How to Create Resilience with Dr. G

I'd like to ship you a free copy of my book Habits of High Performers. If you come and join the 2026 goal setting workshop, I will ship you one of these today. The link is in the notes. Please come and join me to set up the very best 2026 you could imagine. If you've set up goals in the past or New Year's resolutions and they haven't substantiated, I'm here to help you across all the key pillars of your life nail your goals. I'll see you there. Welcome to Lead On Purpose. I'm James Laughlin, former seven time world champion musician and now Executive Coach to global leaders and high performers. In every episode I bring you an inspiring leader or expert to help you lead your life and business on purpose. Thanks for taking the time to connect today and investing in yourself. Enjoy the show.

Would you like to connect personally with some of my podcast guests? They are arguably some of the most impactful, influential leaders and high performers on the planet. Each month, members of my hpc, the High Performers Club, get to connect with a leadership titan in an intimate Q and A. They also get access to powerful high performance leadership coaching and monthly Masterminds. There's only 20 seats at the Leadership Table. You can apply today by going to www.jjlochlan.com HP.

How much time do you invest in your brain? Well, look, our brain dictates so many things. It's our largest asset. We've got to look after it, right? But often we're putting things on our skin and we're doing all these other things that care for our bodies, but our brain dictates so much. I came across a product a wee while ago called Flow State and it's made such a difference. And look, they offer functional mushrooms that sharpen cognition, they really boost energy and definitely strengthen immunity. And they actually use one of their key ingredients is Lion's man, right? So Lion's man is popular among really peak performing athletes and those wanting an edge. It's known as the Brain Mushroom and it's currently being studied extensively for its nerve growth factor potential as a means to ease the symptoms of Alzheimer's and for treating inflammation in the body. The thing I love about these products, they don't taste like mushrooms. You can mix them in with your tea. They're a great replacement for coffee. But I actually love the PM mushroom blend, the evening one. It really helps me sleep and to know that my brain is getting extra nutrients is just next level. The one thing that's really important for me is what's in there. So they have tested heavily at Hill Laboratories for heavy metals, pesticide, residue, microbials and also at Massey University for activ compounds. So I urge you, if you love your brain and you want to go the extra mile to nurture it, head on over to Flowstate NZ and you can use the coupon code leadonpurpose to get 15% off. I don't know about you, but sometimes I get home and I think, what am I eating tonight? It's the last thing I want to do. I don't know what to cook, I don't know what's in the cupboard or in the fridge. And it often leads to poor choices like ordering some takeaways. So recently Caroline and I started eating Green dinner table and it's absolutely amazing after a long day when I'm knackered, I know that when I get home there's going to be a great recipe and all the ingredients I need right there in the fridge. And look, I absolutely love it. I've been doing it for several months and it means I don't have to think at the end of the day and I just know that I'm going to get good, nutritious, wholesome food. And look, it's plant based, which has so many benefits. So if you're a meat eater, perhaps you might want to start on maybe just three, like a three day plan. So you've got three evening meals for you and your partner or you and your family, depending on what option you want to go for. But the food is delicious, it's so nutritious and it means we don't need to think. And as leaders of families, teams and organizations, what we put in our bodies is just so crucially important. So I urge you to go and check it out and I want to give you 20% off your first order so you can go to GreenDinnertable.co.nz and use the coupon code PURPOSE.

Foreign.

Change causes pain. Resilience encompasses the abilities you need to navigate that change and move forward to what you want. Resilience Expert Deborah Gilboa, aka Dr. G, works with families, educators, executives and businesses to identify the mindset and strategies to turn stress to an advantage. She is a leading media personality, seen regularly on Today Good Morning America and is the resilience expert for the Doctors. She's also frequently in the Washington Post, the New York Times and Huffington Post. Today we go deep on resilience. What it means, how to develop it, how to help others build it. Quite an Incredible conversation. Sit back and enjoy the show.

Doctor G. A massive welcome to the Lead on Purpose podcast.

I'm so glad to be here with you.

I'm so excited to connect with you. I've been reading all about what you've been doing, and your area of expertise is just so important in this day and age with what we're all traversing. So before we get into the gold that you have to share, one question is this. So when you think of leadership, what do you think about what comes to mind when you think of that term, leadership change?

If an organization or a family or a team was undergoing absolutely no change, even for a week, that's a great time for a leader to take a vacation. We only need leaders when we are preparing for dealing with or recovering from change, which is only all the time.

Yeah, it's so true. I love that. Then I've asked that question thousands of times to people across my lifetime. I've never heard that. So I love that. And that's really, really gives me a different perspective. And when you say it and explain it like that, like, wow, you're right. Because what's the need for a leader if we don't have challenges and change?

It's incredible.

The problem with change is that it is both the only way to get what we want, meaning the life we want, or the service we want, or the opportunity we want, or the relationship we want or the family we want. It's the only way to get what we want. And it's something that our brains are wired to resist.

And why are we wired to resist it?

Oh, okay. This is actually a really easy neuroscience question. I know a lot of your listeners are like, easy and neuroscience do not belong in the same sentence. But our brains obviously have millions of functions. They are miraculous in a lot of cool ways. But our brains actually only have one job. Can you guess what that job is?

To keep us alive.

That's it. That is exactly it. That's my answer. That is the true answer. Our brains have one job, and it's to keep us alive. The good news is we are currently alive. The bad news, all change is suspect. Not just the bad stuff, the good stuff, the neutral stuff. So examples. If you heard. If you were walking through the grocery and heard someone that you don't even know say something and you caught the corner of your ear, you caught new Covid strain, your brain would say, oh, bad potential change. If you pitched a new client and got an email that they wanted to go with your offering, good potential change. If you picked up your phone to send a text and it said, updating operating system. Pretty much a neutral change, right? All of those, Every single one, and dozens of others in the course of every day. Your brain says, but could we die?

So it has these reflex reactions to keep us safe. Even while you're feeling frustration or disgust over a new Covid, strain or elation and pride and excitement over a new client or annoyance because you can't send the text you were going to send or look up the thing you were going to send that you wanted to look up. At the same time, our brain clicks through these three reflexes that are so built in we can't turn them off. Those three reflexes are loss, distrust and discomfort. So I'm going to use the example of the great change you got, the client you really, really wanted. That's going to make your year, that's going to allow you to fulfill your mission, your brain, even while you're feeling proud, excited, whatever, says, what could we lose? Will we lose the time we needed to serve the other people that we've been serving up until now? Will we lose time with our family? Will this damage relationships in any business or personal? What will we lose? And it says, did that really say yes in that email? Read that again. Was it to me first of all, like, did they maybe just send it to the wrong person? Did they really say yes? Or was it conditional in some way? Can I do what I promised I would do for that client? Am I able to deliver the things I said I would do? I've never done something at this level before. Distrust. And even as we start to accept I was right to pursue this, it was on purpose, to use your term, because I use that idea of purpose a lot.

And they did say yes, they did mean it. Our brains still say, well, what's going to be uncomfortable about it? Is it more or less travel than I wanted? Is it more administrative or more hands on work than I'm used to or comfortable with? Will I have to wear pants every day that I go into work with that client? Where will I park the things that are not life or death but are still uncomfortable? Our brain ticks through loss, distrust and discomfort with every change. Some we go through it so quickly we barely notice it, and some we get really stuck in one or more of those three places. But these are reflexes like, James, have you ever been in the front seat of a car and whether you're the driver or the passenger, the driver hits the brake and your seatbelt locks definitely okay. So the car doesn't know if the driver hit the brakes to avoid an accident or to reach into the back seat. Right. It's just a mechanism. If you're going at a certain speed or higher, hit the brake with enough force, the seat belt locks. It's just a safety mechanism. It's not a thought process. The same thing happens in our amygdala. That's the part of the brain that mediates these fear reactions. There's potential change. The brain says loss, distrust, discomfort. The thing that I think leaders really need to know about that is that when we announce change, because, as I mentioned, leaders are focused around our work is always focused around change, either preparing for it, navigating it, or recovering from it and preparing for the next one. When we announce change and we get any kind of pushback, loss, distrust, or discomfort from our people, whether that's on our team or in our family or in our business, we tend to think one of two things. We either think, why don't they trust me as a leader? Right?

I've been there.

Don't they know that I have this? Haven't I proven myself? Haven't I always wouldn't. I definitely want what's best for our company or what's wrong with these people?

Are they lazy? Are they stubborn?

Are they just not thinking? We see that reaction as a referendum on our leadership or on their character, and it's neither. It is a chemical reflex.

Wow. And so it doesn't actually say anything about a person's personality, about them being good or bad. This is literally a chemical response.

James, have you ever taken a child to the doctor for a well visit as a kid?

Of course.

Okay. You bring your child, you bring that child in to see me. Because I'm a family doctor. I do a lot of well visits. We sit them up on my exam table. The three of us are talking. We're joking around. I'm asking questions about, you know, preschool or high school or whatever's going on in their life. I take out my stethoscope, I listen to them. I let them listen to them. And at some point, I pull out my reflex hammer, and you know what I'm going to do? I tap their knee. What happens?

Their leg goes boop.

Yeah. They kick. Now, if I stood right in front of that child when I tapped their knee, what would happen to me?

You're going to get kicked.

Great. Do you chastise that child for being disrespectful and kicking the doctor?

Of course not.

Probably not. You might at Least in your inside voice, think, why did this woman do this idiotic thing where she stood right in front of the child? So it's a reflex. It's called a deep tendon reflex. And no one can help their leg kicking. And yet, as leaders, we announce change, stand right in front of people and get kicked all the time.

Hey, James here. I wanted to take a quick moment to let you know about something. Look, I get asked to deliver keynotes and workshops for teams and companies all over the world, from London to Antarctica, from America to Australasia, from armies to small businesses to large corporates to sports teams. But I go in and deliver keynotes around the mindset of high performers, around the habits of high performers, about how we navigate change. If you would like me to come and speak to your team or speak at your conference or deliver a bespoke workshop, please get in touch with my team. Carolinejlochlin.com will be able to help. I'll also make sure that we put that in the show notes.

And so, in terms of a leader, how do we understand we need to know that this is going to come and if we can understand the actual science behind it, it's going to allow us to take things a lot less personally. So what's going on there for that to happen? Is there anything we need to understand more around the amygdala and maybe the vagal nerve and stuff like that? What's going on?

So the amygdala kicks in to try and protect that individual. You might be talking to the most mission oriented of your employees or your team members or your family. And yet when it comes to it, their brain still wants to protect their survival. So you announce a systems change. I'll give you an example. There's a company that I've worked with several times over the last few years, and they called me a couple of years after we'd worked together the first time and said, hey, we're navigating a change and it's going really poorly. Can you help? So here's what happened. They did what every business consultant says. They surveyed their people. They asked, this was during COVID What could we be doing better? What's irritating? What's getting in your way of being your best self at work? And they heard from 96% of their employees, including their leadership, that their payroll system was dreadful. It was frustrating and clunky and really taking like a ridiculous amount of time away from their work to deal with the payroll system. Just about nobody loved it. Okay, they researched new payroll Systems. They picked one, they implemented it, they announced it, and people freaked out. They even said in the announcement, we asked, you spoke, we listened to, here you go, congratulations. And then they waited for the applause, and they got lost distrust and discomfort.

Back at them, which is bewildering for most people to even think about.

Absolutely. Super frustrating. Absolutely. No question. And I have tons of empathy for their frustration. However, payroll is about our basic needs, our ability to provide shelter and food and clothing for ourselves and our families. And any change to it is going to feel really threatening, even though it is what you ask for and it is good. And even in some of these people, as we dove into it later, they had said, oh, good. Oh, gosh, a new payroll.

And so even while they were feeling some relief or some pleasure that they'd been listened to, still that lost distrust and discomfort hit hard. Mostly because this really hit at some of their basic survival needs. There are strategies. The first thing to answer your question is just understanding that even the good change requires resilience. Even the good change is hard for our brains. Will allow leaders to both prepare for that and not take it personally. Not taking it personally turns out to be an incredibly important skill. Not trait skill. And I like skills better because we can learn skills. Anybody who's listening to this conversation is going to think back to a change that they let someone know about recently and say, oh, yeah, that was probably loss, or no, I see that that was distrust, or I see that that was discomfort. So recognizing it is a really important step. But there are also, and this is some of the work I do with organizations. There are different scientifically validated strategies that help you help someone else be more resilient. The reason I keep using that word is because the definition of resilience. And you're going to love this, and you're going to see why I wanted to be on your podcast so much is the ability to navigate change and come through it with intention and purpose.

Amazing. I love it. Wow. Can you just say that one more time for the listener?

Yeah. Resilience is the ability to navigate change with intention and purpose.

That's amazing. Incredible. And I think we can all really apply that various levels of our personal and professional lives. You talked a little bit about needs, so I wanted to just discuss that a little bit and unpack that. And as a leader, understanding human needs, psychology, the basics of that, certainty, variety, significance, connection, growth, and contribution. Very similar to Maslow's hierarchy. Um, what's your thoughts on a. A leader understanding what those needs are and B how do we actually figure out how to help our team meet those needs?

You did a nice job listing those needs. What I find is that leaders, especially.

Entrepreneurial minded leaders, meaning leaders who are flexible and facile and have navigated a lot of change in their lives, they tend to think, well, those are a person's needs, but they're not necessarily my responsibility. That's each individual's responsibility to get their needs met. I should be aware of them, I guess. But why am I held accountable for those? The quick answer is you're not held accountable for those. But if you can recognize that our inner drive pushes us towards those, you can use that path, those pathways that already exist to match your mission to your employees goals or your family members goals, or your teammates goals. Knowing that they have this drive, ignoring it is like ignoring your team's need for sleep or food. You could push somebody through an all night meeting.

But if you didn't acknowledge and align with their body's need for sleep, their performance would degrade quickly over time. And so you won't hit your mission because they have to sleep. So when you understand that they have to drive towards those needs, especially when you get into the more esoteric needs like connection for example, that's a struggle because we've all had to navigate big changes around how we get our connection needs met in the last few years. People are doing it, but we have to think in those terms if we want to be as effective as we can possibly be. We can ignore them, but it will make us less effective. It will be like, like dropping gravel into the gears of a machine.

That's a great way to look at it.

James, you asked me a really good question about what's happening with the amygdala and I wanted to mention that it's not the end of the story. Is not lost distrust and discomfort. The amygdala dumps all those in our way when it change and in our way in order like speed bumps to slow us down and help make sure we'll be safe. I get that, but how do we get someone else or ourselves to turn that amygdala down? I said we can turn it down from like a 10 to a 5 or a 4. We cannot turn it off because it's a safety mechanism our brains won't allow us. There is no way to sort of reach in and hit a reset button so we never feel those. And the small percentage of the population who never feel those don't often make it to adulthood if we have no Loss, distrust, or discomfort around change. Then when we lean against the screen on a window on the 12th story of a building, and we don't have caution, we don't have fear, we fall out of that building before we're old enough to reach adulthood, right? So we want those to be there, but we want to turn them down. How do you turn them down? By engaging your ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Nobody has to remember that name. You have to remember asking one question. What choices do I have?

When we ask ourselves, what choices do I have? Even before we list the choices, just asking the question engages the thinking part of our brain. And that quiets those feelings. Doesn't silence, but quiets those feelings.

I can already I'm thinking about that, like putting myself through a scenario right now where there might be some danger. And I'm thinking about going, what are my choices right now? Already I can go to a different part of my brain, and there's a different processing happening, and I'm not focusing on the danger.

And it calms the chemicals your brain is dumping so that your breathing slows and your heart rate slows and it allows you to think a little bit at first. The reflex to danger shuts down all the thinking parts of your brain in order to save you. If you've ever been about to cross a busy street and the light turns green and you have permission to walk and you start to go, and if you can imagine catching out of the corner of your eye a flash of something moving too quickly, wrong direction, and you jump back, all that happened without any conscious thought. Because if you had to engage in the tenths of a second that conscious thought takes, you might be a pancake. So your brain does its best to shut down all your conscious, all of your reasoning and get you to just react, the way to overcome that, when it's the right thing to do to overcome it, is by asking yourself this thinking question, what choices do I have? The reason that's the most useful question to ask yourself is because then this is a cycle, and I actually have a picture of this cycle for free download on my website. Anybody's welcome to it. I can give it to you for your show notes. But so if you can picture this is a circle, it starts with a change or the possibility of a change. There's loss, distrust, and discomfort around the swoop down in the circle, you get to the bottom and you get to choice. You make a list of what choices you have, and when you engage with one or more of them, then you get to reunify with your purpose. You pick the choices that line up with your intention and purpose. You may or may not be successful, but you will be mission oriented. The resilience definition for organizations is the ability to navigate change and come through it mission oriented.

A concrete example of that happened during the pandemic. Many of the companies that I worked with called me early in the pandemic partially because I'm a medical doctor and they thought I might possibly understand the infectious disease that was happening, but much more because they had a big decision to make. I had more than a dozen leaders within just a week say to me, basically, should I close or stay open? Whether that was customer facing or just where my employees physically work. But should we close or stay open? And I said the same thing to all of them. I don't know. But your mission does. Go read your mission.

In the United States, our postal service has a famous mission. Through hail and sleet and wind and snow, they keep going. And it's much publicized and kids learn it. I mean, at least back in the day, the olden days, we learned it in elementary school. The post office didn't wonder if they should send all their employees home and shut down for the pandemic. They had to keep going. They may have changed how they did things. Part of their mission is to protect their people, but their mission is to deliver. Thumbnail.

When your mission is clear, as I know you've talked about on your podcast, because I've listened to episodes where you talk about that clarity of purpose. When your mission is clear, when your purpose is clear, it becomes the litmus test for your choices. When you face change, it becomes your North Star in terms of resilience.

And that's interesting. I'm just so excited that you say this around the vision piece, because when there's that lack of clarity, people get lost. Where do we go? Change hits.

How do you know?

There's no compass for you with the companies you've worked with and the people you've worked with, how do people get clearer on a vision? Or some people might not even have a vision and a mission to go with, where do they start in terms of getting clear on that?

They start with why?

When a company is one person's vision to begin with, hopefully soon it becomes a collaboration of several visions. But when it starts from one person's vision, they have a why not to say that can't change. One of the most amazing things about our long lives is that we get to fulfill different purposes at different times. But when they can answer why we do what we do, they're doing a fantastic job already. And when they can answer it in a way that rings for their team, where their personal mission, their personal purpose aligns at least in part with their company's mission. You don't have to worry nearly so much about employee retention.

One of the companies that I work with.

They work on and they've given me permission to talk about it. They work on better forms of milk for babies.

Cool.

At some point in one of the first times we were working together, I said, can you please just put for me in this, you know, on the screen why you do what you do? Because they had been through tons of change and things were really hard. I said, what's your why this company has done such a good job with clarity around their vision that every person gave the same answer.

That's rare.

We feed hungry babies.

Wow.

Everybody said, we feed hungry babies. And that's a pretty good purpose. And it's not really hard for people to align their personal purpose with their company's mission. And while it aligns well, you'll put.

Up with some really hard stuff 100%. You have a bad day at home or you've had a rough morning, you're going to get to work because you feed hungry babies. Right?

Right. And you have vendor issues and regulatory struggles and climate weather and a formula recall. And your work becomes more and more and more obstacle filled. And you know why you are putting up with it. You know what you're aiming for. Every choice you have to make you align with, is this going to help us feed hungry babies?

That's so powerful. I really wish more companies could get that clear. And you're right. When you ask a number of team members, hey, what's your purpose? Often you'll get like five different responses from five different people. Right. So that to me is very rare. And it says that they've done a lot in taking their intrinsic why and bringing it to life for everyone.

And one of the things that leaders who are listening could do is when you think about your team, if you could survey them anonymously so nobody's worried about having to get it right or get in trouble. If you could just ask them to write on a piece of paper or, you know, in some other anonymous way. A lot of the work that I do, we will do polling where we know everyone in the room is who's answering, but we can't see who said what. And just as a litmus test for you, not for them, see how Much alignment you have when people answer that question, why do we do what we do here?

That's really powerful. Well, every leader that's listening, please take that, try that.

It's a challenge.

Yeah, let's go forth and do it. I love it. And Dr. G, I'd love to chat a bit about what led to this point in time where you are so passionate about resilience and you help people, companies, teams, organizations. What happened in your life that really helped you develop resilience? Be curious about resilience and go deep with resilience.

The answer to what led me to develop resilience really has to do, I think, with being the child of two first generation Americans and the immigrant story in my family. And I'm the only grandchild on one side and the only granddaughter on the other side. And that was, I mean, the white hot spotlight of a lot of people's love.

Yeah, I bet.

And the repository of a lot of people's fears and struggles and an intense desire to make their journey and their struggles worth it as well as my own. But I had this really interesting experience in medical school. And medicine was not my first career. So I hit medical school in my late 20s, which is unusual. And I was in medical school in the late 90s, and my professors were fond of a phrase that had some popularity at the time. They would say, stress is the new smoking. Tell your patients to avoid it at all costs.

Interesting.

And medical school is very much like drinking from a fire hose. You're not reflecting on things, you're just trying to drink as fast as you can. And so I wasn't really reflecting on that or returning some responses. I was just writing it down. I'll memorize it later. And then at the end of almost every lecture, there would be announcements. Here is another research project you can become involved in. Make sure that you're in leadership in at least two organizations. You should also be exercising daily. Don't forget to maintain your home relationships. Because. And I thought, are they trying to kill us? This is a lot of stress. You know, maybe they just don't want us to graduate and compete with them for jobs. I don't understand what's happening. You know, they say stress is the new smoking. You should avoid it. And also, here's more stress. Carry this too. And so I started to realize as I was working in my clinical years in the hospital and I got into residency, a lot of people deal with a lot of stress. And the common denominator didn't seem to be the stress. It Seemed to be the people about who dealt with it successfully and who really struggled.

There's this phrase that we use a lot in American culture, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. I was coming to the observation that what doesn't kill you makes you miserable.

I couldn't really buy this idea that just going through hard things made you stronger. James, without naming names, do you know somebody who is just always having a hard time, no matter what happens to them, it's just always difficult. So if what didn't kill you made you stronger, we wouldn't know people like that.

We would see people get stronger. I think a lot about resilience and how it strengthens us, very much like I think about exercise and how it strengthens our bodies. First of all, stress and exercise are both awful. Yeah, I know as a doctor, I'm supposed to say exercise is fantastic. It's fantastic for you. But very few of us really enjoy the exercise, especially when we're first starting to exercise.

But thinking that just going through hard things is going to make me resilient is like me thinking, well, I want to run a marathon, and I lose my car in the parking lot, a lot, and have to wander around looking for it. So I'm sure I'm ready for the marathon.

It doesn't make a lot of sense. There has to be some intentionality to it. And that intention makes a really big difference. I noticed this in med school. In residency, I see that there are stressed people who are doing well and stressed people who are doing poorly. And then I get to. I finished all my training, and I'm an attending physician, which means basically, I'm like the doctor you go see. And I've been doing that for a few years, Starting to feel pretty confident that I kind of know what I'm doing. And I noticed something really important, which is I know how to help people recover. And as a family doctor, I see kids and adults. I know how to prevent illness and some injury. But I haven't really been taught to help people thrive, to be really well. So I did what I'd been trained to do. I dove into the medical literature, and it described that gap from recovery to wellness as patient resilience, which I will grant you, sounds like a cop out.

Doctors are like, well, we got you this far. The rest is on you. But I thought, okay, if that's the case, what is that? What is patient resilience? And is it like, eye color or genetics? Or is there something I can do to help get my patients more of That I looked at all of the research, and this goes back 15 years that existed around resilience at the time, and most of it was in combat veterans and other people suffering from post traumatic stress disorder and people with severe mental illness, which is interesting, but not tremendously applicable to the bulk of my patients.

I started to do some of the research myself, and I was lucky enough to hook up with some great fellows and postdocs and PhDs at Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business, because we wanted to know about resilience in adults with jobs and professions and people that are functional, that are really getting their lives done. But did resilience matter? Did it matter in productivity? Did it matter in sales? Did it matter in happiness? Did it matter in health? Does it matter? And if so, how? And at a more basic level, what is it made of? So the first thing we set out to figure out was if it is a fixed commodity, if it's a fixed trait. And the good news is, it is not a fixed trait. It's a growth commodity.

Wow.

Which is mostly good news, but slightly bad news too, because growth commodities, as any trader will tell you, go up and also go down.

And not always in predictable ways. So the good news is that resilience does not either stay steady or just slowly climb over your lifetime by going through hard things. The good news is that you can intentionally affect your resilience for the better. And the bad news is that the world can accidentally affect your resilience for the worse.

But that is something that's really important for leaders to know. A lot of savvy leaders.

Intentionally look for resilience skills in their new hires and in the people they choose to promote. You might not put it that way to yourself. You might not have said, I look for resilience skills, but you thought, I want people who can tell me about difficulties they've navigated and how they've grown from it. I want people who, at first glance, aren't terrified of change. I want to know people who have lots of different strategies that think outside the box. Creative problem solvers that advocate well for themselves and their people. That's resilience. I mean, put under in one bucket. You're looking for people who can navigate change with intention and purpose. The problem is, as leaders, we think once we found those people box checked, it's like finding somebody with a driver's license because you need them to be able to drive as a part of their duties, they've got it. Unless something really startling happens, we're good well, that's not true of resilience. Lots of different things can poke a hole in the bottom of the resilience bucket, and it pours out without you or that person recognizing that that's going to happen. And when it does happen, leaders can end up feeling scammed, betrayed, or fraudulent themselves. Like, I thought I knew how to look for this, and I don't. When we start to recognize that it's a growth commodity. As leaders, we do two things differently. One, we look for opportunities to build and polish those skills in our people. And I can tell you what skills make up resilience and what we found in our research. But the other thing we do is when people are showing us less resilience, we start to look for a reason outside of our leadership skills and their character. Again, the ability to navigate change and the reflexes we have when change first comes along are not referendums on our leadership or on people's characters. They're about this chemistry and these skills.

I mean, that's a massive distinction difference for me, and I'm sure for many listeners, that's incredible. If we see that there are ways to grow that resilience for ourselves and for our team, what are those ways that we can help grow that commodity?

Okay, so I'll take a deep breath and summarize my most recent book. And about 90 seconds.

It turns out that when we looked into, just for example, we looked into the eight most scientifically respected resilience scales. There's the Brief Resilience scale and the Resilience Scale for adults. All these scales, and they ask, when you aggregate it, hundreds of questions. But really it's asking about these eight skills and a few traits for sure. And those traits are really helpful. Optimism, faith, sense of humor. But skills, skills we can grow. So that's where I put the bulk of my work is in what are these skills? And when I list them, and I'm going to, just because people's curiosity, when I list them, I want you to listen for things so that you think, oh, I feel really competent at that, or I recognize I'm not as competent as I would like at that one over there. Here they are. And they're not in any particular order, just the order I memorized them in, because you can choose any of them based on your own personality and the change you're facing, and it might be the correct one for that moment.

These skills are the ability to build connections.

To set boundaries.

To open to possibilities.

To manage discomfort.

Set goals.

Find options, take action, and persevere that's amazing. I feel like those last four kind of. Kind of hang together. But the truth is, setting a goal, taking action, finding options. It doesn't always make sense to set a goal. Sometimes you don't have to. The goal is really obvious. My car is going underwater, I need to get out. Right. My goal is to breathe air. But finding options might be really useful in that moment. Or taking action, really useful. Persevering, really useful in that moment. Whereas opening to possibilities, not so useful in that moment. Right. There's really two options. One is not compatible with life. So we're going with the only option, which is to get out. You can see that when my mom got a terminal diagnosis, setting goals wasn't really an option at that time. Right. I could refine it. We had secondary goals. Comfort, peace, connection. But I couldn't set the goal I wanted to set for her to live. Managing discomfort. Super important, super important skill at that moment. We all have some amount, especially the people listening to this have some amount of each of those eight skills. But like any profile, they're going to be places we really excel. For example, if a lot of the leaders listening are entrepreneurial in spirit, even if you run a really big company, if you have that entrepreneurial spirit of like, what could I do? That's different, where could we be at the leading edge? Then you're probably great at opening to different possibilities. You're probably not a person who says, well, there's only one path to a decent future. Only one. You probably know that there are lots of ways, an idiom we use in the States a lot. Lots of ways to skin a cat.

Yeah.

It's a very strange idiom, but there it is.

We use it too.

Yeah. And I remember someone said, why would you ever want to skin a cat? And my child who hates cats said, why wouldn't you? Anyway.

So each of these skills comes to bear at different points, facing different changes in our different personality profiles. But when we talk about the ability to navigate change with intention and purpose, these are the eight skills we're talking about. And I've made my work in the last several years has really focused around first.

Activities, exercises, strategies that build those skills in us. And this is for the prevention time and the actively navigating time.

The bulk of the work that I do with organizations is in how we build these skills in our teams and how we help other people to navigate change that we're in the middle of. Because building these skills in our teams is preventative, we can't do it when we are in the midst of a change, that makes people feel really threatened. But there are strategies that we can use that help other people to get through that cycle. Two, they may still feel their loss, their distrust and their discomfort. We can't turn off their amygdala either, but we can help move them into choice and engagement and reunification.

That's seriously powerful. What I want to say about that is you've distilled it in such a way where I'm like, ah, I get this. And I can see the power in this. And as you went through those different skill sets, I was like, yep, yep. Oh, no, no, I struggle there. Yep. Oh, yeah. I could see different areas that I struggle and other areas where I just feel natural at. So one of those ones, recent ones that I've been building, the resilience muscle, and I guess I think of resilience as a muscle. I think it can be built or it can.

I like that analogy too.

Oh, good.

Yeah, I think it's just like it either gets stronger or it diminishes. And there's certain things we do. So boundary setting I'm okay at, but boundary enforcing, I'm not. So, like, that is something. In the last three months, I've had to make a couple of big calls that have been very difficult to make. And I've had to know that the other person is going to be disappointed. But I've done it so that it's not at the expense of my health, my time, my family. And it felt good at the end of it. But three months ago, six months ago, I would have said yes to it all. And yep, I'll be there. I'll do it.

You've pointed something so important out there, which is you can learn to set the boundary. Part of that skill is learning to accept the fallout of it. Yeah, it's the reaction to setting a boundary that can be even harder. And this is true on the personal level, when we say to our partner, I need to be in bed at 10, and I'm not telling you what time to go to bed. And I'm not saying I don't enjoy going to bed with you, but my life, my body, my brain works so much better if I'm in bed at 10, that most nights, that's going to be my goal. Saying that might sound difficult, frustrating or fearful.

But dealing with the other person's reaction to it, how they hear it, their loss and distrust and discomfort around that change, that is a key part of enforcing those boundaries. And you're not enforcing anything on them. But that's not how they hear it. They think, oh, could we die, though, right? Could this kill our marriage or our relationship? Will this mean that you're up for hours in the morning and we separate? Or does this mean that you are going to be out of the house before those mourning responsibilities have to get dealt with and more is going to fall on my plate? Or all that or distrust? Are you saying this because actually you just don't enjoy spending time with me anymore? You're not giving me your true reason. Is there something wrong with me? All that loss and distrust and discomfort splashes back on us, and you find yourself in what water parks call the splash zone. And that part, that. Standing in the splash zone and knowing that that part's not about you.

That can be the hardest part of boundaries.

You're so right, Dr. G. And that's the. In recent months, I have been comfortable standing in the splash zone. And that's the first time in my adult life where I've been like, that's cool. I can deal with this. I've made other decisions and set other boundaries, but I've been so horribly uncomfortable with the splash zone. But this time I was like, nope, bring it on. Like, I've done it in a thoughtful, respectful way. I've considered others, but I've also weighed everything up, and I feel, well, James.

You'Ve done it with intention and purpose. It aligns with something that is really, really crucial to you.

Yes, absolutely.

They're not arbitrary boundaries. They're boundaries to help you focus towards what your goals actually are. So that, I mean, somebody said to me, A patient said to me just a few weeks ago, and I wrote about it. I have a weekly email for folks that choose to get it. And I wrote about this. He said to me, hey, Doc, because a lot of my patients, I've been a family doctor for 20 years now, and.

They don't so much engage with Dr. G, the writer or the speaker or the consultant. They engage with Dr. G, their family doctor. He says, hey, Doc, I saw you on tv, and resilience, and that's cool and all, but what's the point of being resilient? We've been through so many hard things. I'd like to stop being resilient. What's the point? And it was such a good question. And I said to him, the point of resilience is getting the life you want. It's navigating change with the intention and purpose of having your life look more like the life you want. It's not about putting up with the drudgery. It's not even about bouncing back from difficulty. So you can face another difficulty. It's to kind of scoot your life continually towards more of the life that really aligns with your own purpose, your own priorities. And that's what I hear you saying. But I also want to point out, James, in this growth, commodity way that you may find, boy, I have really built my resilience, and I'm more resilient than I was six months ago in setting work boundaries. And then you might find somebody from your family of origin, a parent or a sibling, ask you for something that does not align with, with your boundaries, and yet you find it tremendously more difficult to set and enforce those boundaries. Because in that situation, your resilience drops some.

I love that. So it's like what you're making me appreciate here is that, you know what? I've built this resilience muscle in this specific area with this specific decision I made recently. But actually, that does not mean in another part of my life or another time or a different situation that I'm going to have that same level of resilience in terms of buying.

It will be better than it would have been. You will recognize that this is a boundary issue. You might not have recognized that a few years ago. You will recognize that you have a choice here to make about whether or not you're going to set that boundary and enforce it. But you might find you're back to six months ago fear about the splash zone. And that's probably because this person kicks your amygdala harder, because your brain feels like your survival is more connected to this person.

That's so, so awesome. I seriously, I'm just, like, applying these things, these concepts right now to experiences I've had or I know that are looming. They're coming up. So it's so good. So what's the opposite of resilience?

That's such a good question.

I think the opposite of the act of resilience is being stuck.

And I was really interested in our research. I swear to you, if you'd asked me beforehand, where do most people get stuck? Is it loss or distrust or discomfort? In 2018, when we were in the midst of this, I would have said loss. Grief is so hard, it's so unpredictable. It comes in these waves and it can splash up when you weren't expecting it. I think in 2020, 2021, I'd have said the hardest thing might be distrust, because I saw so many of my patients and so many people stuck in distrust. But the research shows that most of us get stuck in discomfort and they get stuck there mostly because. Well, I have a couple of theories about the why, and those are much harder to test scientifically. But when they get stuck in discomfort, they have lots of negative coping mechanisms to distract themselves. And when you use negative coping mechanisms, and by that I mean anything that's damaging to you or to your people, whether it's your colleagues or your clients or your family, anything that uses a coping mechanism that's damaging really gets you stuck. You never get to get through to choice. If you use positive or neutral coping mechanisms, then it turns out you do get to choice positive coping mechanisms. Examples of those might be when you're uncomfortable, exercise.

Listening to music, creating art, petting your pet, hugging your people, talking to someone who's valuable to you and trustworthy. Neutral examples of coping mechanisms are they're time killers that take your brain somewhere else, like playing a tile matching game on your phone or surfing social media. But to be neutral, they have to be time limited. If you do them for 22 hours a day or all of your waking time, they become damaging, they become negative. Negative coping mechanisms are things that damage you, like substance abuse, like blowing up relationships, like blowing off work to your own detriment. I don't mean taking mental health day, I mean really like, you know, blowing up a client because you just never get to their stuff, things like that. And when people get stuck in discomfort, I mean, of those eight skills that I mentioned, if I could wave a magic wand and give one to the entire world, it would be the skill of managing discomfort with positive or neutral coping mechanisms. Because then we get to choice after that we get to or during that and we get to navigate towards our own intention and purpose. We get more of the life we want. But many people are so fearful of discomfort and have learned, and this is a little bit of my soapbox about my belief about why this is. We've given a lot of people the idea that if they are uncomfortable, they're unsafe and somebody should fix it for them.

That in and of itself is damaging because discomfort is the only place we grow.

So I mean, to me that is so spot on in that anything we've achieved that's asked us to grow to achieve it, we've never achieved that in our full comfort zone, ever. There's always been some form of discomfort to move towards that. And you talk about those coping mechanisms. So I didn't recognize these as coping Mechanisms, but certainly they were. So I started drinking probably around the age of 15. Alcohol, that is. And in Ireland that's maybe not unusual. It wasn't when I was a young lad and you could see over the top of the bar then you get served. But actually I look back to that and I was like, okay. Mom and dad were getting divorced when I was between 13 and 15. I was like, okay, yeah, maybe there was some form of like, this helps me escape. But than just overwork for me. I find that at times when I was struggling with the earthquakes and here in Christchurch, just being overly focused on work, getting up super early so I could be the first person up in the city, like 4am, wake up, I want to be up before everyone.

Just kind of self sacrificing. So two, three years ago, my partner says, look, I'm going to do one year, no beer. I was like, well, good luck with that, that sounds horrible.

Tell me more about that. And she's like, well, it's one year of no alcohol and it's a challenge. And I was like, okay. So the next morning I woke up, I was like, you know what, I'm going to give it a go to. I keep justifying these couple of drinks I have every day. Like it's normal, everybody does it, but it's not, it's escapism. So I went on the one year no beer challenge. I'm like two and a half, three years in and I'm a different person. I think differently. I feel like I can cope better certainly and that I can concentrate better, that my emotional responses have changed. So with those negative coping mechanisms, one, how do you feel we can actually become aware that a mechanism that we have is negative? Because sometimes we justify it as no. Alcohol is like a stress reliever, right? So how do we actually label it, identify it and become aware that hey, this is not healthy?

The first thing is, this doesn't. You're asking how do we get the insight? And the first thing we have to have is not insight, it's courage. Courage to ask ourselves, how are my coping mechanisms? What are my coping mechanisms? Is there any damage here that I could be avoiding? And that takes a tremendous amount of courage because in medicine we always say, don't do a test or ask a question unless you might do something with the answer. And I think that makes sense. This is not a question people want to ask because, well then do I need to do something with the answer? If you have the courage, I would suggest, and this is an exercise actually that I do with people a lot. I ask them to make a private list. Meaning you're going to rip this up or burn it. Nobody else is ever going to see this. I'm not going to ask to see it. I'm not going to ask you to show it to anyone. This isn't just hipaa, which is our American law about privacy between a doctor and a patient. This is entirely private. And I want you to make a list of every coping mechanism you can think of that you have. Every single one. Without judging it, just write down the whole list. And it might be reading billboards that are near your home out the window. And it might be calling your sibling, your adult sibling, to pick a fight. And it might be yelling at the television when there's a terrible call on your favorite rugby match. And it might. I mean, every single thing. Opening up the refrigerator and just staring at the contents and every single thing you can think of that you do to distract yourself when you don't like how you're feeling. Distraction is not inherently dangerous or damaging. Distraction is really useful. It can help us a lot manage discomfort. Have a minute to think about things. Often people, I'll remind people, and they'll be like, oh, yeah, sleep, shower, check my phone, put something away, clear a counter. Like, this would be. If you really did a full inventory, it'd be a very long list. And some of them you would do once a year. And some of them you would do 78 times a day. Whatever. Once you've made that list, I would ask you to lock it in a really secure place and step away from it. Forget about it for a few days. Come back to it when you're feeling really fresh, really comfortable, and ask yourself.

Which of these. And put a line through any of these that are damaging to you or someone else.

Ever damaging. And those are the ones where you're like, okay, well, you don't feel terrible admitting, like, picking a fight with my sister? Probably not. Awesome.

But then I ask you, which of them would you be happy to pass on to a mentor, a mentee to someone that you mentor as a suggestion for how they should manage their coping? So would you have, the day before you agreed to do the one year no beer, would you have recommended to someone you mentored, not just a colleague, but someone you felt a little bit of responsibility towards? Would you have suggested to them that they have a couple of drinks a day when they were feeling uncomfortable?

Absolutely not. That's like, you know, I think I would be like, no, it's a bad idea. Don't do that.

Right. That's one of the ways we often take better care of our people than we do of ourselves. So to get that insight, it's really hard to look at our behavior, that we're totally functional. And also, I want to say not every drink is a danger.

But you know, only you know if you're using. If it gets bad enough, your people know too. But in general, you know first if you're using something as a coping mechanism as opposed to an occasional hobby. And a good litmus test is when I think about my adult child or my mentee or my assistant, would I tell them I do this, and would I recommend that they try it? And if the answer to either of those questions is no, then I want you to consider one week without it. And just note. Just be a scientist for a minute. Just note any changes.

That's amazing. And for the person that has an addiction to this behavior, whether it's alcohol or whether it's phone checking, is there any neuroscience behind how we can reinstall that? You have any advice you have around uninstalling and reinstalling?

There are amazing scientists and researchers and experts in addiction medicine. And the first thing I would ask you to do, as with any change you try to navigate, is have empathy for yourself. That this is hard. It's hard. I had a patient of mine who's a smoker, and I'm really honest with smokers. They're in there to see me about their ankle sprain, and I will just be like, hey, by the way, smoking still bad for you? Because.

I won't give up on the possibility that they'll navigate this change successfully at some point. And I had a patient say to me, doc, Doc, you gotta tell me to stop telling me to quit smoking. I quit smoking 19 times every day.

Smokes, pack of cigarettes, which is 20 cigarettes every day. And he said, between my first cigarette and my last cigarette of the day, every single time I quit, it reminded me. It really drove home for me. I had another patient who came to see me very first visit, and she was morbidly obese. And before I could even get into any sort of preventive medicine or health, she said to me, hey, doc, before we really get started, I know you're going to talk to me about my weight. And she said, and that's fine. I don't think I would think you're a very good doctor if you didn't mention my weight. But I got to tell you, please don't try to.

And she put it in a really smart way. She said, please don't empower me with knowledge. She said, I'm so empowered, I could probably pass the nutritionist licensing exam. She said, I'm plenty empowered with education, but if you could make me more effective, that would be useful.

Wow.

There's such an important gap between being empowered with information and being effective in navigating a change. Please don't think if you were smart enough, strong enough that you would just know how to do that. It's incredibly difficult to navigate behavior change. You can't do it alone. It would be like saying, I've decided to be an Olympic athlete. No coach needed.

Yeah, we'd never even consider that, right?

Absolutely.

Get the support you need. If you notice that you have a behavior that it would be much healthier for you to change and you're not succeeding in changing it alone. I mean, James, please know the fact that you went from what you are implying was a crutch behavior, something that you did to handle difficult feelings, and you stopped with just the support of your partner and your own willpower, that's incredibly unusual. Most people cannot do that because of the chemistry that you're talking about. Not because most people aren't strong enough or most people aren't motivated enough, because this is about brain chemistry and they need support, they need professional help. They might benefit from medicine, they might benefit from acupuncture, they might benefit from mindfulness techniques. There's a million different strategies. But just deciding is not enough for most people to effectively remove a crutch behavior.

That makes sense. And I guess I tried things with alcohol before to try and minimize diminish stop. And it didn't work. But probably the one thing that did help was just writing a list before I stopped. Just a list. Why do I actually want to stop? And so I thought, okay, let's fast forward like 20 years. Will I be in a good, healthy spot? Fast forward 40 years. Will I be able to run around with my grandchildren if I'm lucky enough to have them? What's it going to look like at the end of life? If I continue to drink alcohol the way I do, will I have, you know, pretty horrific end and it's my fault. So I started doing all the long term things and then I got, okay, let's get vanity. Okay, Carrying the extra weight, you know, feeling sluggish, being short with people, you know, in terms of temper.

So less athletic than you picture yourself, right?

Totally. 100% totally. I got all the vanity in there and then I looked at the long term and combined them. I thought, okay, this is really not worth it. So I started reading that every day and started just kind of visualizing the future of what it would look like if I continued with my old habit and then visualize what it looked like with the new. And that helped a lot. So, yeah, I don't know. I'm two and a half years in, But I'll say this doctor gave. I'm not going to say no to alcohol. If people say, will you never drink again? I'm like, it's not punishment. It's not like white knuckle. If the occasion comes along and there's a reason for it and it's appropriate, cool. But I'm never going back to drinking it every day. That's just not something I'm willing to do. But it's not a no forever.

And for some people, that's totally possible. And for some people, that is not a safe plan. And that's not because some people are weak. That really has to do with genetics and environment and chemistry and a whole bunch of things that we only are starting to understand. So if you are thinking, boy, if I was just cooler. If you're listening to this and thinking, if I was just cooler, stronger, or smarter like James is, and think less of yourself for your own struggles with whatever your addiction is, that's not reasonable. That's like somebody who has diabetes saying, boy, if I was just smarter or stronger, I could eat an ice cream sundae. Nope. Chemically speaking, that's just not true for everyone. When we have to navigate change and to bring this back to leadership, it's so easy to look at someone else. Like, I would be nervous if I worked for you and I was struggling to quit alcohol. I'd think, boy, I can't ever talk to James about this because he was just strong enough to do it. And as a leader, it would be really tempting for you to think, well, I did it. Why can't they just, like, why is this a thing? They recognize why it's bad for them. Them. They've verbalized the things they want to be better. Just do it. And so leaders really need to lean hard into empathy. And.

One more myth I want to bust while we're talking today is this idea we have in our society that if you are a decent person, expressing empathy comes easily to you. And that's not true. There are actually seven cognitive barriers to effectively expressing empathy.

That have nothing to do with if you're nice enough or you really understand what the other person is going through. Empathy is complicated, but there is a simple hack for six of those seven cognitive barriers that I'd love to leave people with. And that is all you have to be able to say authentically is you matter. So I care about what you're going through.

That's beautiful. Thank you for sharing that. And yeah, you're absolutely right. Anybody that's got challenges, addictions, which we've all got different challenges, please reach out and get the support that you need at the level you need it. And in any way that we can support here on the show, please do reach out. Dr. G, you're simply incredible. And I feel this is not our last conversation for sure.

Oh, wonderful.

Yeah, this is amazing. And a couple of things. I'm going to put a link to your book in the show notes. And so for the listener who's listened, who wants to understand resilience, build resilience, share resilience, please buy the book. I know that you're listening on your phone right now, most likely. So go and get it. Go straight to Amazon and grab a copy. And I'll also put a link to the download you'd mentioned from your site as well, which would be.

And there's a two minute video on there to explain it.

Okay.

So if you're like, well, I won't remember what she said. Of course you won't. No one would. So there's a two minute video to explain the, the cycle. And one of the things you can do is download it and I explain on there, you can use it as a very quick exercise or a game with your family to figure out where everyone is about a particular change that you're navigating right now.

Thank you. I really appreciate you sharing that tool with us. Dr. G, just before we do wrap up, I've got one last question. If we were to fast forward way into the future, it was your last day. In fact, it was your last few minutes. And you've been told you have a few minutes and someone very young in your life, so someone you care dearly about, maybe a grandchild, says to you, how can I go through my life and lead it on purpose? What advice would you have for them.

To keep figuring out who they really mean to be in the world and gently realigning their course to be aiming for that.

Amazing. Thank you. I'm going to clip that. I'm going to send it to you. And for those young people in your life, make sure you save it somewhere for them.

I will for sure. I have four sons who are 14 up to 20. So I'm sure they'll be really excited to take this in right now.

Not.

I love it. Oh, you're amazing. Well, I've got one little boy who is 6, and he is just a delight, so I can only imagine the delight, but also the challenge that comes with having four.

I got to say, I mean, don't tell anybody, but it gets better every year. Teenagers are actually a blast.

You are amazing. What a great mom. I love it. Well, Dr. G, thank you so much for taking the time to share your wisdom. I know people will have got so much from this and I will put all the show links so people can come and connect with you directly.

I would love that. Thank you so much for having me, James.

Thank you.

Thanks for tuning in today and investing in your own personal leadership. Please hit that subscribe button. And I'd love if you'd leave me a rating and review. I've got some amazing guests lined up for you in the coming weeks. And leaders, it's that time to get out there and lead your life on purpose.