Are You Resilient?

This is the No Ego Podcast, where we ditch the drama, end entitlement, and transform your world place. I'm Sy Wakeman. Welcome to another episode of the No Ego Podcast. If you're watching this on video, you can see my location has changed. After 3 months in Mexico, I am back in Waterloo, Nebraska. In my home, and boy, it's wonderful to be back in the United States and to be connecting with all of you in this format. So today I'm flying solo, and my topic is resilience. I'm getting so many calls for training and development experiences that people want to offer virtually for their teams on resilience— building resilience in individuals, building resilience in teams— and people are hearing me talk a lot about readiness, which is what the organization needs to cultivate in order to be able to respond to disruption. And resilience is the individual response to disruption. And how can we develop resilience in ourselves? What even is resilience? And so I've done a few podcasts, I've answered a few questions, I've hinted at a bit of our work on resilience, but today I wanted to just have a conversation around the edges of resilience and give you what I'm looking at from our research in terms of accountability and what an important factor resilience really is when we're thinking about the ability to deliver results in really extraordinary circumstances, which is what accountability basically comes to be when it's valuable. That's the value of accountability, right, is that in spite of our circumstances, we can count on people's ability to meet the needs of patients and clients and customers and their team members. And so I have been getting such great questions on the few posts we've been putting out in regards to resiliency. So before I even get into this topic, I want to center us and give us a few caveats on this topic. So I'll just put it frankly: do not weaponize resilience. We've tended to weaponize so many other things in our organizations where we take a concept or a post on Instagram or a Facebook thought or idea, and we use that from a place of ego to try and control or manipulate or shame or guilt another person. And In people's fear, in people's concern about the many things that have come into our vision as of late. And I say come into our vision because these things already existed. Police brutality existed. It's just coming into some of our vision. Disruption and the threat of a pandemic or pandemics existed they just have come into this generation's vision. So the first thing I would say is that if something is first coming into your vision, know that you probably have zero expertise on the topic and should be working on yourself first rather than spouting any advice for others. It is so easy to want to get quickly into the, oh, I know, and grab a post and use it to supposedly call people up to greatness, and that's not the case. If something is new in your vision, you need to do some deep work around existing with that new view of the world for a while before you move into trying to help others adapt to their view of this world. So as a leader, a whole lot of us are in some spots of what we call beginner's mind, which is the most fabulous place to be. And if you're in that spot You don't need to lead with, I know, or the answer is, or even Sy Wakeman says. Lead with, I'm creating space for myself to be with this for a while. And if you don't know what to do with your teams, create space for your teams to be with this for a while and to share from their experience in very clean ways. This is what I'm experiencing. This is what I I'm discovering, this is what I'm wondering, and allow everyone to have room to share their own present moment with these things that have newly come into vision. So a lot of leaders are asking me, like, how do I handle what's happening in race relations and protests and the call for inclusivity and diversity in a very urgent way in my workplace? And I I've been hesitant to come forward with, here's the checklist of how to have a good conversation. And instead, what I'm encouraging people to do is creating space for us to all be with this and for us to be able to share from our own experiences. Because I absolutely believe if people can get in the present moment and they can get to a beginner's mindset beyond ego, and they can get to a place of focusing more on what they don't know and simply what they're experiencing and share that, that beyond ego, no ego resiliency for the team is when we can all come to a place where we're fully present with the moment and making room for all of it. I have absolute faith that that is the moment that together everyone's genius and They will know what to do if they're coming together as evolved selves in the present moment. More on that, that's kind of woo-woo. But I want to just make sure that you're mindful of not weaponizing the call for resilience. And one of the ways we can weaponize the call for resilience is that we have this flawed view of what resilience is. Like, resilience is the ability to show up to work regardless of what's going on in your life, or to deliver in spite of the circumstances. And that's not quite it. Mm-hmm. Resiliency isn't about your ability to, like, spiritually or emotionally bypass something. It's not your ability to deny and therefore perform. It's not even really a performance metric as much as it is a competency of how we come to deliver. And a lot of resiliency is done knowing and being in touch with our reality and being able then to be responsible to what I'm experiencing and moving forward and delivering within that, rather than denying what I'm experiencing or delivering. And the perfect example of this is where resiliency gets weaponized, is when we tell people who are experiencing anxiety either as a feeling or as a state or as mental health challenge that they're working through right now. Because when we use the word anxiety, we use it so ambiguously. We can use it as, I'm feeling anxious, which is a feeling like some fear mixed in with stress, or I am anxious, which is right now I am responding to the world with a lot of free-flowing anxiety that I'm not yet using mental processes to respond to and recenter myself, up to and including many folks have trauma that's being triggered. Many folks are truly in a state that it's considered a mental health challenge where they have a condition of anxiety, some type of diagnosable, although maybe situational disorder. Use disorder not as a label, but just the, the description that something's out of order, it's in disorder, and that they're working to retain balance that isn't going to be handled maybe with just a few techniques and strategies. Long explanation, but as people are experiencing anxiety, it is not empathetic to be like, you know, girl, get resilient. step it up. Resilience looks different in many different people. If I'm in a state of pretty chronic anxiety, resilience may look like showing up today to the video call. That may have taken more resilience than you may know. For some of us, resilience where we've had some really great habits and practices and we aren't subject to some of the same brain chemistry and we haven't had some of the trauma in our life, or we've been able to work in that trauma and find ways to be resilient given that trauma. Just know that while we aren't in the business of lowering the standard— we need to keep the standard high— we need to up the support and engage in honest conversation that sometimes resiliency isn't going from 1 to 10, it's helping people go from 1 to 2 or 3 to 7. And I say this not because I I want you to stop fostering accountability. Part of accountability is being accountable for acknowledging where I am, what I can deliver, and tapping into the resources available to me to be responsible to improving that over time. Doesn't let me off the hook, but it lets me lead with an honest piece of information for my team to know what that's like for me. And And then not accept it as my sentence or my future status, but to acknowledge where I'm at, and then through accountability, have the ability to account for what I'm not tending to, and then the ability to respond differently, to make plans to increase this going forward. So that caveat, I just want to make sure that we're thinking about. And it was so important to me, I even took some notes because Any advice that we give online, I want people to filter that advice or that quote. I want people to filter that through their current state of mental health and their current state of socioeconomic status or their current state of activation, whatever that is. Because as I said, anxiety can be a feeling, a larger sense, or even you know. A response or a larger condition. And those all fall under the, the term we all use for anxiety. And so what I'm trying to do is to give everyone strategies to respond to anxiety in the midst of your influences, to move beyond the feelings of anxiousness, whether in the moment or ongoing, and To really move beyond that, given your needs, find those strategies that can help you when you feel like you're gonna disengage, to find ways to plug and play. So resilience is really the ability to overcome the human urge of disengagement— fight or flight or freeze or others— and to be able to find a way to rejoin or replug into the common team working on resolving what's going forward. And resiliency keeps your data points into the great crowdsource. It keeps the gifts that you have able to be continually offered to the solution we're trying to create. And, you know, I've worked with those that are in the midst of some anxiety disorders, as I've said, when I was working as a counselor. And I encourage people just to filter any messages about how to cope through your own judgment of what works for you and what toolkit you're building going forward. So this is a place, leaders, for a big and. I'm gonna call you to greatness. I'm going to use and mine this current experience to develop resiliency, my own and others. I'm not gonna waste what's going on because the best growth comes from being grown by what's happening in our world and to us. That's really the almost forced growth, like enforced growth. And so I don't want you to lose out on this moment, but I want you to be in an and world where there isn't one simple answer. There is a vision, a direction, and some situations that you need to be working with people involved in those situations to move forward. So I really believe though that you can't opt out of resilience because you have anxiety in any one of those forms. In fact, as I said before, some people that have lived with some high levels of anxiety their entire life are probably some of the most resilient people I know. One of my own sons commented when I'm like, oh my gosh, I just kind of have racing thoughts, and I have this obsessive thought about needing mayonnaise when I can't go to the store. And I have to keep reminding myself whenever that ping— pings my brain that we're just not gonna do anything about missing mayonnaise right now. And I was just sharing with him what an odd sensation I was having, and he just kind of laughed on FaceTime and said, welcome to my world, only daily. So in one odd way, some of those folks who have some chronic anxiety conditions are going to be our best teachers about what they've used to cope, to even show up for us on a daily basis. So, you know, they are the meek right now, and they will definitely help us conquer the world. Um, I just think that it's vital for us to help all grow our competency of resilience given our current experience of the world so that we can bless the world With our gifts, including, you know, what we've learned from our own anxiety. So for those that are just feeling anxious, we can teach you good mental processes and techniques. Those who have kind of anxiety as more of a constant companion, you can find ways to enhance your self-care and your habits and your boundary setting or access treatment and get the support you need to find your own version of resilience. So we aren't responsible for our conditions. Many of those happen to us, but we need to be responsible to our path and our growth so that we can move more skillfully through this world, the next normal, the next normal, and the next normal. All of that said, please be kind to one another. I wore my XOXO shirt to send you lots of love. So let's get started on resiliency. So resiliency is the ability to stay the course in the midst of disruption, obstacles, barriers, unexpected things coming up. So when I was doing my work on accountability research, we were in the midst of a different crisis. It was a financial crisis, and many of the people I were interviewing at the time, we were looking at those who were able to still score high in accountability and keep their accountability score or state high regardless of what was happening year to year from 2008, '09, '10, '11, '12, right? So whatever was happening in those years. And then we revisited this in pretty normal times in 2016. And I want to share with you some of the themes that we pulled out of the research. And by the way, this month we're shooting a new online course about resiliency. It will take you through, from a personal standpoint, how to develop your own resiliency and grow that competency in yourself no matter where you start from. And it will help leaders and teams grow together and help grow each other's resiliency. Because if you want to move forward peacefully, happily, and successfully in a world that will have disruption— if you want to do that, you're gonna need to develop 2 things. You're gonna need to develop readiness as a business and And readiness involves things we've been resisting, like standardization and automation. Like, if you can standardize everything you can get your hands on, and you can even get things into a position of standardized— standardization plus machine learning, you can use standardization of processes and data collection as your friends to pick up on the smallest nuances of disruption, kind of the tremors before the big earthquake. You can use standardization, automation, and our friends, the computers and robots, that processing. You can use those to pick up on the tremors and then to help you quickly identify what has changed and where to go next. And this involves some real allegiance, I believe, to evidence and science and the willingness to not fear automation or robotics, but to embrace it and find a way that we ethically can dance with that, where we gain the benefit without giving up the free spirit and free will and independence. And so people don't often think about how to get ready, that it includes taking humans out of almost everything we can take humans out of, so that when disruption comes, it's the humans in their innovation and creativity and resilience that can step up and really do the high-value work of adaptation. So one of the things that I preach a lot about— we don't talk about change management. That's how to cope with the change after you weren't ready. It's not a ready state. It's to pick up the pieces when you get disrupted and figure it out and hopefully use your people. But it's overusing resilience and the effort of the people to somehow find a new normal. And that is just a formula for temporary adjustment and reverting back to what was old before the disruption and is even older now. And then it sets up power structures where we have to keep the unnatural in place and we have to resist change. And all of the issues we're having, I'm completely convinced, is because we have not, as organizations, as as educational systems, as a society maintained a state of readiness, and we focus too heavily on managing change once it's mandatory or once it comes. And it's very different work. So readiness is a big responsibility of the collective, whether it's the organization or the team. And it involves standardization, it involves risk mitigation with things like cross-training, it involves, for those of us in healthcare, drills And practice and maintaining high levels of skill sets we may never use in our lifetime. I am trained in advanced life support, and I've used it once when I was 16, but I've never used it since. I hope I don't have to, but I will refresh and take my refresher course often. I don't want to know how to deal with a scuba diving accident when maybe somebody with me runs out of oxygen, but I want to maintain my readiness so that on every dive it's fresh in my mind. And we oftentimes are so busy holding on to the past that we're not drilling people in what would be useful and able to be generalized for the future. In order to build readiness, we have to stop enabling people and trying to slow the world down, and we have to quit interfering with people's relationship with reality. So when we set a goal of 10% growth and the team achieves 9.5, and we go, you know, gosh, considering the circumstances, that was awesome, we feel that that enhances engagement. But what it does is it hurts resilience and it hampers Readiness. And we also don't need to beat the team up and go to extremes. We need to practice in our readiness finding comfort in things like the word and, and multiple things being true. And a key competency about readiness and resilience is the ability to maintain curiosity. Now, I would tell you that in this world of hustle, We harm ourselves in terms of resilience because we don't practice the, the declining part of any cycle. We don't practice a relationship with uncertainty because we are constantly seeking certainty. We don't practice a lot of relationship with our own stillness because we have this over value of our culture on don't be still, go hustle. I'll never forget a time when I was promoted to a VP position and we kind of lived in a glass hallway. We have all of these offices, but they were all glass front. And I was preparing for some strategic work, and I was just sitting in my office thinking. I had just read some Mind-blowing articles. I had listened to a voice message somebody had left me in the olden days about their work, and I was like kind of mind-blown sitting there going, this changes everything. And my CEO walked by, and he walked by and he backed up, and he looked at me, and he does this thing with his arms, and he goes, Wakeman, what are you doing? And I go, I guess I'm just sitting here thinking. He actually said, well, stop that and produce something, like get working. And so our readiness, our resilience is really hampered by the fact that we are really one-sided in what we're cultivating in ourselves individually and in our teams and in our world. If you look at anything in nature There are cycles it follows. Even in the desert, there's definitely day to night and seasons. Here in the Midwest, there's big-time seasons. The moon goes through a cycle, and while it's waxing and growing brighter and then waning, growing dimmer, we tend to really celebrate the upcycle and not really find a way to find relationship with the down cycle. And so when the pandemic, when the world crisis hit, one of the big things that was revealed to many of us is what's your relationship with solitude, with little external, you know, stimulus? What's your relationship with uncertainty? And if you notice as a leader and as an individual, when things get still, you may be one of those people who are like, I gotta to be busy and find something to do. Or as a leader, when things become uncertain, it's like you jump into searching for answers rather than practicing with your team. We may not know that for a while. And so if we're a fixer, somebody comes and says, hey, you know, HR didn't cover this topic, we immediately go, no problem, I'll go find out for you. You should never be without information. And we even on our engagement surveys talk about, does my manager keep me well-informed? But we don't ask, does my manager encourage me to grow and be able to respond in times where I have little information? If you want an assignment this week, start noticing how often you move into action rather than stillness. You move into knowing Rather than being okay with uncertainty. You move into where you're comfortable rather than where you're not familiar, which has a lot to do with some of our race issues. Like, you move into talking rather than listening. You move into filling silence rather than allowing time for reflection in meetings. Just notice that it's because we're over— rotated on the action part of the cycle, the up part, and we're really ignoring the down part. And so organizations that are ready do some— they have things set up to do some intense listening. And so if you think about the world health crisis, there were some things set up to do some intense listening around the world when Ebola first popped up. The, the, the mechanisms were in place to do intense listening, and that triggered very quickly a world response to a very contagious disease, which is why Ebola was contained and continues to be very monitored. And we may have disconnected some of the listening. And listening also means leaning into what you're hearing rather than when what you're hearing interrupts your, your ideal view of the world, you dismiss it. And so another part of that down cycle is noticing how much information comes your way that you just out-of-the-box dismiss. Just, I know how I feel about looters, it's this. Just how much information we dismiss. All of that is my kind of odd call to you to round yourself out. Part of our next evolution as organizations and as people is to round ourselves out so that we can be more comfortable in the not knowing as we are in the knowing, that we can maintain states of curiosity. And, you know, organizations that are really ready are set up in a way that they can be quick and nimble in their responses. But you can't expect an organization that didn't even require people to move offices for the last 15 years can then suddenly be quick and nimble in their responses. An organization that, you know, fought change can't be quick and nimble in their responses. And the organization that is decision-making power in groups that are overrepresented can't be quick and nimble because most disruption doesn't come in a way that you've lived before, but it does come in a way that some have lived before. And that's really powerful. So a lot of people are like, did not see this coming, and that's because we were not listening. And so I really hope we take these current times and find in our organization what we need to do to be more ready. And we're also doing a course on readiness, but all of those will be coming to you. We're doing these great online quick courses that any of you can access. So I want to talk about the, the way in which we build resilience. One of the key things we found in people that were resilient is this not only intent listening, but listening combined with curiosity. There was a heightened state of curiosity in people who were resilient, and about what's going on in the world. This doesn't mean they constantly tuned into CNN or Fox. They were curious about what wasn't being reported or what was underreported, or they were curious about principles and science and the arts and poetry. They were really into learning and expanding their awareness. So whether— and everybody kind of found their own way, whether it was travel or whether it was pursuing diverse activities or whether it was getting lost in reading. Or we saw that people who scored high in accountability and high in the factor of resilience— I'm starting to give you the common themes— were learners, big-time learners. But they didn't learn to know for sure. They learned to collect another piece of information. This is very different. They didn't— they were more gatherers than hunters, because when we learn to know, we tend to overvalue things that reinforce what we already know and undervalue things that that don't reinforce that. And so this curiosity, this intent listening, this gathering of alternative data points led to a heightened ability to be in this healthy tension of differing points of view, probably all having part of the puzzle. And so that's one thing we found with this curiosity, people who really maintained their awareness outside of their organization. And so when I talk to people and I'm like, you know, what have you learned lately? And they go, well, my organization gave us a class on Crucial Conversations last year. Great class. If that didn't open up for them this— bam— this open-mindedness to figure out all the ways that I don't lead with heart in a conversation, that I try and manipulate, that I'm not good at making amends— if that didn't— if that class didn't lead to a big discovery where you suddenly saw in your worldview all the cases that you could plug and play, then that wasn't learning. So in training and development, we're held to 4 stages of evaluation. There's probably more by now, but, you know, the first one, did you enjoy the class? And the second one, you know, could you find ways to use it? But eventually it is, are you using it to make a difference in the world? And many, many times, if we don't get level 4, it is deemed that the training wasn't any good. Do you hear the coddling in this, the, the enabling? Instead of looking at the shared responsibility of the learners, that the learners were not curious enough to go find ways to plug and play differently in the world and make a difference. So there's also got to be this willing participation in uncomfortable situations, the willingness not to know, as I've talked about And then people need to be willing to advocate not for their position, but for openness to what's new, for openness to new information, for willingness to support an advocacy to, in front of others, state that they're willing to support even if we don't know all the answers. It is not a way to convince other people. It's It's not selling, but it definitely is being an upstander or an ally where I have so much to learn and unlearn about my own racism. But that doesn't mean I can step up with the answers. It does mean I can step up and say, this situation doesn't feel okay, and I want to just go back to the person that was talking and hear more. And so it's the ability to take risks and be very vulnerable, I think. And then the next thing is action. Resilient people were willing to act even if it was probably— it wasn't perfect, and they knew they would not be perfect, and they knew they would get additional feedback and be called up and get lots of alternative opinions. They were able to not personalize that. They were able to really advocate and then Jump in and actively participate to do something. And at least on my Instagram feed, which I continue to curate so I can get— follow as many diverse voices as I can, you know, I hear the biggest fear. I identify as white, and I hear the biggest fear of people that don't identify as white as, this is cool while it's fashionable. And I think people have raised their awareness and they say they're willing, and some are even taking the risk to advocate. But will this lead to action? I think everybody is pretty worried that— will it lead to action? And action that comes from uninformed people who aren't curious, who aren't willing to have multiple things to be true, those are power plays. Those are destructive. So people who are like, I'll take this matters into my own hands, if you can't fix it, I will— that's not the action we're talking about. In order to take action, you need to almost have a license to do that, that you've earned through the steps I've already talked about. Continue to grow your awareness, your willingness to move through the world not knowing and be curious, and your advocacy, which is just— let's advocate for voices to be heard. Those are the folks we need taking action, that silent, hopefully majority, when traditionally the people that take action are the ones who have no embarrassment of their own ignorance and of the topic. And the ones who don't take action are the ones who still are curious, and they're saying, I gotta learn more because when I take action, I want it to be politically correct, and I want it to be, you know, paying attention to all of the feedback I've gotten. And that is where a lot of evolution gets stalled. Doubt— people who are most curious, people who are most open Probably have the most doubt in their view of the world, which is healthy until it comes time for action. And that doubt— I think doubt is one of the things that definitely stalls out evolution. And there isn't a test to pass, there's action to be taken. And as we move forward, we'll learn more. And it's improv, it's a— it's iterative process. It's saying yes, and then let's gather more information, and now we'll know more and we'll involve more and we'll figure this thing out. Confidence isn't, I know the answer. That's ego. Confidence is, I'm confident I bring a good data point to the table, and together we will figure out the answer. I'm confident in the people around the table. I'm also confident in the process that at any given time, what we've already decided will be outdated. It's good enough for now while we look at what would be more kind of utopian. So basic things I found about people that were good at resilience, and therefore what we're gonna teach in the course and give you assignments to develop: they were very good at self-reflection. They went inside to own what's my part in this mess first. They were open to even feedback, but they were good at self-reflection. And self-reflection, I talk a lot about, is the ultimate drama diffuser. It's the ultimate ego bypass. It gets you from low self to high self really quickly. It's Transactional. It's in the moment. It doesn't become transformational unless you go to the second place, which I talked about in last week's podcast— contemplation. Contemplation, self-reflection, is in the moment. Let me quickly get away from doing harm, even if my intent's good, and get myself back on the side of trying to connect for good, right? So it helps us in that moment come as our most evolved self. Contemplation starts to look at what is that about for me? What's the trends there? What's the trauma there? What, what do I need to go deeper on? What is one of my lessons for this lifetime or this stage of my life? How do I keep ending up here? So if I have to consistently edit my story because I'm consistently judging Another awesome intervention— edit my story so I can keep loosening the ego's grip on my view of that person. Awesome. But at some point, I have to ask, like, contemplate, how do I end up here? And it could be like, I am so understanding that that understanding keeps me from being honest about my preferences in this relationship. Mm-hmm. So I end up in a place where I'm judging and resentful because after contemplation I see where I try and keep the peace with them and start the war with myself. Wow. Journal that because that isn't gonna be resolved quickly, but it can be resolved over time. And that's the contemplation piece. People that were more resilient— and this does have to do somewhat with privilege had better habits already in place, better practices. They were meditators, they got enough sleep, they ate healthy foods, they were active. They— so you hear the privilege in this? They had access to healthy foods at a decent price. They, you know, were able to take the $700 meditation course and went to yoga class So part of this whole pull yourself up by your bootstraps stuff that, you know, that people can just walk into a state of accountability— I want you to question that because part of being resilient is having better habits, but they also can be in spite of socioeconomic status as well. You know, given YouTube and all kinds of things, it's more that people either don't have time or aren't introduced or don't have social systems that make it easy for these things to happen, but they were also people that reported a belief system and a practice, whether it's that you have a belief in, um, that's anchored in the religion and part of your practice was, you know, weekly gatherings, or part of your practice was, um, you know, study of whatever book, whether it's the Quran or Bible or, um, you know, Torah, that was important to you. They had these habits, and you heard some people who moved into the world's kind of health crisis when we were sheltered in place say things like, this is why we practice. You also see people in crisis that can quickly get down to thinking clearly, and that's because they have used business discipline thinking in the past. That's why doctors, when they see trauma, can very quickly go into You know, we need to secure airway, we need to stop bleeding. We— because they've practiced so much that when those times hit, they have things they resort back to. So if I meditate in the morning and I see something that hooks my ego during the day, I can resort back to a meditative state where I can disconnect and just notice that's not me. I'm the observer of this. And so our practices are super, super important. I'll talk a lot on the course about self-care versus self-soothing. I've already done a podcast on that, but that's really a big difference. I talked about curiosity. Resilient people have perspective where they put themselves in proportion to the situation, as in it's not about you. This isn't happening to you. This isn't about you. They're able to depersonalize things, but they also can put themselves in perspective in history. in the future and in the past, and they can put things in perspective on a time continuum. They can put things in perspective as far as kind of managing their own risk. Lack of perspective is what you see right now where people were sheltered in place and completely safe and without really seeing different data except economic data. So we have taken health data And many have chosen to say, given the health data, that hasn't changed, but the economic data is compelling enough for us to take greater risks. That's just all perspective. Most people, in order to justify opening our economy, are starting to deny the contagious factor of the virus. That's lack of perspective. It's also lack of ownership. If you're going to open up the economy, own it. That we are in parts of our world using economic data that's compelling for us to decide that the health data is worthy of managing some of those risks of. And when they speak, you hear the perspective. You hear them not speaking about me, and they don't get offensive— offended, and they aren't emotional. They have perspective. They have perspective that yes, as a nation, we have to manage racial protests to you know outrageous situations with economic drivers that are important with the coronavirus, with all the things being revealed like the lack of equitable care. for people in different socioeconomic classes or different races. So perspective is important. People that are resilient have read the owner's manual to their body and their minds. They understand how their mind works. They also understand how the world works, not this weird ego view that it's rigged or it's all conspiracy, or— they just understand the ways they get caught up in the world that diminish their spirit, diminish their creativity, diminish their effectiveness. People that are resilient are able to commit to do hard things. There's this wild factor on the most resilient where their first inclination, if there is pain over there, is to turn and walk away. And something in them says, wait a minute, I'm gonna turn and walk towards the pain. I'm going to see what is illusion and what isn't. I'm going to sit down and feel the feelings. I'm going to sit here and listen to this person's story. I am going to stop being ruled by my fear of pain and realize that I can do hard things, and I can, I can go into a tough conversation. Like they rightly challenge themselves. They feel the feelings we've talked about. They have healthy tension. They have an ability to be with somebody in discomfort but not have to fix or rescue somebody or say things that, you know, are fixing but unhelpful. They have the ability as a leader to have somebody challenged and watch them struggle a bit and have some comfort in supporting them while they move through hard things. It's letting people explore their edges and being good companions while they explore the edges. Resilient people— and this has come into play big time— resilient people anchor their confidence not in certainty about their worlds The I know minds, but in certainty that I have enough people in my world that together we can figure it out. I've developed my collaboration skills. I have a great network of positive folks. I have platforms I can borrow. I have influencers I can influence. And so what happens is so many people said to me, "Sai, you don't understand yesterday. I I knew like what my life was going to be like. I knew I was going to go to work. I knew." And now today it's like, you know, there's nothing that's certain. And I kind of chuckle because all that means is that the ego was successful in convincing you to believe in the illusion that you had any certainty in the world. So pre-health crisis, pre-some of all of this disruption, the, the, the confidence you had was anchored in a faulty foundation. You anchored it in this illusion of certainty, and therefore when the certainty went away, your confidence that you would be okay in the world went away. I want people, in order to be resilient, to anchor their confidence in something different. And that's what we learned from the resiliency work. These folks had— resilient people had big relationships of— or big networks of positive relationships doesn't mean you have to be a social butterfly and, you know, be chatting up Facebook, LinkedIn, or Instagram. It does mean that you have been so open to helping others when they came to you, you didn't fail them. Doesn't mean you had to do the work and have no boundaries and give, give, give. It means you were able to point them in the right direction or connect them with somebody or give freely of your knowledge or information. You weren't a knowledge hoarder. And so there's these people out there that have this positive relationship with you that when you need to tap into them, they are quick to return the favor. And so networks were so important. And when I ask people about this, one of the ancillary studies that came out of some of the work we were doing at this time was during 2009 and '10, how quickly people found new jobs. And, you know, we all know that, you know, if you're networked, it's easy to find jobs rather than, you know, a blind application. But it wasn't just that. It was that they were able to get people actively looking for them for jobs. And we measured how many contacts that you had and how long it took you to find a job. And it was profound. I don't remember the exact difference. We published that, but it was profound. That the people who had maintained relationships, by the way, outside of their company— most of us don't even maintain relationships inside our company, but outside our company— were so important. Okay, kudos to Brené Brown. Genius. Resilient people are not the strong ones. They are not the ones who just have stamina, who can persevere. They aren't the ones, you know, maybe like myself, that have, you know, survived some crazy things. And so we probably have too high of tolerance. for crazy things. They aren't the over-functioners of the world. And that's something we're seeing right now. We're seeing some people step down and under-function under stress. We're seeing people over-function in stress. And we think the over-functioners are the most resilient. They are functioning to control, not to help folks. They are functioning a lot of times to perform, to get kudos and validation through performance. They are not over-functioning for always healthy reasons. But the people that are willing to get vulnerable, to say, here's where I'm at, here's the work that needs to be done, here's what I can contribute, here's what I know my own vulnerabilities are, here's the help I need— resilient people ask for help most often. So they weren't the strong ones, they weren't the persevering ones. In the transactional interim, the people that have a lot of perseverance and stamina are the most resilient. If you're running a marathon, the person who's trained and has higher cardiovascular abilities, you know, are gonna be able to be more resilient if suddenly the route has a lot of hills in it. But for not so linear things, that's not always the case. I've talked about they had a good relationship with stillness and uncertainty in the down cycle. People that were resilient were good at triage. They got really busy on what are the basic Am I safe? What do I need? Get that and then free themselves back up. So one of the things we're seeing right now is that people who are lingering, and we're not calling them to develop resilience, is let's say in the beginning of work from home, if they were— I call them the lucky ones that weren't out on the front lines, the work-from-home folks— in the beginning, managing schooling and childcare and, and work You know, that was like a basic need. Like all of a sudden we've compressed a lot of lives into a small space, and we've put responsibility on one or two or maybe three people in that household. In the beginning, that was basic safety, basic needs, and so we could have some tolerance for like okay, get yourself settled, get that figured out. But if we're three months later and people are saying you know I can't come back even for a day every couple of weeks because there's no. summer camps. We need to challenge people's resilience and to come up with a plan for how you are gonna handle that, figure it out. If we continue to say, oh my gosh, you're right, the world hasn't met these basic needs yet for you, we rob them from that very opportunity to develop resiliency. This is interesting. People high in resilience had go-to stuff. They had, and I think it's Robert Rohrer, maybe he's a contemplative writer. I may misdescribe this, so don't quote me. Somebody said to get through all the kind of craziness in your life, you need to create your own Bible. And this isn't religious. Your own Bible is like what do you go to for solace, strength, inspiration, motivation? Not the people you go to, but what have you curated over your life? Like, what's your book? What's your Bible that you go to? Resilient people had these. They had music. Like, one guy would say, so I listened to this specific concerto and I just recommit to my resolve to do better tomorrow. And, and it's not just one thing. People had like, you know, I go back and I read this book during these times, I, you know, I have poetry that I go back to. And when I pulled out the research again, I'd forgotten about this part. But for me, I immediately, in times like these, go back to like Pema Chödrön's book When Things Fall Apart. And Kristin Tippett did a podcast on Being with a conversation about that. And it seems like so many people go back to that book. I go back to A Course in Miracles, or I go back to Marianne Williamson, I go back to Byron Katie. I'm listening to her daily. I go back to the poetry of Mary Oliver and David Whyte, and I go back to certain music. And I just realized, without realizing it, I have kind of created my book. But most people don't do this intentionally. And for a lot of us, it's corny stuff. Like, if you're out dating, you go through a breakup Maybe you're like me, you have like a few songs that, you know, you listen to over and over and over again, maybe from high school, maybe not, but it's like you just get the tears out. So we need to teach people to write the book, and then we need to teach people to look at their own autobiography. Because if you don't believe you can get through tomorrow— and resilience has a lot to do with vision and belief— if you don't believe you can get through tomorrow, you, you won't— like, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. But if I can have examined my life and gone back to turning points, hard times I already got through, and I have kind of a list of them, I can have perspective. I go back and I go, you know what, I've been in a similar place before. And I can mine that experience for learning and say, what did I do that helped me go further? And the book I'm writing right now, Life's Messy, Live Happy, I found that in the hardest times of my life, I retreat to places with water. It was kind of a weird red thread I picked up that I didn't really understand. But we have to mine our own experiences for when we've gotten through tough times. Now, I would tell you there's some folks I've worked with that are low in resilience because people have shielded them from tough times. Their privilege has shielded them from tough times, and people have interfered with their view of reality or their relationship with reality by rescuing them. Mm-hmm. during tough times. And that's probably the worst thing we can do. We don't want to drop people off the cliff and leave them alone, but we don't want to take their journey away from them. And which is such an important thought. And if they don't necessarily have that, they need to look at their DNA. And their ancestors probably had that, because the only reason those of us alive today are alive is we had some sort of resiliency in our DNA. It's hardwired in us. Others didn't survive for certain reasons in evolution, and some of us did. Now, I have a caveat there. Some weren't victims of genocide, or like our First Americans weren't, you know, intentionally wiped out. It's hard to have resilience against intentional hostility, but— or violence or murder. I'm not talking about resilience in those more extreme cases. So I'm talking about a lot of us have some resiliency that we can find. Skill sets— people had studied, people have been to therapy, they had studied, or they'd been self-healers. They had read about how to communicate directly and ask for what they need so they don't have hope as their strategy. They— doesn't it sound like a big list? I'm giving you this list because I want you to kind of go, oh, That's the one area I could focus on. This is like a shopping list. I'll tell you how to do these things later. But another thing people do is they make the choice to be hopeful, and they don't get tied to a situation or a future state that when it doesn't happen, their life is over. They are able to envision a multiple number of future states that would be awesome, and So that they don't get attached to one. And so I can live a full life whether I, you know, have kids of my own, whether I am able to serve some of my mothering needs through, you know, fostering kids or through working with kids in a school setting or, you know, through also having pets or whatever that is. I don't say I have a need to be a mom and that means delivering my own baby by the age of 36. Those are the folks that are crushed at the age of 36 and not resilient because they were so narrow in their definition of what would be okay that they made so many deals with the universe that the promises they've made and the universe never promised, and they're so mad when it doesn't happen. What another factor we pulled out of this research. So resiliency really isn't strength as far as from an individual effort, but it is the willingness to go out into the messy world, screw things up but only daily. In the meantime, take some action that helps. It's a mixed bag. Come back, regroup, retreat, reintegrate. Resiliency has a lot to do with integrating and the new, like re-evolving or evolving more. I guess you can't re-evolve, evolve more. And it's not about being like strong, it's more about being open, like coming in open and willing— and willing, not willful, there's a difference— with your most evolved self and working to connect to the whole, working to connect to more of the all of it, and the ability, before you seek to have impact in the world, to be just as okay with being impacted by the world, to be grown by the world. And if you're resilient, you are doing your work so you're not traumatized by what's happening, you're impacted by what's happening. And if you're traumatized by what's happening, that's good information too, and to be able to go back and build your own resiliency by tending to some of those traumas that are still able to be activated for you. So it's really about vulnerability and connecting and confidence that together we're gonna know what to do, what's next. I want to check my notes and just make sure that I've given you what I wanted to say. So probably the biggest thing I want to end with about resiliency is belief that the solutions exist. And certainty that they probably don't exist within me, in my brain. But if I can come forward in an open way and connect with the whole, the solutions we need already exist in the whole. So a big part of my resiliency is the ability to show up having done my work so that I can be fully present in this moment, open to all of it. putting forth my part of it and seeing how I can knit it together with everybody else's. It's very different work. And resiliency has really gotten a bad name because resiliency has— can get into ego very quickly. I'm stronger, I'm smarter, I know the answer, here's how we fix it, I can survive something, I'm gonna ignore my privileges or the The, the reserves I went into the situation with. We start to use it to reinforce power structures and those types of things. And so it's complex, and I know I'm one who boils it down to the essence to help you. I'm giving in this podcast the complexity of it. I promise you I'll boil it down to some actionable focus areas and next steps. I just really want to prepare. I want you to prepare yourself fully so that you can come into the amazing amount of work that we have to do at these times. And resiliency really is about joining the human race without bringing a bunch of crap into the human race. So it's keeping your crap out and getting out of ego and plugging in as a fellow human and together focusing on what's next. And I'm so excited about this new topic that I'm in. It's not new. We did the research. We're validating to see if it still plays. But this new conversation is something I just plugged into— accountability, one of the factors— and I really want to pull it out because it seems to be kind of a missing factor for today. And yeah, more on all of that later. Resiliency isn't an individual sport. It does require you to be fully participatory in your own evolution, and then for you to be fully participatory in the human race. It is about full participation. Resiliency is about A belief in a sense that you're connected into something bigger, that you can play more full out, that you can use other people's energy and strength as your own, and therefore you can step into what's going on right now rather than having to step down from And I'm talking longer term, not for those moments of self-care. That's my thoughts on resiliency. Thank you for so many of you commenting on a few of the posts we put out there asking, you know, what does this have to do with anxiety? What does this have to do with present times? Thank you for those posts. They've helped me think and be able to verbalize an expanded view of resilience. And And I tell you what, I will be editing this stuff. So I'm coming out in a vulnerable way with my thoughts on resilience in a podcast to put it out there. I want to do that so that you guys can also help shape this. So I hope that all of you are well. I hope if you're not well, you're finding some support and peace. And you guys, XOXO. Bring big love. If you don't know what to do, just bring big love. We need a bunch of it right now. Now, have a good day. This is the No Ego Podcast, where we ditch the drama, end entitlement, and transform your workplace. I'm Sy Wakeman.