Resilience Redefined | Marie-Hélène Pelletier | 559

Peter Winick.

A thought leadership idea that seems simple and easy to you may seem difficult or even impossible to someone who encounters your ideas for the very first time. So how do you simplify an idea and encourage people to take their first steps towards making change real? Well, that work is at the heart of thought leadership. Today I sit down with Dr. Marie-Hélène Pelletier, who is the author of The Resilience Plan: A Strategic Approach to Optimizing Your Work Performance and Mental Health. In today's episode, we'll explore distilling ideas, encouraging action, and creating impact. I'll also speak with Dr. Pelletier about her multidisciplinary approach and how it impacts her thought leadership work. I'm Bill Sherman, and you're listening to Leveraging Thought Leadership. Ready? Let's begin. Welcome to the show, Maria Hlin.

Thank you, Bill. Pleasure to be here.

It is an exciting conversation that I'm looking forward to, specifically not only on the topic of resilience as it relates to individuals, but also the intersection of resilience with the work of thought leadership because I think there's a beautiful overlap of what it takes to get an idea out into the world.

Yes, agreed.

So my first question for you is, how did you come to the theme of resilience? How did this build from your areas of interest and work?

It came from a number of directions. In my— I mean, certainly coming from psychology on that lens, what's wonderful with resilience is that there's a strong proactive opportunity so that you can catch things earlier, influence them earlier, which is something I've always been passionate about in various ways in my work. So there's that. It's also a term that tends to resonate well with a lot of people I work with in my executive coaching and speaking. Who tend to be high performers, professionals, leaders, entrepreneurs, and that's a term that they tend to connect with really well. So yeah, these are some of the forces that brought me to, yes, resilience is a, a useful focus.

You mentioned your audience here. So I think from an executive coaching perspective, it's easier for, for someone to say, hmm, I need to figure out resilience, or I need more resilience, than it is to say, I'm struggling, and I'm worrying about being able to carry forward at this pace or handle these problems, right? And so that first step of getting someone to identify with your topic is a huge one. How do you do that? How do you— get people to lean in and say, tell me more?

Yes. I think it's coming from this audience of high-performing individuals' knowledge, like constant quest to find their edge or the next edge, the next thing that can allow them to bring even more of what they love to bring in their particular area. And it's probably even more connection now, possibly more than ever, possibly in part with the pandemic that we've gone through, possibly more with artificial intelligence coming, uh, in our lives, personal and professional, and therefore making us look even more at what's my human contribution versus an artificial intelligence contribution. So it comes in different ways, but ultimately, it often lands on some version of, that's your edge.

That leads to an interesting question. Is resilience a skill, a strategy? I know the title of the book leans in on plans, so— or is it even a trait from personality? So let me throw that question to you. Is it something we're born good at? Is it something we develop over time? How have you seen that, and where do people respond?

Yes, so it is not a personality trait. We tend sometimes to think of it this way. It's actually a trap, uh, if we do, because if we think it's innate in us as part of our personality, then of course there's no reason to actively nourish it or invest in it, right? And that's when we're actually even more at risk. But we know from research that no, no, It's not a personality trait. It is influenced by personality.

I could see it tied to emotional stability, for example, right?

Yes, connected with emotional intelligence, uh, emotional stability. Yes, it's connected with openness also. So the more we're optimistic, um, the more we may tend to be more resilient. But our resilience, the reality is that it's not a personality trait, so therefore it will fluctuate. In time, um, and therefore it is something we can influence. And that's, uh, where I'm coming in and saying we need to be strategic about it, the same way we're strategic about any important goal we have, say, in our business— launching a new product, launching a new service. So these same approaches work very well for us to look at our resilience on the personal level.

And there's an intersection there that you just presented that I want to call out. One is the academic side. What does the research, what does the literature say on resilience? What do people need to do to be successful? But often that information gets trapped in an academic journal versus the poor practitioner who's out there running a business or they're in the organization somewhere and they just feel the weight of the world on them. And so there's this researcher-practitioner-end-user divide.

Yes.

That often happens.

There is. And you know what gets trapped also? So yes, I agree, some information gets trapped in, in the journal. That's one. But also what happens is whatever is written in that journal most of the time does not also take into account the context that we may be in here, where that particular thought leader, individual in charge of a team, in charge of an organization, or whatever. And that context is extremely important. You can have the most wonderful recommendations here in the academic literature, valid, supported, solid, yes. And you've got you and I here trying to, knowing at times actually this information, but feeling so stuck in how do we actually bring this in the reality of our context. So these are two pieces that need to translate.

Well, and as you mentioned that, I think about the challenge of recruiting populations for research, right? And so how so much research literature is based on university students because they're an accessible population. Whereas if you talk about context for you or I or anyone else who's further along in their career, the stressors that we have are not the stressors that a typical undergraduate in their early 20s face.

That's right. So very different stressors. And there are, there is also research about these types of stressors. Even then, so even if we know and understand, let's say, the stressors that are more particular to people in more senior leadership roles and all this, also very helpful, and we do have some good, good knowledge there. Ultimately, here we need to digest all this in a way that allows us in an extremely busy and demanding schedule. How do we make this happen? And that's where in my work with professionals and leaders, I started saying, you know what, we're gonna use the same approaches we're using in strategy and business because that makes sense to, to you. It's also useful in a practical way and allows us to lend these observations, recommendations, more clarity on what stressors you may be facing, All of this allows us to bring it in a way that then we can use to make a difference for ourselves and people around us.

So I hear multiple hats that you're wearing, right? At the same time, I'm hearing an academic and a clinical hat. I'm also then hearing sort of the executive coach or business consultant hat, but sort of reassuring of I can speak your language, right? Rather than forcing your audience to try to understand your language, right?

And also the hat of having been in those senior management role. In fact, all of the levels of management roles, junior, like managing a call center, it's like getting into a fire every single day. Middle management, it's truly, it is middle management, uh, where you've got people in your responsibility, but you're managing up to, and then the most senior levels as well. So, mm-hmm, understand that. Yes.

So talk a little bit about your journey in thought leadership and how did you get to this point yourself? When did you cross into the world of thought leadership and what were the key points where you had aha and going, oh, this is something I'm actually doing?

Yes, it often in the various points at which it has occurred for me, they tended to appear seriously. I was following my nose. I was following what seemed to be missing. I think it probably happened because I had training in my case. Sometimes it comes from just reading people have or other experiences they have. In my case, I did go to school quite a bit, and so it was combining sometimes some of those, uh, ideas together. And that's when I'd look at this and say, oh, here's the next thing that could happen. Seriously, it probably felt to me like what sometimes artists describe when they emerge with something that comes from a number of ideas, expositions, and different things prior. It incubate and at some point comes out. That's probably how it happened for me. It was not a deliberate intention to be that or do that or made that happen. Nope, it just, um, was there.

So you are at a point where, as we're recording now, the book just launched less than a month ago, right? And so your book, The Resilience Plan, is out, it's being in the world. We were talking about the reviews coming in. Talk to me about the journey itself from knowing what you want to write on to getting the book out into the world?

Interesting journey that required me to use some of the things I talk about in the book, for sure.

How so?

Yeah, because, um, a number of ways in which we can proactively and strategically plan to increase our resilience is having a realistic read on the sources of supply, where energy comes from, and sources of demands, where things that demand your energy are. And this being my first and probably only book, I didn't have book writing specific experience. And so there was a lot of conversations with as many people as I could on figuring out how long could this take me, how, how does one protect enough time to do this, and then realizing, okay, it's significant, and therefore some things need to be taken out of my schedule. It's not like, you know, how do you fit this in? Well, I did not fit this in. I changed the whole thing so that there would be a space for it. And all that, just that, the planning required for this to happen in a context where, like you and, and others, it's not like, you know, your work is a one-time action with, say, a particular client. Often it has multiple, multiple touch points. And so getting to a point where a space is created takes a bit of lead time, really. Uh, so yeah, so that, that was, uh, one of the things. Um, many discoveries, wonderful ones along the way, like, uh, the writing community, which did not even cross my mind existed and would be as rich and, and supportive and one for me to support as well. Wonderful to discover this. But what I think helped the most was in my, for me particularly in this case, was being realistic about the demand that this would be as much as I could. Of course, you can't plan for everything. And then creating the space. And I'm glad I did. And I also created the supports around me. Also glad I had that.

So I want to ask a question on behalf of our listeners here, many whom are practicing thought leadership either for themselves independently or on behalf of an organization where they work inside a larger organization. My question is this: if I practice thought leadership, what should I know about resilience that will help me practice thought leadership better? So what can I take from your expertise to become better at practicing thought leadership?

To be good at practicing thought leadership, you need to be very creative, intellectually bringing ideas together and giving them your voice or a different angle or something like this. There are elements of just what I'll call for now intellectual creativity. And therefore, for the brain to be available to do this, you need to have taken care of creating that availability. I'm using this word right now in a broad way, not just in a time and space way, but in having the energy to do this. And so given that resilience has many definitions, the one I use mostly is our ability to go through adversity and come out even stronger. And given that all of us, regardless of, say, our particular role right now, we have demands in all areas of our lives—personal, professional. Some demands we're really excited to have. They're still demands. Some areas we'd rather not have. Peter Winick. And so the more you build your resilience, it's almost like you're increasing your baseline in a number of ways, and such that when these events come, you'll be able to navigate them, grow, uh, come out even stronger. And with this, what this means is you'll have more availability— coming back to this word— for the creativity you need to have. If you don't, your, your resilience is much lower, then your resources are going to dealing with all the and all this, there is not much left to be creative over here.

You spend more time firefighting on demands rather than being— performing at your best or having time to think or to sharpen an idea or communicate it well.

Firefighting and going on empty on, on those demands. So not only you're firefighting, but okay, I still have some leftover to be fabulously creative later this afternoon. No, you're fighting these things, you deplete, and so you sit down to try to do something, you can't even focus.

And so, and that's how you wind up binge-watching on Netflix or doing whatever you do just to sort of recover some energy.

Then that's right. Yet if you had a resilience plan and notice you needed to recover, maybe the plan needs to be adjusted such that in a moment of feeling drained like this, maybe instead we turn you to a meditation, which may be a better recovery for your brain, better preparation for being creative than Netflix, which I know it's always there for us, but, uh, it's not always the best option.

Right, right. It's sort of like potato chips in some ways. We know they're not healthy, but they still have appealing characteristics.

Yes, I, I agree with that.

If you're enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you'd like to help spread the word about our podcast, please leave a 5-star review at ratethispodcast.com/LTL and share it with your friends. We're available on Apple Podcasts and on all major listening apps, as well as thoughtleadershipleverage.com/podcast. So You seem to have put your own IP to use as you were tackling the book project. And you said, "Look, I know I don't have the reserves to just add this to my plate. What comes off?" Talk to me about the process of applying your own insights with you as the mentee or, you know, the person that you're coaching? Because you almost have to wear two hats simultaneously, right? Yes, yes.

Um, I'm used to doing this because even, say, in other areas of my work, one of the things that will make— so I still have a small practice as a registered psychologist. Part of what makes a psychologist, but that's also true on the leadership front, completely different, but part of also what will make a leader even more influential and effective is that degree of authenticity. Are you walking your talk, right? So I've always, um, challenged myself to do this at times with success, at times realizing, wow, look at that, walking that talk is easier said than done over here. And that's also how it has felt here. So it has felt very aligned to look at implementing the same things I would encourage someone else to do. It has felt in some ways fabulous because the intention behind implementing this process is to lead to positive outcomes, and it did. So yay, thankfully. It worked, Bill. Right, right.

Yeah, it's amazing when you follow your own recommendations, right?

And yes, and they work, so yay for that. But yeah, but more seriously, so that— but there was this aspect that's true, and also realizing that it does require some deliberate attention, which is true from, for, you know, anything new we want in life, really. So combination.

I want to underline here the importance of being able to turn inward and to look at yourself and what you were talking about, that ability to not only just have the theory and say, oh, this is good for others, but let me use myself as my own test case. Does this help me? Where do I struggle? Now, you can't generalize from a population of one, but at the same time, it's absolutely essential for you to do that deep thinking and digesting through. And then, like you said, whether you're doing clinical practice as a psychologist or you're doing executive coaching, that allows you to increase the sample size and see where do people thrive, where did they struggle with these concepts, and what did you think was easy for you, where then they scratch their heads and say, but I don't get it. Or I'm struggling here, right? That process of refinement of the idea begins within, I think, first and foremost.

It has to come. I, I agree, uh, it definitely has to come from that part of it. In this case, for me, in the book, there were also focus groups where, you know, we tried with many of the people, and it's all research-based anyway. So there's other data points thankfully behind. At the same time, ultimately you can have all these data points behind, to your point. If it's not coming from here, then the communication of it and the, the authenticity with which you bring it forward will, will just not have the same, the same level. That's just a fact.

Well, yeah, you could write a book which could be a summary of the literature. But not be reflective of your journey, your purpose, the work that you've done either inward or helping others. And that's going to be a much more sterile, I would say, book. Rather, it might be empirical, but it's sterile.

Yes. And in my case, would not have connected as much with the leaders and the professionals here that I—

And that goes back to your audience. Yeah. Absolutely. If your audience of leaders is not sitting down and saying, what journal articles should I read from applied psychology, for example? No, they're not.

They don't have time for this. Overloaded. And we need to get to the point.

Yes. Exactly. Give me something, maybe a one-pager or a summary that I can take, apply, and use now. Rather than stick me in the land of theory and complexity. I'm looking for a tool. I'm looking for a solution. And I think that hunger or appetite for help is often that first hurdle you have to cross with an audience that you can say, hey, here in 60 to 90 seconds, here's something that can help you. Yes. And it's worthy of more attention from you.

Yes. Yeah, no, absolutely agreed. Uh, so the book is in that sense very concise, and even the 9 chapters that, that are in there have summaries, they have reflection questions, so it can be used for ourselves in our own reflection or with others, or even as a, a way to skim it if, uh, right, right, someone wants to start with Yeah.

Well, and I think even the title, the Resilience Plan, signals that it's an approachable sort of thing. It's a tool that leaders are used to using. If you said the Resilience Model or Resilience Framework or something like that, you'd be speaking to a different audience, probably more theoretical and academic rather than I need a plan to put this in action today.

Exactly. Yes, that's all exactly that was part of The reflection, because I did consider many titles and, and ultimately what made me land on this one was not what MH feels like the title should be. It was what resonated. I've tested it. I've done all kinds of things to see what would connect. And so that's how I got there. So you're completely right.

Well, and in the old days, we would have asked the question of what book title would cause you when you're browsing at a bookstore to pull it off the shelf. Now it's the question of would you click on this if you're browsing through Amazon to actually read the description? The title is the first interaction touchpoint, and if you don't get that click, you've missed the, the opportunity for even a 30-second conversation. Yes, agreed. Wetting the details and testing that is huge. Absolutely huge. So I want to ask you a question based on your journey in thought leadership. Okay. And you've been on this journey for a while, but you made a comment and you said, this is my book. It may be my only book. Okay. First off, I want to unpack that. What is the— it's like, this is the definitive piece, or I don't have another book in me. What's the thought there?

Well, I, it's, um, I mean, we'll see. Of course, the door is not closed, um, so it can change. There is flexibility there still. Having seen the years of investment, um, to get here and the choices that therefore I had to make for it to happen, now these things that I've put in parenthesis for these years, I really want to bring them back in now. And I don't think I will want to put them in parentheses again anytime soon. So that's in part what makes me look at this and say, and you know, I very much enjoyed one big challenges only once. One PhD, one marathon, one child. And I'm thinking this may very well be one book. So we'll see how, how it goes. But that's sort of the, the positioning where I'm thinking right now.

And that makes a lot of sense in terms of allocation of resources and time and energy. It also, from a— if you think about the book as an asset, if you will, that you've created in the 60, 90 days of a book launch, which you're in now because you're only 30 days in on the book, this should be an asset for you for 5, 7 years at least that you can recoup some of the time, energy, and effort that you put in. This should be on the harvesting side rather than the, hey, let's jump to create the next book and leave this one behind.

Yes, yes, that makes sense from that perspective as well.

So let's flash forward a year. If you were to define success on the book, what would it be, either from doors opened or other pieces. What are you thinking about success?

Yes. So first, for the book itself, I hope it just brings even more people to really think strategically, talk strategically, and act strategically about their resilience so they can have it for themselves and also even help others do the same thing. The book itself, I guess you're asking also from my perspective, what I— yeah, yeah. The book, the thought leadership, the whole body of work.

The whole thing.

So from the book perspective, some of that, I think it will hopefully enhance even more the trust that some groups that would have taken more time to trust bringing, you know, this kind of expertise into their teams or for themselves, trust it even more, enhance that, perhaps increase also some of the work I do on the executive coaching and the speak— speaking side of things. And, you know, yes, opening doors also, which in my experience, when I think of that, it often means opening doors I did not even see. And that's in part what's exciting. I think it's the same thing that happens at times in thought leadership where you don't know yet what is the next door you're going to open as you carry on. And it feels that way, uh, in that sense, already feels like this. Even the fact that I'm having this conversation with you today, had the book not been there, would probably not have had that. And from my perspective, how amazing is this?

So just looking forward to all of this. Fantastic. So my last question, MH, is what advice would you give your younger self regarding thought leadership? So knowing what you know now, what would you whisper back to yourself in the past?

I probably would say, trust it even more, keep going, and have fun. Because there were times where it was interesting and all, and but there was a lot of, um, really? Uh, and, uh, so I'm making faces here, but if, if I could add these pieces of advice, I would.

I think a lot of work of getting the idea out there and repeating it again and again, you've got to remember to have those moments of fun and joy. Because if you're speaking to the same topic again and again, especially at an introductory level, you could easily just go through the motions. Having fun is also a way of reminding yourself, be present. Yeah, make it fresh, because for your audience, this may be the time that they encounter that idea for the first time. And if you're present, they're more likely to receive the message.

Exactly. It's important to reconnect— if that's to stay connected or reconnect with the energy, the excitement that brought you originally to this topic. Sometimes we need to actively nourish that. Sometimes it's there on its own and it's fantastic. But yeah, if you work on something for a long period of time, maybe you need to find that flame again. And, and, and it does, it does translate in, in conversations, in the work you do. And so it's worth investing in and not, yeah, absolutely not just going through the motions because that is unlikely to be inspiring to anyone really.

Exactly. Exactly. So, MH, I want to thank you for joining us today for a fantastic conversation around thought leadership and resilience.

Thank you, Bill. Yeah, it was great.

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