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Fire Fighting?

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Resilience is your capacity for change.

‘I think there’s a danger that we get caught up very much in the fire fighting. When we don’t have enough resilience to be able to stand back from something and put it in perspective’.
Participant of a Resilience Engine programme

Highly resilient people seek different perspectives all the time, so they don’t get trapped by any patterned ways of thinking, doing, or being. How can you create the space to get perspective?

First off the bat, connect with how to ‘be’ more. ‘Being Present’ is one of the top three enablers of your resilience. Which of these do you do already, and which do you want to do more of?

• Taking a moment out
• Counting to ten before reacting
• Going for a walk to clear your head
• Watching a sunset, or enjoying a similar beautiful moment
• Becoming kinder to yourself in the moment, no matter what your thoughts are
• Doing that hobby or sport that allows you to cut off from everything else
• Yoga, Pilates or Mindfulness

The second step is to consider the conditions that you need to get perspective. There are four key drivers:

1. Your Energy
How much energy have you got in your tank? If this is too low, forget trying to do anything else other than topping the energy up.

2. Your Curiosity
What would be most interesting for you to discover about this whole situation?

3. The Time available
Nothing will change unless you give yourself some time and space to notice for real what is going on

4. Your commitment to doing well/doing right in this situation
How much does it matter – to you? – to others?

Seeking perspective is a fab way to get out of the fire-fighting trap. Both ‘Being Present’, and creating the conditions for perspective are straightforward. Give them a go!

To discover more about how you can invest in your resilience, click here.

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.

 

Principles 1-3 of Leading The Resilient Organisation

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Resilience Engine, top ten principles, resilient organisation, build resilience habits, good habits, being resilient

Organisational resilience is your capacity for change.

The Resilience Engine approach is based on our ten years of leading research and practice in the field. It is real-world, practical, inspiring and scalable. We have ten principles for enabling resilience, the capacity for change, in your organisation. This article gives a summary of the first three principles:

Principle 1: From tricky to straightforward.
Principle 2: Build resilience habits
Principle 3: Balance privacy and socialisation

If you are frustrated by the pace of change in your organisation, have you considered resilience in relation to your culture? Does the organisation enable adaptability at all levels? Or do you have folk in the organisation with their heads stuck in the day-to-day and you are therefore not getting a clear perspective?

Organisational resilience is your capacity for change.  Without a resilience culture, you will not adapt well. Principles 1-3 of the Resilience Engine are all about enabling this resilience culture. Talk about it. Make it transparent. Make it the norm. Make it your habit.

 

Principle 1: From tricky to straightforward.

Make resilience a part of day to day conversations. Best practice shows that resilience is fostered in teams so ensure it’s part of every team’s standing agenda.

To do that you need to make it ok to talk about. But in many organisations, resilience is an icky subject. People, especially managers, assume that if people aren’t coping it must all be personal and difficult.

The Resilience Engine research shows that one of the most common ways in which people drain their resilience and therefore fall back from high resilience to coping, is they take on too much, get overwhelmed and then end up on the hamster wheel. The reasons aren’t about deep emotional issues at all; they are about pacing, energy and perspective. All addressable in practical and easy ways.

The next most common reason is that people lose the connection to the ‘why’ of the organisation. Meaning. That’s a leadership issue – not complex to help people connect to, but taken for granted in the hustle and bustle of routine. Meaning : talk it, walk it, share it, inspire it.

Reflective Questions
    1. What can you change to lift people’s head out of their day to day and address the issues of pacing, energy and perspective?
    2. What are you doing to make alive the ‘why’ of the organisation?

 

Principle 2: Build Resilience Habits

Resilience is a practice. It doesn’t increase on the basis of a single event or intervention. Instead, a steady, bite-sized way of connecting with the ideas and concepts of resilience builds real resilience habits that stick.

Being resourceful like this needs investment in your resilience day to day. The first set of resilience habits, and the most fundamental, rely on core enablers. These are like muscles – you’ve got to spot and connect with them, you have to learn to activate them, then develop them, and to keep their elasticity and strength, keep it up. Otherwise they can go flabby pretty quickly.

All of that means habits, not one tick in the box.

Reflective Questions
   3. What are you doing to build resilience habits in your organisation?

 

Principle 3: Balance Privacy and Socialisation

The organisation needs to address both in any resilience support and development. You need to hold people to account for them taking responsibility for themselves. And you need to normalise resilience.

People need the privacy to get the time and space to see for real what is really going on for themselves. Online learning is useful for this:  people get to choose where and when they look at resilience ideas and how they connect to it, giving them the space to honestly respond. And that builds understanding and change.

People also need to know that others are in the same boat – it’s a relief, it’s a help, they get ideas of what others have found useful.

And the organisation needs to foster resilience assets – people, teams yes – but also organisational processes and values. This happens in teams. So teams become the home for resilience, and it needs to be normal to talk about it.

Getting the right balance for resilience between privacy and socialisation is critical for supporting and extending the resilience of your organisation. You need resilience for change. And that’s one of the real imperatives of performance.

Reflective Questions
    4. Are teams in your organisation encouraged to foster resilience?
    5. Are you in your team talking about your team’s resilience? Your organisation’s resilience?
    6. Are you giving people time and space to consider what they can do for their resilience day to day?

 

 

To find out more about how the Resilience Engine can help you create a resilience culture, email info@resilienceengine.com.

 

Author: Jenny Campbell, CEO of The Resilience Engine

 

Build Resilience Habits

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TOP TEN PRINCIPLES FOR ENABLING, RESILIENT ORGANISATION, resilience engine blog, resilience engine, resilient article, resilience article, build resilience habits

The Resilience Engine approach is based on our ten years of leading research and practice in the field. It is real-world, practical, inspiring and scalable. We have ten principles for enabling resilience in your organisation. This article will concentrate on building resilience habits.

Principle 2: Build Resilience Habits

Resilience is a practice. It doesn’t increase on the basis of a single event or intervention. Instead, a steady, bite-sized way of connecting with the ideas and concepts of resilience builds real resilience habits that stick. It’s all about applicability, for you, in the each of the contexts in which you operate.

The contexts in which you draw on your resilience are varied:

  • A set of senior leaders who it’s tough to say no to, but if you don’t, you and your team’s capacity for performance is severely under threat.
  • Losing your keys every day, aaargh!
  • Choosing to take time to exercise, or investing in how to get better sleep
  • Noticing and naming anger in the moment, but choosing not to be hijacked by it
  • Listening well to your kids
  • Taking time to rest
  • Allowing time to free-wheel, just notice, then assimilate what your thoughts into useful stuff
  • Forgiving yourself and learning, so that you can move on

This kind of stuff happens day in day out. Some big things, some small. Some of it responding, some of it proacting. Choosing between responding vs proacting is resilient behaviour.

Being resourceful like this needs investment in your resilience day to day. The first set of resilience habits, and the most fundamental, rely on core enablers. These are like muscles – you’ve got to spot and connect with them, you have to learn to activate them, then develop them, and to keep their elasticity and strength, keep it up. Otherwise they can go flabby pretty quickly. All of that means habits, not one tick in the box.

So don’t offer your people a quick fix. By all means offer them the golden nuggets of resilience (we have Being Resilient, our online 2-3 hour guide for this) – as long as that helps enable muscle building.

Find out more about how The Resilience Engine can help your organisation here.

Author: Jenny Campbell, CEO of The Resilience Engine

‘No’ is your friend

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Saying no is good for your resilience.

If you pay specific attention to your energy, get perspective and pace yourself well, your Adaptive Capacity increases. And that’s the fuel in the tank of your Resilience Engine. This means that your capacity for change increases – as well as your wellbeing and performance. Nice one!

 

To do this you need to be able to say ‘No’ well, appropriately, and often.
The opposite? Saying yes to everything, which is not a healthy habit. There are lots of reasons behind this:

  • If you are an adrenalin junkie, you will love feeling ‘busy, busy, busy’. And then it will catch up with you, and you will crash.
  • If you say yes to please others, that might be because you need to figure out why you are worthy of pleasing yourself.
  • If you say yes to rescue others, or indeed to stop them from becoming overwhelmed, you need to consider whose boundaries need bolstering. Yours? Theirs? Or both?
  • If you say ‘yes’ to avoid saying ‘no’ because you think it will create a conflict which you can’t handle, then think again. Too many yes’s only build towards tiredness and resentment. This can build like a volcano, ready to explode into real conflict. Not good!
  • Finally, if you’re saying yes to stuff because you just don’t have the time to figure out what you really should be doing, then STOP! You’re definitely on a fast, slippery slope to mediocre performance. Get off the slope, take some rest, and take the time to think about the criteria behind what you actually want and need to do.

 

Saying “no”. It’s all about boundaries.

Do you know what you need? If you do, do you ask for it? If you ask for it and it’s flouted, do you assert your needs?

“No”. Such a little word. Such a powerful word. Such a brilliant word for your resilience.

To discover more about how you can invest in your resilience, click here.

 

Author: Jenny Campbell, CEO of The Resilience Engine

 

Top 10 principles

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TOP TEN PRINCIPLES FOR ENABLING, Resilience Engine, Resilience Engine Top Principles

The Resilience Engine approach is based on our ten years of leading research and practice in the field. It is real-world, practical, inspiring and scalable. We have the following proven top 10 principles:

Principle 1: From tricky to straightforward

In many organisations, resilience is an icky subject. Leaders and managers often believe that if someone is not coping, it must be because of deep inner psychological issues which are emotionally tricky. Everyone – the boss and the individual – often stick their head in the sand and try to ignore it all. Alternatively, the caring manager might in fact make it a bigger thing; the person not coping might find themselves in therapy. And that might be in itself stigmatised within the organisation. None of this is helpful.

The Resilience Engine research shows instead that most often, not coping can be interrupted easily. The top enablers and barriers of resilience are easy to connect to, and all are addressable in practical ways.

It’s a lot more straightforward to get a leg up on resilience than delving around in the deep stuff.

 

Principle 2: Build resilience habits

Resilience isn’t built in a day. High performers and the curious will take things away from a one day event and start to put them into practice. But the large wodge of staff in the middle don’t have capacity for the learning required or for putting it into practice. So forget once-off training as really being effective.

 

Principle 3: Balance privacy and socialisation

People need to do this for themselves and do it well. And they need to know others are in the same boat, to share what helps and hinders it within their context, so that they might make things easier together. You need both.

 

Principle 4: Account for different beginnings

Kill the standard list of resilience to-do’s. Get real; resilience means different things depending on the start point. What you offer must be flexible enough to allow for different start points, and different routes through.

 

Principle 5: Think both deep and fun

Resilience isn’t all about the difficult things. It often is about being in a state to connect with the best of yourself. And in doing so recognise how to create the conditions for that more often.To get there, you need a pathway to openness and learning. Fun helps!

 

Principle 6: Embrace synergies

Wellbeing and Resilience. Whilst chocolate and wine are ok up to a point for resilience, you can’t get to the highest level without self-care. Equally, focusing only on wellbeing efforts alone such as mindfulness and nutrition, will not build some of the harder-edge resilience skills. Get into both, they are synergistic.

 

Principle 7: No waggy finger

If you are passing out top resilience tips, you are most likely patronising more than half of your staff. They already know a lot about their own resilience, and they don’t need you to tell them. Especially because of principle 4, people’s starting points are different – your top tips might not be relevant for them at all. Don’t try to second guess, enable your people to connect for themselves.

 

Principle 8: Teams make it real

Teams are the nurturing place for creating resilience assets. If these assets are connected well, they enable organisational resilience. Alignment and consistency are very difficult aspects of organisational resilience, but the first step is to get the assets built and supported. Without that, there is no organisational resilience. Teams are the vessel that allows resilience to be built.

 

Principle 9: Bypass the cognitive faff

People love talking about resilience. It can seem great if you’re watching a full room with participants talking away about it. But don’t get hooked. In the talking about, people avoid connecting with their own resilience.

Don’t get hooked by those who know lots and can’t wait to impart their knowledge. Instead, work with those who really understand that they need to push the action into the hands of your people. Takes a whole lot of humility.

 

Principle 10: Model it

Last but not least, leaders and managers. Walk the talk.

‘Nuff said.

 

If you want to know more about how The Resilience Engine can help you and your organisation, please get in touch: info@resilienceengine.com

Author: Jenny Campbell, CEO of The Resilience Engine