Latest / The On Purpose Podcast / Ep. 365 - Resilience Is A Skill
Transcript
- The On Purpose Podcast: You are listening to the On Purpose Podcast. What's up, everybody? Welcome to this week's edition of the show. We know it's always our privilege to show up for you each and every week to get you moving, get you thinking, get you pondering. Maybe are we missing something? And this week I wanted to just share with you ⁓ a conversation I've had repeatedly recently. And I thought, man, if I'm having this with business leaders and organizational leaders and thought provokers, we should have it on the con ⁓ on the podcast, right? And that is this. That is that resilience is a skill. And as a skill, it's going to need to be trained or can be trained and can be coached, right? People talk about resiliency like it's a personality trait. Like some people are born with it and others don't have it. I also I get it a lot in this manner, and that's like kids these days they're just not tough enough. They don't know how to bounce back. They don't know how to handle failure. And I asked them whether they're a coach of a a sports team or a a leader of a business unit, have you taught ⁓ how to be resilient? Have you taught ⁓ And they usually look at me with a perplexed look and like, No, I've never had to teach resiliency. Back in my day, we just did things. We we just got up and we got knocked down, we picked ourselves up, we we moved forward. And like, okay, though days are different, right? It's not true that it's a personality trait. It's not true that people are born with it. It's not genetic. It's not luck. It's not magic. It's a skill that you can strengthen, refine, and rely on, especially when get things get hard. And that's where I steer that initial conversation with people. And I say, okay, give me an idea of what what did you do as a kid when you were younger? Well, you know, we we played outside till the street lights came on. We didn't wear helmets with our bikes. If we crashed, we got up, we wiped ourselves off, and we moved on with our day. Like, okay, now think about today's kids, right? Their play dates are organized. ⁓ they everything's structured for them. They don't get to experience near as much failure as Previous generations. And that's no fault of their own. They're not in charge of what they're exposed to or not. And I'm not saying the parents are doing a worse job of sheltering their kids, right? They have good intentions there. But what does it do? It leads us to get people in the workplaces, people on our college level teams that don't know how to lose, don't know how to fail, don't know how to take feedback, don't know how to be resilient. Right? And People, what is resiliency? If you had to describe it, and right, we go around the room, we talk about it, and ultimately it boils down to resiliency is what do you do when shit goes bad? Right? How do you respond? Period. How do you respond when things go bad or not according to plan or out of your control? And too many times we we get this idea that resilience is toughness. You just grite grit your teeth and you just keep going. You push through. And then you pretend you're fine, right? Then you pretend you're fine. And I struggle with that a lot in my life, right? Pretending I was always fine. But inside I had battles going, I just wasn't sure how to handle them. And as I got older and I started thinking like with resilience is quieter, it's steadier. And it's developed long before I need it. Right? See, if I'm already in the moment that things are going bad. I'm going to revert to what have I trained myself on? What are the behaviors that are my habits? What are the characteristics? Do I explode? Do I lose emotional control? Do I freak out and start blaming everybody around me? Do I slow down, go introspective and look for what is my role and what's happening here? How do I dictate? How do I change? What do I learn from this? You see, resilience is your ability to bend without breaking, to adapt without losing yourself, and to stay grounded when things get unstable around you. It's not about being unshakable or so stoic, nothing can bother me. It's about learning. How do I recover my balance when I do stumble? When I am throwing that curveball, when I don't know the answer. How do I regroup? More importantly, when the how do I regroup shows my team how I expect them to regroup or my kids how I want them to handle things when it doesn't go their way. See, resilience comes from practice, from small daily reps that shape how I respond to pressure. And I'm not just guessing on this. We have hard data, right? As I've been studying this and presenting on resilience by design, there's studies, a recent study from a front health ⁓ frontline healthcare worker, right? We would all agree people that are constantly under stress, under pressure, showed that structured resilience training in their organization. significantly improve their ability to handle stress. Right? That's from the employees themselves. And it's not personality changes. We didn't change who they were. We changed the skills, the expectation, and the system in which they're going to handle the stress. It's trainable. It's a skill. If you want people to respond in a certain way, teach them how to respond. One of the best ways to do that is not by ordering people to be resilient, not by ordering people to bounce back and and you know grit your teeth and stand up and get going again, but to actually model it. To model it, right? Because people are watching what their leaders do, kids are watching what their parents do. Players are watching what the coach does. If I tell, if I'm coaching football and I tell the kids, no arguing with the referees and don't worry about the flag, stay focused on that. And every time the ref throws a flag or the refs near me, I'm screaming and yelling and throwing my hat at them. Are they gonna mo are they gonna follow what I told them or what they're seeing? Most of the time it's what they see. Right. So I want to go into this episode thinking about what are we teaching our kids about how to be resilient? What are we teaching The people we lead at work are on our teams about being resilient, but first starting with how are we actually being resilient to ourselves? How are we modeling resiliency? And the first step is awareness, right? Being aware. Because I can't respond to what I refuse to see. Resilience starts with noticing, noticing my stress signals. Am I being short with somebody? Am I, is my heart rate up? What are my emotional patterns? The assumptions I make. Is somebody i is my assumption always that people are doing things intentionally to to throw me off or to set me back or to make me look bad? My internal narratives, like what is that story I'm telling myself about the circumstance, the situation that isn't going how I planned? What are my avoidance habits? Right? You think like to me, one of the biggest issues we have right now as a society and in our teams is we avoid the difficult situation. We avoid the difficult conversation. I tiptoe around the thing that's causing me discomfort and I let it eat at me instead of acknowledging like it's here, it didn't go as planned, it didn't go right, what can I learn from this? Right. We avoid many of the things that will actually make us stronger and propel ourselves forward, not just us, but our kids, our families, our teams. To avoidance, to wanting to face a hard truth. You see, awareness is like the flashlight in the dark. Son, I become aware. Wait, what happened here? Let me what did I do wrong? Let me focus on this. What just took place? Now that I see it in the light, I can have control over my responses. So we got awareness. Second step is regulation. And that requires me to regulate the ability. My internal state. Not suppress it. Not pretend those emotions aren't there. Not pretend I'm not angry. Not pretend that I'm not hurt. Not pretend that losing doesn't suck. But to regulate it. That means breathing before I react. Slowing down when my mind is speeding up. choosing how I'm going to respond instead of being hijacked by the moment. And one of the best ways I've found to do this and that I love sharing with others. Is in that time, I'm not looking back on all the other things that didn't go well or that happened in the past. And I'm not trying to look forward to predict how impactful this thing's gonna be the future because I really don't know that. I just want to ground myself in the present moment. Be right here, right now. What is this situation teaching me? What am I to learn? What am I to share? Because too many times we in the pain, in the moment of of discomfort and uncertainty, we revert back to the past stories we've been telling ourselves, which probably aren't even true anymore. We just don't challenge them. But they do affect how we react. If I've my self-talk and my neg my my backstory is that I'm whenever enough, that I always make mistakes, that I always mess up, that I'll never reach my full potential, when something bad happens, when something unforeseen takes place. If I don't regulate myself, it's easy to revert back to that. Now I'm making decisions back. Now I'm making decisions based off that ni narrative and that self talk, not what's current today. If I also try to play it out and say, ⁓ my gosh, this decision right now, because things I'm not sure how it's gonna play out, I try to forecast what it looks like in the future. Now I have more doubts, more uncertainty. I'm trying to be perfect. When the reality is I don't know what all the ripple effects will be in the future. And I don't need to carry all the baggage from the past. I need to stay right here in the present, feel what's happening, accept it, and pull the lessons from it so I can apply it in the future so I'm not repeating it. You see, regulation is kind of that hinge between chaos and clarity. What do I mean by that? That's gonna be felt mostly by the people that are impacted by how you respond to it. Right? So I'm leading a team. And I am well regulated emotionally. They know I'm calm and steady. I something goes wrong. I'm not panicking. I'm not freaking out. I'm not blaming and I'm screaming. I'm not yelling. I'm sitting with the information. I'm gathering facts. We make a new decision going forward. I'm modeling for them that that's how they I want them to react. So when things don't go well, their baseline now is to be calm, collected, analyze the data, make a new decision. If the same team comes to me and I'm not steady and every time thing goes bad, I revert to past self and now I'm yelling and blaming and it's never my fault. It's gotta be somebody else's fault. What do you think they're learning? How do how do you think they're learning to respond to a difficult situation? Not to take accountability, not to look for ownership, not to see what they can take, what they can learn, what they can share, but to blame. To point fingers. Right? Too many times we have resiliency posted on these cool pictures in your offices and hanging in the hallway with these motivational quotes, but we don't practice it. We don't model it. And that's what I'm saying. The emotional regulation allows your team to know the consistency with which You're gonna handle stress. Your team, your family, it's also gonna model for them ideally how they handle the stress. Because the reality is none of us go into anything expecting it to be perfect, and every day is gonna be perfect and nothing's gonna go wrong. We know shit's gonna go wrong. It's not about when stuff goes wrong or if stuff's gonna go wrong, it's when. So, what control do we have? I don't have a control, what shortcoming comes up. What new things throws me off that I didn't plan for, but I do have complete control on how I'm going to respond. And when I have control on how I'm going to respond, my team also knows the expectation and how they're going to respond. So we have awareness, we have regulation. And then the third one I want talk about is recovery. Right? And this is the one that that really gets me because in today's world where everything is magnified. Any mistake you make is magnified on social media. It can be magnified in so many ways. We have this idea that we gotta be perfect. What I want to throw out to you is recovery is about losing the veil of perfection. I don't, as a boss, as a dad, as a husband, I'm not trying to be perfect. I'm trying to be real and trying to be honest and know I'm gonna make mistakes. I'm gonna mess up. Because resilience isn't about never failing. It's a literally how do you get back up and what do you do when you get up? See recovery is how do I bounce back? the reflection piece. It's a taking a moment to go, wait, there's something I did. Some something I'm responsible for. What is it? Let me find that. Because once I take ownership now I can tweak it and not repeat it. It's about repairing. Reconnection and then re-entry, which means getting back and doing the thing again. This is so critical when we want people to do something. Maybe they stumble, maybe they fail, they come up short, it's not exactly what you want, but you don't want them to pull back and never try again. We need them to try, make the corrections go again until they get it right. See, recovery is this rep that keeps you in the game. It's what keeps you moving forward. Because if we don't model how to get back up. What do they see? They see the knockout blow. They see the person that stays down. They see the person that that runs from it. No, we're gonna get back up. I had my last fight, I got knocked out in front of four or five thousand people. Most of ⁓ were there to support us, wearing our shirts. It was a big deal. I didn't want to lose. I didn't plan to lose. Didn't train to lose. What happens? Shit happens. You get in a MMA fight, there's two people in there. One's gonna win, one's gonna lose. It's gonna be very definitive. There's very few ties in that sport. But what did it provide me an opportunity to show people? Hey, it was cool when I was undefeated and I was fighting for the title and you loved it. I lost. What am I gonna do? We didn't hide from it. We came out, we went to the same dinner afterwards like we would have if we won. We thanked our people for coming out. It sucked, it was hard. Wasn't the most fun I ever had, but it was the right thing to do. And I think probably more people learned. Something from watching me lose that fight than any of the ones I won. Right? And what when I I share that because I want you to understand that resilience is by design. Resilience requires design, it requires a system. Because people don't rise to the level of their intentions, right? That comes and goes. They rise to the level of the system in place. So if you want people to be resilience around, you want your organization to show resilience, your culture to be one of. Resilience, you have to design it. That means you build routines that stabilize you. You create environments that support you. You have relationships around you that strengthen you. You practice the habits that are gonna prepare you and you eliminate self-sabotage. Right? Resilience isn't spontaneous, it's structured. Right. And that's where that whole crawl before you can walk, walk before you can run mantra comes from. It's literally talking about progressive resilience, teaching resilience progressively that we crawl first. Once we get crawling down, now we can walk. Once we get walking down, now we can run. A baby isn't born, just starts running, not humans at least. Because if I understand I got crawl, walk to run and my systems are based on that, whether in my family or my team, now I'm not depending on people to bounce back when they're motivated or inspired, which comes and goes, but now Give them a system that this is how we're gonna do it. This is the expectation. Not only is it the expectation I tell you about that you can read about, but it's what it we're gonna model for you. You see, people don't truly bounce back, right? You think about when I fall down, I got knocked out, I didn't come back when my head was clear and I was back the same person. Right? You rebuild, you learn from that. See, resilience isn't about returning to who you were pre-incident. about becoming somewhat stronger, wiser, and more grounded than before. So that I'm growing forward, not learning backwards. And now to my very my opening comment where people are telling me that kids these days are showing up the workplace, they're just not tough, they don't have resilience, they don't know how to bounce back, they don't know how to get dirty. Here's the hard truth: resilience requires discomfort. You cannot build toughness, internal fortitude when everything around you is comfortable. I can't build it in convenience when everything's easy. And I cannot build it. By avoiding the difficult things. Right? The very things that build the resilience a lot of us try to avoid. That is things like hard conversations, an honest self-assessment, looking in the mirror and asking ourselves, did we truly live up to our potential today? Are we leaving things on the table that we're going to regret later in life and down the road? It requires an emotional exposure. If I'm never willing to put my heart out there, if I'm never willing to put my emotions on the table, they can never get hurt. But I can't learn from s ⁓ heartbreak because that won't happen because I'm I've built up these walls. So I'll never have those relationships that are deeply fulfilling and meaning. because I put up barriers to keep myself safe. It requires failure, fatigue, and uncertainty. And when I when I was preparing for this and I was putting this together, those last two fatigue and uncertainty were like two of the driving forces in my first hundred mile ultra. Right? I got tired. I'd been up for over thirty hours and I had to move the whole time. And the uncertainty of could you do it? Were you capable? Did you train enough? Did you believe enough? Had to face those doubts and face those questions. Because here's the thing: every time you put yourself in a position to face these things, you're training how do you handle difficult moments? How do you handle it? What do you do? And every time you get an opportunity to step up to that, you're creating a repetition of this is how I'm going to bounce. This is what I'm going to do to pick myself up. This is what I'm going to do to move my thing forward. So every step I took, I knew. I'm capable. ⁓ there's another step. There's another step. I didn't worry about if I still had twenty five miles, ten miles, eight miles. I just knew I had one more step and one more step and one more step. And at the end I stop and look back and I'm like, Wow, you did a hundred miles. But it wasn't because I focused on a hundred miles first, I focused on the steps. But I wouldn't learn that about myself if I don't put myself in that position. And in world right now we're so risk-avoidant and we want to look perfect to so many people that we're not willing to take on the things that we know are gonna help us grow. And not only do they help us grow, they help us model the behaviors we want for the very people that look up to us so they can grow. So here's what I ask you for this week is don't treat resilience like it's a trait that you have or don't. Think about it as a skill you can train and model and then ask yourself, am I modeling this for my team? Are they aware of the difficult moments I have? Right, because too many times, as a parent, as a boss, as a leader, as a coach, whatever your title is, you will do something or encounter something that requires you to redefine yourself, to take in information, reprocess, to be very resilient. But a lot of times we do it in private and we don't share it with our team. Well, how can they learn from if they don't know the process you went through, if they don't know the difficult circumstances? So here's something I'd ask you this week is is ask yourself one what's one area in life you need more awareness? What's ⁓ an emotion you need to regulate better? And a recovery practice you need to commit to. And then pick it, train it, repeat it, strengthen it. You see, resilience isn't built in the moment of crisis. It's built in the days, weeks, and months before it. It's built in the reps no one sees, the choices that nobody applauds, and the discipline that no one celebrates. Because it's a skill. And the more you train it, the more you can trust it, and more you can rely on it. Then when things don't go well. You're not gonna panic. You're not gonna freak out. You're not gonna blame everybody around you. You're gonna be the person they look to to go, wait, I wanna, I wanna be like them. They were calm. They understood it. They learned something from it. We all got better because they shared what was the lesson. Think about it this week and I'd love to hear from you on how you're sh how you're modeling resilience in your world. What does that look like? What does it mean to you? And how can we help others around us learn this skill that's ⁓ that's apparently a rare commodity? If you're interested in more of that stuff, visit teamhardy.net backslash excellence programs. We have a whole block on resilience by design that I love to share with you. Come present at your your conferences, your team meetings, your retreats, or a leadership program. So thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for being intrigued by what we're talking about, what we're sharing. And it's okay to disagree. Feel free to let me know if you disagree with any of this. I'm always open to learning something. I don't know everything for sure, but here's what I do know. I don't control everything that's gonna happen around me, but I control how I respond. And I respond better when I rely on my framework, which we just talked about. So have a great week, everybody. Thank you for being here. Hey friends, Jared Hardy here. If you've been inspired by what we talk about on the on purpose podcast, it's time to take it to the next step. My excellence on leadership course is built for individuals, teams, and organizations ready to lead with clarity, accountability, and purpose. Whether you're running a business, leading a squad, or just leveling up personally, let's work together. You can book me for custom classes or speaking engagements, and we'll build something that lasts. Visit teamhardy.net to learn more and take action today. And remember, team, life is far too short to live any other way than on purpose. We will see you all again next week.