In this episode Jenni talks about mental resilience, explains how it differs from mental health, and shares coping strategies to practise every day to build resilience and enable you to better handle life’s setbacks. She introduces us to “hopeful equanimity” – that balance of hope and optimism with realism – and some preparation strategies based around reframing and drawing on past experiences. Find out the five elements of building mentally resilient teams.
Things that will help you go from chaos to calm:
Notes on a Nervous Planet by Matt Haig
How to Humor Your Stress | Loretta LaRoche | TEDxNewBedford – YouTube
The Art of Resilience by Ross Edgley
Transcript for this podcast:
Welcome to this episode of Redefining Comms with Jenni Field.
Today I’m going to be talking about mental resilience. So, in the next 15 minutes, we’ll talk about how this is different from mental health, how we can all build it, and the model we use when it comes to resilience in teams.
Now I’m going to start with the difference between mental health and mental resilience, just so we all know what we’re talking about and how the two are different. So mental health is about our emotional, psychological, and social wellbeing, mental health problems according to the charity mind effect amount, one in four people every year. Now, the advice we always give to anyone experiencing, any kind of chronic mental health problems is to speak to a medical professional. But workplace mental resilience interventions are not recommended for people who are either off work or are just returning to work after experiencing some mental health related problems. The difference, therefore, is that with mental resilience, it’s more preparatory work so enabling you to better handle life setbacks, allowing you to bounce back a bit more. Uh, we often talk about if you put your rain jacket on before you go out into the rain, you are much more likely to stay dry. So that’s what we’re trying to think about when it comes to resilience. It’s that bounce back ability when you are trying to deal with some of those setbacks that might come your way. What’s important to know is that you cannot be permanently resilient, but you can have resilient tendencies. And what we are focusing on today is the fact that everybody can build resilience. It doesn’t matter who you are or what you’ve been through there are techniques and things which we will cover today that will help you think about how you can build and how you can start to practice certain things to build that resilience. Now, one of the things I’ve talked about a lot is this phrase that I was told many years ago by a previous boss about the need to get comfortable with ambiguity. Now, it’s something I really struggled with, partly because in this situation, ambiguity was everywhere. Nothing seemed to make sense from the strategic narrative to the organisational structure. But since I had that conversation, I’ve read, I’ve researched more into how we work as human beings, and I talk about understanding people a lot because I believe it’s fundamentally important for us to understand each other, to enable better working relationships. Now, one of the main things that I talk about when it comes to communication in the workplace is how we work as human beings and how we are designed to dislike ambiguity, how we have to be able to predict what’s happening for us to stay safe, and how we make up stories when we don’t know. Now, I’ve been researching resilience over the past few years, looking at different ways, it links to organisations, and I think there is a clear link between building mental resilience and communication.
So, let’s look at mental resilience and chaos, and what does that look like?
Now, this is one that manifests in ourselves more than necessarily in the organisations and what’s happening around us, but it shows up in everything that we do as a result, and it stops us from doing new things, from taking risks that might be, you know, really calculated good risks to take but that lack of resilience allows us to do that. It’s almost that imposter syndrome that we have often talked about. Certainly, a topic I’ve covered in my Calm Rebels podcast, but it’s also that voice in your head making you question things and it can lead to you catastrophizing situations, making things seem much worse than they are, overgeneralizing, and thinking that you are always going to do things badly. You might be blaming others for things that are happening and also, it’s a bit of a fear of failure. You know, success is not final and failure is not fatal and I think this is where resilience and chaos can start to come together but it’s a very personal thing. It’s something that’s in all of us and it does impact the work that we do. It impacts the relationships that we have, whether that’s work or at home. Now I’m going to be talking about some coping and preparation strategies, and these are things that we cover. In the workshops that we run to help teams build mental resilience. I’m not going cover everything, but I’m going to cover probably my favourite ones that I have been practicing and use and continue to use every day.
Coping strategies and preparation strategies
Coping strategies are the things that we practice every day to build resilience. Now, there’s a couple I want to talk about here, control and connection. Then I’m going to talk about some of the traits that you can build to really build that resilience from a personality perspective and then we’ll have a look at what it looks like when you are leading a team. So let’s come back to those coping and preparation strategies so the two coping strategies, control and connection.
Control
Now, control is all about controlling your environment, but it’s also about controlling how you spend your time and energy. Now, I’m a big fan of Matt Hague and his book notes on a Nervous Planet where he talks about editing your choices. He talks about the fact that you can’t read every book, you can’t watch every film, and we have to edit our choices to align to the goals that we want to achieve because it’s very individual and it’s very personal. What’s important is that control of our time and energy, and it’s something I talk about a lot in the episode around productivity and attention management. It’s something I talk about a lot when it comes to boundaries, but we do control where we spend our time and energy. That’s the one thing we can control more than anything, and how we want to spend that time and prioritise the things that we want to do. Now when it comes to building mental resilience, it’s about looking at what we can control and what we can influence and sometimes situations can make us feel frustrated or make us feel angry and the questions I always go through are, can you control the situation? And if not, can you influence it? And if you can do neither of those things, then let it go. And that can be easier said than done. You know, sometimes you want to be angry in the moment and, and vent and rant and all those things, but even if we take something as simple as a traffic jam, which you’re stuck in, you can’t control that. You can’t influence that and therefore, you might as well embrace that time that you are stuck and use it if it’s safe to do so, to make a phone call, or listen to a podcast or listen to music, you know, reframe that and use that time in a different way.
Connection
The second coping strategy is connection. Now, this is because social connection is really important for us as human beings, so we have to have a community around us. Resilient people are very good at asking for help. Now we can develop deep connections with around 15 people. This is including your kind of immediate family. So you need to think about how you’re investing your time and how many people you’re giving your time and energy to and when we think about those deep connections, and these are the relationships you want to invest in, you want to really build a, a proper connection with 15 is the maximum we can have as human beings. I think that’s quite an interesting thing. For some that will feel like a huge number for others that will feel like that’s far too small. But I always encourage people to think about where we’re investing our time, who we are connecting with, who we’re investing our time with, and making sure that those social connections are bringing benefits to us as a human being.
Now, those are a couple of coping strategies. Preparation strategies are the things that we do in the moment. So if you are preparing for something that’s making you feel, or experience feelings around anxiety. So we can prepare for those things, and that might be through reframing or drawing on past experiences. So reframing is where you can tell yourself that something is great fun when maybe you’re not enjoying it. I do this in the gym a lot when I’m not enjoying the 20th burpee that I’m probably being made to do and I just say myself in my head i’m having a really good time, this is great and try and change that. One of the really famous reframing is when you are feeling nervous or when you are feeling excited, nervous and excited are the same response in our body, so we can reframe that. So, if you feel nervous about something, you can tell yourself you’re actually excited. The body physical response is the same so there’s lots of ways we can reframe things that help us build that resilience. The drawing on past experiences is really helpful so remembering if you’ve done something before. What happened and using that technique to remember that everything’s going to be okay and that nothing bad will happen. So, a couple of tips there around that preparation side of things. The other thing is to have a bit of a conversation with your thoughts. So, this might sound a bit strange, but sometimes your brain is putting thoughts in your head that aren’t particularly helpful. Maybe just saying back to them, you know, give me a thought I can do something with, or just questioning some of those things and, and engaging in somewhat of a conversation can help you move forwards and stop that becoming that overgeneralizing, that catastrophizing, that can often happen.
Three traits to build
Now, there are three traits to think about. There’s lots of traits around building resilience, but there’s three that I think are really helpful when it comes to dealing with ambiguity, which has been quite a big thing for us in the last few years, but also when it comes to thinking about every aspect of our lives.
Adaptability
Now the first one is adaptability in a workshop that I do and I do workshops with, an ex British army chap called John Humphreys, and he helps me run these resilience workshops for people. And he talks about the fact that we need to be more like a tree and that tree is bending in the wind, it’s flowing with its surroundings. Likewise, he’ll talk about water and how we need to flow around a rock rather than just stop. So, if we can be more like a tree and the water and bend and flow and adapt, it makes things a lot easier for us to have that resilience. When things are thrown at us now, there’s always a way forward. There’s always a solution. I fundamentally believe this with everything that I do, which is probably why I have the field model and this need to fix everything in organisations. But it’s about discovering that. It’s about finding that way around the rock or finding that way to bend with the tree.
Humour
The second trait is humour. Now, things aren’t always funny, but you can sometimes see the funny side of things and most people will talk about the fact that having a bit of a sense of humour can make light of a situation. Now, I’m often smiling, I’m quite a generally, genuinely smiley person, and it’s rare that I’ll go a day without laughing, but I do take what I do very seriously. But I also think there is something about not taking life too seriously, and that’s something that is always worth considering. There’s a few TED talks around this that I’ll pop in the show notes as well, that just help us think about how humour has a role to play in what we do now.
Hopeful Equanimity
The third trait is called hopeful equanimity. Now, this is something that I came across when I was researching, rental resilience. Optimism isn’t always the best approach, and it can be quite unhelpful when it’s not grounded in realism. And there’s been a lot of talk in the last few years about toxic positivity and for me, this plays a bit of a role in that but in the book I was reading, which is Ross Edge Lee’s book, the Art of Resilience, he talks about Admiral James Stockdale. And the coping strategy that he had while in a Vietnamese prisoner of war camp and in the book it says, you know, I never lost faith. In the end of the story, I never doubted not only that I would get out, but that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining experience of my life, which in retrospect, I wouldn’t trade. Now in the book it says how optimists will say we’re going to be out by Christmas. But then you know, we’re going to be out by Easter, and the optimists in the camp died and that’s because they had a timeframe on what they were doing. Whereas Stockdale says, you must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end, which you can never afford to lose with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they may be. So in other words, have faith, but don’t tie that hope to an external circumstance that you can’t control. And this term, hopeful, equanimity rather than optimism has stayed with me. Equanimity is calmness and composure, especially in difficult situations so it’s that balance of hope and optimism with realism. You know, we aren’t designed to be okay with ambiguity, and we are designed to ensure that we are safe and that nothing will cause us harm. So, making sure that we practice some of these resilience techniques will really help us. Now I said that I would talk about resilience and teams because this is something that often comes up when we’re talking to different organisations and different teams around how to build that resilience.
TEEAM
And we came up with a model, which is just called team, but it’s got a double E in it for the things to think about if you are looking at resilience in your team, how to help build that with them. How to help just focus on things or pay attention to things that. Might be different to the norm for those individuals.
So, the T stands for time. So, taking time to understand each other as a team inside an organisation, you have to know each other and know what you need to do well. If a trait of resilience is that we can lean on and get support from each other, we have to be able to do that, and we can only do that if we know each other quite well.
The first E is experience so we can learn from each other and share what we’ve been through before. So if using past experiences is a preparation strategy, how can we do that together? How can we share experiences? How can we build that?
The second E is encourage, so that’s encouraging each other, celebrating, rewarding, supporting each other, making sure that we are acknowledging things that we do well. We don’t often spend time to stop and reflect on the things that are going well, and it’s an important part of that building resilience to make sure that we are celebrating those wins.
The A is for action, so actually making sure that we are making steps and doing things and moving forwards towards the goals that we have. So looking at the goals, having maybe quarterly check-ins on those. To make sure that you are moving forward and doing what you say you will do.
And then the M stands for monitor. Which is really just a way to be watchful for science that something isn’t quite right. So if you are leading a team or in a team, it’s about looking out for things that might be different to the norm for those individuals and helping people just think about how they might be doing something differently and how they might need extra support and working in a true sense of a team rather than just a group of people that have come together in that function or in that department.
Now in my next episode, I’m going to be talking about the field model in a bit more detail. So I want to share with you the three phases of the model, why I created it, and how you can apply it to your organisation or team. Now, in my book, I go into detail about the different applications of that model in different scenarios.
So, I’m going to pick one of those for that episode just to help you think about how you can apply it. We’ll talk about different diagnosis tools, how you can diagnose chaos, and also, we’ll talk a bit about toxic chaos, what that looks like and how that can become toxic in organisations.
Thank you for listening, I’d love to continue this conversation on Twitter or LinkedIn, so please connect, ask questions, share your thinking with me. I’ve put details in the show notes on how to stay in touch and all of the things I’ve covered on resilience today as well.
