Short spoken tip by Adam Markel on increasing personal and team resilience by growing capacity. He reframes "capacity" as resilience and gives three practical traits/steps: (1) Reframe setbacks to find meaning and learning opportunities, (2) Recalibrate by making small pivots ("recalculating") toward goals, and (3) Create recovery rituals to regenerate (e.g., 20-minute naps or walks) so stress doesn't accumulate. The piece is directive, brief, and aimed at immediate application.
Chapters
Hi, I'm Adam Markell, helping you to pivot and become more resilient. I've got one powerful tip that you and your teams can use today, and that is to look at how it is that we create greater capacity. A dear friend of mine, years ago said, paid me this wonderful compliment by saying, you've got a lot of capacity. And for a while, I didn't know exactly what that meant or how it was that I was producing greater capacity. I mean, I was good at going the distance. I was good at not quitting. I was good at being tenacious and just getting back in the game, even after I got knocked down. And I started to realize that those descriptors, the way that I was thinking of myself in terms of having greater capacity was really just another way of saying that I was resilient. So right now, one of the things that you can be focused on for yourself and for anybody that you work with is how it is that you cultivate greater resilience. How it is that you actually are taking better care of yourself. We've got three steps in creating resilience, and I'll quickly outline them to you. These three steps are also the traits that resilient people exhibit more often than other traits. So, for example, resilient people know how to reframe. They understand that setbacks are temporary, that they can look at situations and realize, even in the midst of a pandemic, let's say that there are positive things that we're going to learn from it. Lots of people are learning things that they didn't know about themselves already. They didn't know they could work from home. They didn't know they could work remotely and be as productive as they're being. They didn't know they might be as happy as they are working from home. And for some others, they didn't realize that they actually loved working in the office and they can't wait to get back in. But those awarenesses, those AHAs, if you will, are a simple way of finding the meaning in situations. And that's what resilient people do. They find the meaning. They reframe and find the meaning. The second thing they do is they recalibrate meaning. They can look at where they are and understand that the most important thing right now is to be able to make small changes, to make small pivots to get where they're going. Just like when we're in our car and we make a wrong turn, our GPS will naturally tell us recalculating. That's all it says, it tells us that wherever we are right now, we can get to where we want to go by simply recalculating the the root. And right now, that's the most important thing that we can do to create resilience is just to realize that we can recalibrate, make small changes, recalculate, find a new route to exactly where it is that we want to go from where we find ourselves right now. And the third step and the third trait that we find with resilient people is that they are ritualistic, meaning that they create rituals for just about everything. And their rituals to recover. Because it's not stress that's the issue for all of us. Stress is actually a really good thing. It's a healthy thing. Except when we are exhausted, when we don't recover from stress, that's when it leads to dis ease. That's when it leads to problems, to challenges, to overwhelm. We've got to find time to actually recover from the stress that's all around us. Even the healthy stress requires that we have time to recover, that we create rituals for regeneration and recovery. And that could mean just taking a 20 minute nap. If you did just one thing that was different than how you've been doing it, you could decide in the afternoon when you find that you're tired and you're reaching for a cup of coffee or a piece of chocolate, that you take a 20 minute nap, 20 minutes with your eyes closed, or take a 20 minute walk. It's a very small thing to help you, to increase your capacity and your productivity and your resilience. So again, resilient people, they reframe, they recalibrate and they recover by ritual. That's how you can help yourself right now. And that's how you can, of course, help all of those around you. I'm Adam and I hope this resilience tip really helps.
