Being present is like a set of muscles in the mind and body. It takes a bit of practice to get them moving! Why not give yourself 5 minutes to connect with just being in the moment?

If you’re keen to know more about how to support your own and others’ resilience, why not get the book?  

Are you a leader?

– How often are you and your colleagues stuck in this kind of thinking? 

A resilient culture ensures that options and solutions are being generated, no matter what’s going on.

What can you do to build a resilient culture?

1) Get in touch.

2) Buy the book.

3) Learn about our approach.

Are you a coach?

– How often are your clients stuck in this kind of polarity thinking?

Being present – awareness, acceptance, compassion and curiosity, is critical to unlock client thinking.

How are you bringing this specifically into your practice?

Do you want to understand resilience more? Buy the book. 

If you want to become a Resilient Engine Accreditated Coach, click here.

Principle 10: Model It!

Principle 10, enabling resilience, resilience engine, jenny campbell

These results demonstrate a somewhat profound disconnect between what organisations believe are the best strategies to build resilience, and what they are actually doing.
In fact, there is a strong suggestion in the results that organisations largely do not know exactly which programmes produce the best results in the cultivation of resilience. Or, that they may in fact be pinning their hopes on initiatives that do little or nothing to promote true resilience.
Penna Organisational Resilience Survey June 2018
Data from 700 senior HR professionals in 7 European countries

Model resilience, your capacity for change. That means investing in it, talking about the up’s and down’s of it, putting a personal stamp to it. It might all seem really obvious, after all, it’s what leaders are asked to do all the time about all sorts of thing –brand values, people processes, how to manage clients, the way things are done around here, managing change. It’s all about walking the talk, showing that you mean what you say.

But many leaders don’t manage it. Why? Two key reasons:

  1. The leader does not have enough capacity to make the changes within their own area.AND/OR
  2. The change – the resilience demand – is anti-cultural. If it’s embraced, it will mean the leader will stand out as going against the grain. Exposure. It’s a very demanding scenario from a resilience point of view.

Because leaders, like their employees, when forced to be vulnerable also feel powerless
Glenn Llopis
Forbes, May 16th 2017

Both reasons are where the resilience demand of the situation is greater than the current resilience levels of the leader. If the leader doesn’t act fully on the change, it ends up looking like lip service. And that of course blows the change out of the water; people smell a rat.

Here’s the nub of making difficult changes. If the leader sees themselves as a credible carrier of this new change, plus has invested in their capacity for change, they will enact on it. If they don’t see themselves as credible, they will worry about how others will see them and do nothing or very little. It’s really all about the leader’s confidence in their own value within the organisation.

Since confidence is an outcome of resilience, it comes down to this: the resilience gap in the situation can be filled if the leader invests for real in their own resilience. So I am not talking about modelling as in a fashion model putting on a superb new coat. No! Modelling resilience is about living and breathing it. It  doesn’t mean lying on the psychologist’s bed talking about your upbringing but it does mean  means a deliberate investment into your energies, purpose, and attitudes and skills that enable you to be the most adaptable. We call it your Resilience Engine®.

We would be delighted to discuss more about we can help you get it right for the resilience and wellbeing of your people and organisation.  Get in touch via info@resilienceengine.com.

                                                                                                                                                                      Author: Jenny Campbell

Principle 9: Bypass the cognitive faff

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Jenny Campbell, Resilience Engine

Principle 9: Bypass the cognitive faff

People need to talk about resilience. They need to know it goes up and down, even for those with high levels. They need to know how it gets drained day to day. And they need to know the key factors of how to support and extend where resilience is in deficit.

Leaders in particular need to be able to match the resilience demand with the resilience potential within their organisation. The resilience potential of their people needs both support to ensure it doesn’t drop… and extension, in order to match the increase in demand due to our complex and uncertain world.

But sharing the facts and insights into stress, mental health and resilience, whilst helpful, will not shift things enough to ensure that the resilience demands match the current resilience potential. The recent survey from the Resilience Engine and the Academy of Executive Coaching survey showed such a shocking mismatch of resilience demand vs resilience potential; we are currently way off.

Jenny Campbell, Resilience Engine

A lot of this mismatch comes from what we call the ‘cognitive faff’.

People – leaders in particular – love to show up together as knowing stuff. They ask interesting questions, they enquire about complex connections. Groups of leaders especially coalesce in this cognitive activity. Take the typical leadership programme : 60-70 senior executives altogether, being offered some kind of new knowledge, and having the opportunity to discuss and ask questions of the expert presenter. Everyone feels good about sharing the data, talking about the subject, and then going out of the room. ‘Interesting’, ‘useful’ are the kinds of words used. Those who have voiced clever questions feel they get a lot out of the session and that they can feel good about themselves knowing they have ‘got’ it. Those who don’t feel they understand keep quiet and try to catch up quietly outside of the room, so they don’t show their vulnerability.

We call all of this kind of dynamic the ‘cognitive faff’. It leads to very little change.

But the mismatch of resilience demand vs resilience potential is real. You can see the signs of it every day. Leaders need to enable people to really support and extend resilience. They need to get on top of the conditions for organisation resilience to flourish.Resilience is your capacity for change. Whilst it includes those who aren’t coping, it also includesthose who have that highest level of adaptability. It isn’t about being tough which can lead to brittleness, it’s the opposite!

So resilience as your capacity for change means learning. And learning means being outsideof your comfort zone. And that means helping people both whilst they are vulnerable, but more strategically, learn to be vulnerable together! Imagine if you and your organisation had the resilience to say

 ‘I don’t know’ or ‘ I don’t know how’
which shows you don’t have the answer but are seeking

Or

‘I don’t like’
which may show you as opposing something but willing to work at what you do like

Or

’ I think this or that..’
which may show you as going against the tide but willing to forge a new way

Or

‘I feel stupid because..’
which may show you as admitting mistake or becoming frozen, but seeking to learn and get unstuck

Or
‘I need you because’
Which may show you as reaching, connecting, and seeking to build together

That’s the domain of high performance. It’s the domain of collaboration. It’s the domain of innovation. It’s the domain of vulnerability. And it’s all the domain of resilience.

The first step for leaders is to embrace how strategic resilience is. Then, bypass all of this cognitive faff, invest for real in resilience. Support vulnerability, extend resilience potential, and seek to create the conditions for resilient behaviour. That way you’ll navigate the complexity you face, and perform much more easily.

Wondering how to extend your organisation’s resilience potential? Our Community of Practice will help you live and breathe this stuff; we can support any size of organisation. Get in touch via info@resilienceengine.com.

Author: Jenny Campbell

Living intentionally

resilience engine, new year resolutions, 2019, new year, new habits,

New Year resolutions and goals. It’s so admirable when folk are making them, driven by them, committing to them and actually achieving them!!  As an official ‘middle years’ person (over 50), I no longer set them because they would be the same ones as the previous N years, and why set them if I haven’t been able to achieve them thus far?!

Do I aim for nothing new then? No. The opposite.  I have shifted instead towards living more intentionally. I find it simpler and more effective.

Curious about what this means?

Intentional living is where you seek to create the conditions for something to come about, to come to fruition. If I illustrate with my own two intentions for 2019:

  1. To get better at tennis
  2. To consolidate and stabilise the position of the Resilience Engine business

I am unclear how these will be done exactly, and in fact, I don’t have specific goals around either intention, although I do have the first step or two. Why no goals? Because both intentions are complex to achieve and I can’t see which goals will make the difference, and what is realistic in terms of achievements to aim for.

The complexity in my tennis comes from two or three main drivers. Firstly, when I played as a kid, I was great at some shots like baseline play, but not others like volleying– and that skill gap is still with me.  Then next  driveris years of not playing, I am really under practiced. Then there’s the little time I actually have for this great love in my life, once a week at best. Then there’s my age, my fitness, my weight (or overweight!). And there is a significant wrist injury of 5 years ago that has meant several years out of playing, now having to relearn all my shots so it’s not painful.

I am grateful to be able to play tennis. I love it. And I want to get better. To what level, to what aim doesn’t really matter. I start from where I am, and work towards something better, then review and keep going forward. Thus I already have set up better fitness routines, alleviated some of my end-of-week mental fatigue, have recently cut down on my alcohol. And am now going to work on some specific skills like the volleying that I know I am not confident about.

The journey of getting better is very motivation because the more I play better tennis, the more I enjoy it.

The business complexity is a more obvious one – a start up business with quite a bit of debt funding, with the vagaries of the marketplace, the lack of capacity since we’re a small company, and the inevitable highs and lows of it all. The idea of smoothing the path is what I have in mind, nothing more. The conditions – being able to make headspace, being able to match our capacity with what we can actually achieve particularly in sales and marketing, and I’m sure many more. I haven’t set out to identify them all and set out goals or specific targets for any of these conditions. Instead, I will give space to leveraging every opportunity to smoothing the path.

I cannot set SMART goals for either of my intentions. I can’t see the wood from the trees enough – the paths are obscured in many ways, and will depend on where I get to after the first couple of  steps. I also know from experience that many factors affect the ability to drive towards a specific goal within a complex task means that goals are often missed and it could feel like a failure. I don’t want to go there.

Instead I will live and work to the intentions of ‘making better’. I  will make these intentions active, every day; will seek the opportunities that arise; will aim to see as far as I can down the line to help shape what I decide today. Intentional living involves significant experimentation and learning,  effort and rest, being independent and dependent, and falling over and forgiving yourself!

The core attitude at the heart of living intentionally in this way is not ‘what should I do’ but rather ‘what can I do’.  It’s entrepreneurial. In my complex world, this is a resilient way of looking forward at the start of the year. And its oh-so motivating!

Are you navigating complex stuff where goals are difficult to set and you feel like you’re always in danger of missing them? Why not shift your thinking and instead deploy resilience coaching for you and your team, so that you can unlock the conditions for navigating this complexity?

We are a strong team of resilience-accredited coaches who can help you and your colleagues. Get in touch via email.

Author: Jenny Campbell, CEO The Resilience Engine