Resilience Checkup: What Are You Doing To Build Personal Resilience?

Life happens, and not always the way we expect it to. Every single day we face change, stress and uncertainty. What if you could learn to thrive no matter what life throws your way? Resilience expert Adam Barkel and his inspiring guest explore breakthrough strategies to fully embrace change and build the resilience required to become change Proof.

Hey, it's Adam. And welcome to another episode of the Change Proof podcast. Today I'm going to be your, your guest and your host and we're going to talk about something that I write about in the book Change Proof. I don't know if you've gotten a copy of the book Change Proof yet. I say yet because I hope that you will at some point. Of course that sounds and is a bit self serving, but the book itself I think is a very valuable tool for your own personal resilience as well as the resilience of those around you, whether they be your family, your friends, colleagues at work, people that you're leading on a team, your organization itself. It's very, very important to recognize that for, for many, many years now we've been, we've been pursuing resilience from, from a very odd place, using a, a method or a methodology. Even that is outdated, that does no longer serves us, isn't really attainable anyway. So, so much struggle already in our, in our world, in my goal and our team's goal is to stop that if possible, change, change that dynamic, help people to suffer less, to thrive and, and to succeed at higher and higher levels and to enjoy the process. Resilience is the unsung hero in every success story. I don't care what, what success you're talking about, whether it's in, in sports, it's in business, in personal endeavors, in, in relationships, in health, anything. Resilience is going to be involved in that success at some level or another, sometimes greater and sometimes lesser. And the book Change Proof is really about how it is that we leverage the power of uncertainty and adversity as catalysts for our growth, for our building of long term resilience. Because it's through that long term resilience that we are able to succeed either sooner or later. And that's the only thing that I can't say with certainty. And it would be audacious and foolish for me to do that anyway. But what I can say, and I say this with certainty actually, is that if you do work on your resilience, mentally, emotionally, physically and even spiritually, you will succeed over time in various ways. And sometimes it'll come sooner and sometimes of course it takes longer, but there are certain markers of resilience that will help you along the way. These are some things today that I want to talk about that come right out of the book. Change Proof. There are actually 14 markers of resilience that we address or talk about in the book and I'm going to just cover a couple of them. And of course I, I invite you to, to get your own copy of Change Proof. You can go to changeproof.com to do that on your own. Of course you can also go to Amazon and buy it. But feel free to go back to changeproof.com even if you've bought the book on Amazon or in Barnes and Noble or wherever it might be, because there are certain gifts and things that will be yours simply by letting us know that you bought it elsewhere. And those gifts are a pleasure to give you, but you have to go there to claim them yourself. And there's nothing else to it actually. So let's start with these markers of resilience. As I say, there's 14 that we really unpack in a variety of different ways and mostly through narrative, through story, et cetera in the book. But I want to cover a couple of them right now. So number one, attention to health and good cardiovascular fitness. I think people take for granted their bodies. They. We take ourselves for granted in so many ways and we take our health for granted. Unless we are training for something or unless we've been given a scare. Often it is the case that, that we don't realize that we're speeding on the road of life until we get pulled over, right? The sirens go on and we're, we're either pulled over or, or we end up in a ditch or in an accident. And then we go, oh, you know, we've been, we've been traveling too fast or we've been traveling without enough gas in the tank and now we're out of gas and broken down on the side of the road. And here's the thing about that, that I want to share a little, little lesson that I learned from a woman by the name of Blair Braverman. And, and this lady, Blair Braverman, she's an Alaskan sled dog. Musher. Musher, meaning she, she performs the role of musher on a, on a, on a sled in Alaska and, and often in, in a race called the Iditarod. I don't know if you've ever heard of it, but it's a thousand mile race through the frozen tundra of Alaska and she, she mushes her dogs, these beautiful Alaskan malamutes and huskies. She's like the conductor in the symphony. She's. She's the. She's the coxswain in. In a boat, in. In crew. She's. She's the leader. She's the team leader. She knows something about these beautiful dogs. She. She takes very good care of them. She loves them, I would dare say. And she understands that, that they are built to run. That's why they do that. It's not cruel at all for them to be harnessed to one of these sleds and. And asked to run. Given the opportunity to run, they will run and run and run and run until they cannot run and anymore, because it's in their DNA to do that. She also knows that if she just lets them do that, what is natural to them, they cannot win the race. She will never win the race. That team will never win the race because they will at some point become so exhausted that they have to stop and they have to recover, and it takes some time. So she does something unthinkable, actually, on some level, she. She stops them about every four hours before they. They. They have any clue that they're tired and. And sometimes they won't even lie down on the ground, even though she puts out these blankets for them. She. She stops and. And they howl at her and they bark at her like she's out of her mind. But she rests them before they know that they are tired. She feeds them before they know that they're hungry. She gives them water before they know that they are thirsty. Because she understands a concept that's fundamental to be being resilient, building resilience for yourself, for others around you, and that is that it is far easier to prevent our fatigue in the first place than to recover from it later. I'll say this again. It is far easier to prevent our exhaustion in the first place than to recover from it afterward. It's far easier to prevent our injuries in the first place than to recover from them after the fact. She understands this about her dogs. And it's a fundamental principle when it comes to taking care of yourself and becoming more resilient. So when think about attention to your health, attention to your good cardiovascular fitness, what are you doing on a daily basis, on a ritual basis, on a routine basis, to take care of yourself so that you are preventing exhaustion, you're preventing burnout, you're preventing injuries from happening. How. How much time do you spend during a day stretching your body or creating better flexibility through some simple Practices. How, how often are you elevating your heart rate so that you're working on your cardiovascular health? How often are you walking, taking a simple walk? What, what are you doing on a, on a, intentional basis to really curate the kind of food that you put in your body, the kind of drinks that you, you have, that, the way that you hydrate yourself, the kind of water and other hydration techniques that you are utilizing. These are very deliberate things that people that succeed at the highest levels are doing, not because they are, are any healthier to start with or any more gifted physically than, than most people are, because that's just not the case. People that succeed for lengths of time are, are intentional about taking care of themselves. And the concept here, the key ingredient to being resilient is, is not one of, of how long you can go without the break or how it is that you can burn the candle at, at both ends or, or every conceivable end you can think of. It's not about winning the Night Owl Award. It's about understanding that resilience is not about endurance to begin with. That's the old language, that's the, or the old concept, the old paradigm, the one that we're working very hard to debunk for people and, and in its absence, in the absence of doing it the grit way, which again, so many people think resilience is about grit. It's about simply, you know, being able to grind. That will only lead to exhaustion. Just like Blair Braverman's dogs cannot grind their way through a thousand mile race, they cannot grit their way to the finish line because they will be exhausted long before they ever get to the finish line. They will never make it there based on that, that structure, that, that strategy. So what we have to understand is that endurance is, resilience is not about endurance. It's about restoration. It's not about how you endure, it's about how you restore. It's about how you recover. It's about how you ritualize recovery day to day, routine by routine. So that's the first marker of resilience is this attention to our health and good cardiovascular fitness. Another one is our capacity to recover rapidly from stress. And to me, I'm going to tie that marker of resilience to the one to the last one that I just said, which is that our capacity to recover rapidly has everything to do with whether or not we have created rituals for our recovery in the first place. Because without rituals for recovery, it is almost impossible to recover rapidly from stress. You may be able to do it occasionally, but you certainly can't do it routinely and on a, on a consistent basis. And you'd say, well, Adam, you know, do I need to be doing it on a routine basis? Do I need to do it, you know, all the time? And I'd say, well, what world are you living in? Because the world I living, I am living in is one where we're constantly being stressed. Stress is not something that's going to go away. And for people that want it to go away, you're looking at the, you know, through the telescope from the wrong end. It's never going to go away. And in fact, we shouldn't even want it to because stress is vitally important to our growth. What we have to understand is that stress is not the enemy here. It's a lack of recovery from stress that is the enemy. That is the thing that will make us sick, and that's the thing that we can do something about long before we start to see the physical signs of deterioration or depletion. So the idea here, again, when it comes to this marker of resilience, our rapid, our capacity to rapidly recover from stress, is that we have to understand that it, it means we have to ritualize recovery long before we are feeling the results or effects of stress. That means day to day routine by routine. We have to ritualize it, we have to schedule it. I, if you saw my calendar, you would see that my calendar is filled with things that I do on a ritual basis to recover from the stresses of ordinary life, whether they're personal life or their business life matters. That's everything from taking a scheduled walk in the afternoon to taking 20 minutes to do a legs up the wall posture, which is sort of a gentle inversion with your legs up the wall and your back flat on the ground. And for 20 minutes with my eyes closed in the middle of the afternoon is better than any cup of coffee at that time, better than any, anything else that I might use to energize or re. Energize myself. Same thing before bed. Most important recovery we get is at night when we sleep. And so many people have trouble getting to sleep, trouble staying asleep, et cetera. And one of the best things you can do is a legs up the wall exercise for about 20 minutes before sleep. It helps with insomnia, it helps with anxiety. It just sets you up for success in a way that again, many, many people are not intending ahead of. It's very much about being intentional in the way you structure your day so that you can create These pockets of recovery, these what we like to call recovery zones throughout the day. And by the way, just so we're clear, it doesn't even take 20 minutes for a recovery zone to provide a benefit. The, the evidence is clear, the research is clear about this, that breaks of 5 minutes, of just 5 minutes cool our brains down. I love the visual that I often will show an audience when I'm delivering one of my resilience keynote talks, or a keynote on mental health, or a keynote on stress management, or even on work life balance, which we speak of as work life harmony. When I'm doing that kind of thing, I'll often use research and a recent Microsoft paper was published to show the difference between our brains on brakes and our brains when we have no breaks. And it's a visual thing. For me, the brain with no brakes is hot. It's orange and red and yellow color. It's a hot head basically. And the difference between that color of our brains and what, what our brains are actually the, the kind of stress that they're under in that, in those times. And a cool brain, a brain that is literally the color blue, which is not, not under, under stress and strain and depletion and is, is not producing cortisol at that same time, adrenaline at that same time as a, as a means to, to defend from that stress. That brain is simply a brain that's had breaks, breaks of five minutes. That's it. Five minutes between your zoom meetings, by five minutes between other things that you're doing to just relax your brain. And there's lots of techniques that we get into in the book Change Proof as well as in the Change Proof program, which is our digital program that's all about taking change and becoming change proof and developing resilience rituals, etc for yourself, for your teams to a new level, to a level of intentionality that, that most people just don't learn, aren't acquainted with and I wasn't acquainted with until I began doing this research some years ago. So it's, I completely get it. But if we want to develop resilience for ourselves and for others around us, we want to model it and we want others to be more resilient in the face of ever changing change world of never ending change, then we have to do this intentionally. We have to do it by design and not leave it to other things, leave it to default. I suppose. So again, marker of resilience, we have to have that capacity to rapidly recover. Another marker of resilience is the ability to regulate our emotions And I could spend an entire episode just talking about this. I will not for now, but I would just say that emotional regulation, regulation of our emotions is so vitally important and for most of us, we never, we never learn this. I think people live their entire lives and are not acquainted with how important it is to recognize your emotions, to be present with your emotions, to understand your emotions, and to understand that it's not required that you change your emotions. Meaning there, there's, there. The work to be done when it comes to our emotions is simply to acknowledge their existence, to be present with them, to, to not try to push them away or, or to suppress them. And, and when I, I say that, it's, it's kind of an odd thing because often it is that we have, we have learned this in childhood very early on from the, the very first early life traumas that we had. And you may not think that you've been traumatized. Some of you, you know that you have, of course, because there have been significant abuses that people have faced in their lives, etc, but, but trauma can be very, very subtle. And not everything rises to, to, you know, an obvious level and not, and traumas can't be compared because we all experience trauma uniquely. So something that might create trauma for one person might not create it or be that for another. But what we learn, all of us, regardless of whether we've been abused or whether there's been something that, that made us experience fear and, or anxiety or discomfort, any, any, any kind of emotion that at a, as, as a child, we didn't know how to handle, didn't know how to deal with, we wouldn't know how to deal with it before the age of seven or eight anyway, because it's our precognitive development years. And, and then even when we start to develop cognitively, we don't understand things and people don't explain them to us. And often we are just the victims of our circumstances in that respect. But we have coping mechanisms. We all learn that. And one of those coping mechanisms for so many people is simply to not deal with it at all, to deflect or distract and to repress. And that's done on a subconscious level. It's unconscious to us. We don't know we're even doing it. We don't even often know that that's the default mechanism for dealing with unpleasant emotions. So then you fast forward and you're 20 or 30 or 50 or 70 years old and still not regulating your emotions in an open and honest way. And, and what ends up happening in many cases is that the body has taken on the responsibility for distracting us from feeling certain things. And a lot of the pains and aches in our, in our physical beings are not due to structural issues, structural damage, but are actually our body's response, our, our mind's response, our brain's response to unwanted emotions. And when those things are triggered, you, you, you might see things show up like irritable issues with your, with your stomach or issues with your skin, rashes and, and things of that sort. Pain in the shoulder, pain in the, in the elbow, pain in the wrist, pain in the back, pain in the neck, literal pain in the neck that comes from this unresolved tension. These emotions that have not been regulated have not been dealt with. So emotional regulation is absolutely one of those skills that we learn to develop greater resilience. And the net result of that is not just emotional resilience and mental resilience, but also physical resilience. Because our bodies are in a position where, when you can regulate your emotions, again, not trying to change circumstances, but simply being able to deal with the fact that you feel the way you feel and that there's nothing wrong with that, that our bodies in those situations don't need to protect us, don't need to defend, don't need to be on guard to distract us by producing other, other things to get our attention. And, and so that, that alone can, can create great relief. Relief that medicines, prescriptions and even surgeries have not been able to provide for many, many, many people. So I hope that you, you do read more, find out more about that, whether it's to read it in change proof or to develop a greater understanding of these things and capacity to actually regulate emotions through the program, through the change proof program or, or that you seek that, that counsel and those strategies elsewhere. This is one of those game changing things, one of those sort of transformational moments for so many people when they discover that they actually have so much more control over how they resolve their, their physical ailments as well as those that are, are mental and emotional as well. But again, of course, you know, we think about things being in our head. It's, there's a stigma associated with that. And so oftentimes, you know, it's easier to just take a pill, it's easier just to listen to a doctor or somebody else and, and, and seek a, seek a structural change surgery even to resolve that pain, as opposed to simply understanding yourself better and, and how it is that you're, you're, you've been dealing with, with uncomfortable things probably since you were a small child. So I wanted to cover a couple of these, which I have. As I say, there's 14 markers of resilience. There's a lot more in the book as well. And of course you can go to changeproof.com to get your copy and also find out about the Change Proof program, which is something that we're very, very happy with, something that you can do on your own, in your own time. It is self paced. So if you're a quick study, you can, you can take it quickly. And if you're a slow study, which I am actually, then, then you can time doing it as well. And it's great not only for individuals but for, for teams or individual leaders who are leading, you know, groups of other people. The change program would be very suitable in that scenario as well. Because ultimately where our, our companies, our organizations are really only as strong and only as resilient as the individuals in those organizations, especially those who are leading others. So very important today, our company is committed to creating a more resilient world, one individual at a time and one organization at a time. And you're a great big part of that. So thank you. Of course, if you have questions for me, you can go to AdamMarkel.com podcast and leave your comment or question there. If what I've shared with you today is something valuable that you would like to share with someone else, of course you can share, simply share this episode. But another way to help to get the word out, in addition to sharing with people that you know, is to recognize that this, it's the algorithm that determines whether or not this podcast shows up in, in front of people is really in many ways based on the kind of things that people say about it, the reviews that we get. So if you would leave a five star review on, on whatever platform it is that you're consuming, this particular show that is super helpful to us. We so appreciate you doing that. And again, I get it that it's, it's also self serving. And to make that request, I, I thank you to just think about how many other people in this moment could really benefit from learning how to become more resilient in a world that we're living in right now, which is just full of uncertainty, full of, of ambiguity, full of people that are mourning and in loss and, and, and are in some state of pain. If we can resolve those things individually, you think about the benefit to us collectively as a society, as a community, as a world. I think we're doing something positive that way, and we appreciate you being partners in that with us. So thank you. For now, I'll just say ciao.

Thanks for listening everyone. We hope you now have even more tools and greater insights to build resilience and become change Proofs. Help us inspire others by sharing this episode and leaving your comments over@adammarkel.com.

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More resilience tips and strategies, including support for building change proof teams, visit AdamMarkel.com BecomeChange Proof.