Giant: Life Skills in Troubled Times

HOW TO RECOVER WHEN HAUNTED BY THE FEELING YOUR BEST WASN’T GOOD ENOUGH I was a guest on a leading podcast for coaches recently, & I brought up my origin story – how I started a resilience practice. The risk is that when you’re tempted to feel like you dropped the ball as I felt back in 2012, you’ll take too long to recover your equilibrium & are left watching a crisis morph into a tragedy. How do you get back in the game when you’re left feeling gutted by massive, unwelcome consequences you feel responsible for? Can you imagine having this searing thought: "My best wasn’t good enough”?? Maybe you’re actually living with that giant now. As an aside, let me just say, it takes a major act of bravery to admit this to yourself. If, God forbid, this has ever been you, I hope you can feel better a little better about yourself. This level of candour isn’t common, because any number of us will try to avoid such a bruising reckoning any way we can: – anything to save face – anything to avoid feeling guilt, shame or small – anything to avoid having to reckon with our truth as our potential shortcomings are exposed – anything to avoid doing the hard yards & taking responsibility to change. But as classy as such honesty is, at the same time, admitting that our best isn’t good enough can result in a level of bad press from others or even ourselves that is difficult to come back from, like being slammed into a wall at 60mph. Cancel culture can hit hard like that, these days. It’s been said that adversity introduces a man to himself. Well, if you can’t stop thinking your best wasn’t good enough, that’s a cruelly hard bump in the road. So I’m interested to know if you’d like me to host a powerful LinkedIn Audio session where we provide a seatbelt & fast-acting airbags that still work even after what happened happened? But just to be clear, the conversation won’t be about how to avoid such a reckoning, but making sure we get to walk away from it in better shape than before & keep moving forwards regardless. If you’d like to be a part of that conversation, drop me a line in the comments or shoot me a DM. If enough people are interested, I promise I’ll make it happen sooner rather than later. And of course, let me know if you need one-on-one resilience coaching on this & can’t wait for the audio event. I’d be more than happy to help… #LifeSkillsInTroubledTimes #ResilienceCoaching #WeAreGIANT! #BiggerInsideThanLifeIsOutside #LinkedInAudio

HERE’S A WAY MY RESILIENCE COACHING DIFFERS FROM TRADITIONAL COACHING Top coaches'll tell you that their superpower is to help you to do your best thinking. Which is absolutely critical if you’re to perform at your best in testing times. Can be precarious, mind. Your front-&-centre challenges aren’t always the issues that need addressing most. Like a noisy & intrusive smoke alarm, what's causing the smoke is the problem, not the alarm blaring or what set it off. So an element of staying curious & trusting the process is necessary. But getting help avoiding stinking thinking when digging into our hidden recesses is invaluable. So do consider working with such coaches. Where resilience coaching differs though, is that I help my clients go a vital, maybe even more precarious step further. I support people to be more fully present despite strong emotions & feelings. That way, their contribution isn’t as compromised by misdirected energies – medicating or fire-fighting what’s going on under the hood. As it feels easier navigating hot emotions & feelings, they find more bandwidth to think more clearly, helping them make better decisions & get better outcomes. This approach can be messier. Sometimes it’s harder. But the relief can feel incredibly powerful. I was working with a client recently who burst into tears when after a simple resilience exercise she realised she wasn’t doing as bad at work as she’d so often felt. Her feelings were telling her a story that wasn’t true – a story she didn’t know she’d written, or how to get out of. We humans aren’t thinking people who feel, we’re feeling people who think. Our feelings always lead. Of course, the people I work with aren’t always entirely comfortable discussing their feelings publicly. Too many are just like how I used to be – a closed book emotionally. Growing up with too many harsh realities, I learnt how to live life detached from unprocessed emotions & feelings. I found a way to survive. For me, that meant disconnecting from pain. We’re all creative that way. We find ways to keep ourselves safe. And that should be celebrated & acknowledged. However, many skills we learnt back when no longer serve us well today. (My wife'll tell you that!) So let's do some unlearning & put some of our old trusty – now rusty – coping mechanisms down. None of us just want to survive. We want to thrive. And flourish. With deeply satisfying experiences. And to enjoy our work & feel richly content with our contribution. Especially when feelings of high alarm threaten to keep us trapped in stories we don’t want to be in. If that’s you, & you’d relish some new resilience tools to help you write the best chapters in your story to date, then let’s talk. The relief you’ll feel handling your strongest feelings & emotions better could help transform your performance & your life… #LifeSkillsInTroubledTimes #ResilienceCoaching #WeAreGIANT! #BiggerInsideThanLifeIsOutside #HighPerformance

LISTEN IN TO MY CONVERSATION ON THE COACHING INN PODCAST Covered a lot of ground talking about #resilience with one of the most insightful & generous people I know in my network, Claire Pedrick MCC. Recording just dropped on all the places you listen to your podcasts. So do listen in if you want to get a peep into how resilience skills & insights can not only help us recover from challenge, change & complexity, but also handle giant challenges that we've chosen but which have suddenly ballooned on us, threatening to overwhelm us with fear, judgment & failure. You'll also get to hear about my own giant setback that helped shape my resilience journey, as well as how story has played a big part in mine & others' emerging recovery. The link's in the post below. Circle back to let me know what you think & if you'd like to know more about helping you, your workers & your workplaces to feel bigger inside than life is outside… #ResilienceCoaching #WeAreGIANT! #BiggerInsideThanLifeIsOutside #LifeSkillsInTroubledTimes #HighPerformance

Why is #CommunityResilience necessary for increasingly resilient workers & workplaces? Doesn't make sense supporting workers & workplaces to perform at their best when life takes a turn for the worst if the communities we live & work in undermine human flourishing, right…? #CSR #StopTheCuts

Small businesses that want to connect more deeply to their communities & give something back may struggle with corporate social responsibility, as it's not easy to do something that's sustainable & doesn't look like tokenism. But this genius idea for hospitality venues is one awesome way of ticking a lot of boxes: – a sense of place (somewhere we're proud to live, learn, work & play) makes a big difference to health & well-being outcomes (as well as the economy) & this amps up everyone's feel-good factor no end! – if someone's struggling with food poverty, fuel poverty may be a problem too. So at least for an hour or so, someone gets to feel incredible relief – helping someone feel like they're not alone in their struggle can literally save lives – somebody gets fed. Even if you don't have a social conscience, here's why your food & drink business should do this: – up-sell to customers without them feeling you're taking something from them – a community with a lively social conscience is a community that's more likely to sustain enterprise – improve cashflow & revenues – it's great PR – helps create customers who become loyal, & maybe even raving fans. What other benefits have I overlooked here…? #LifeSkillsInTroubledTimes #WeAreGIANT! #BiggerInsideThanLifeIsOutside #CommunityResilience

Speaking on imposter syndrome again; this Sat afternoon on Twitter Spaces (still can't bring myself to call it X!). Details below. Giants like imposter syndrome don't defeat us because they're too big, they defeat us because they make us feel small. So listen in if you'd love to spend a lot less energy worrying about a loss of face, status or reputation with some tips that can keep your confidence levels high & reduce feelings of stress & anxiety… #LifeSkillsInTroubledTimes #ResilienceCoaching #WeAreGIANT! #BiggerInsideThanLifeIsOutside #HighPerformance

Another year, another extraordinarily powerful piece of work from Norwich City Football Club on #WorldMentalHealthDay. Incredibly necessary, but not at all easy to watch. So please do take care & choose your moment to take this message in… #YouAreNotAlone #LifeSkillsInTroubledTimes #WeAreGIANT! #BiggerInsideThanLifeIsOutside

I confess to feeling a little uncomfortable with this, everyone. With resilience as I see it, it's vital to stress that grit is more nuanced than this post might seem to indicate. [SPOILER ALERT: if you haven't read Steven's post or watched Angela's vid below, they posit grit as the primary determinant behind our success.] Firstly, I’m not challenging the research. I’m merely challenging the story we might believe the research is telling us. So secondly, let's be careful what we're hearing here: If we think of 'blood, sweat & tears' when we hear the word 'grit', then okay [hello David Goggins fans!]. But if we then run a script that says that in order to be successful, my effort needs to look AND FEEL like blood, sweat & tears, then that can lead us to get distracted by the means to the end, & lose sight of the end itself. Hard work gets results. But if then hard work becomes the aim, then that becomes the result. We’ll enjoy the work less having lost sight of a meaning that matters (discipline works best from joy) & so we’ll then be less inclined to keep at it. Resilience is energy management. Burn too hot too fast for too long without any sign of 'success' & we can burn out badly. If it’s not sustainable, it ain’t resilient. Instead, resilience – being able to perform at our best even when life takes a turn for the worst – has more to do with who we become (identity) & less to do with what we do (performance). That growth mindset Angela refers to in her talk is a work horse. But it kicks so much harder when we believe 'I am someone who exercises', as opposed to 'I really must exercise today'. So thirdly, let's drill down a little bit more into grit & make sure we're weaving in the vital identity piece. Grit as passion & perseverance? Bring it. But let's remember to bring this relentless enthusiasm from who we are & not from our methods. As Angela puts it: Grit is sticking with our future. How do we do that? By never giving up on ourselves (even if everyone else has) – but NOT necessarily sticking with what we're doing. As Steven himself has repeatedly indicated over the years, grit isn't synonymous with never quitting. Grit isn't a resilience tool if we're spending litres of blood, sweat & tears only to find our ladder's leaning against the wrong wall. Grit is a resilience tool when it allows us to repeatedly meet that old imposter failure without any lasting loss of enthusiasm, because we can find ways to keep believing in ourselves despite our results. Want to be gritty & avoid writing a story you don’t want to be in? Let me know if you’d like to talk about this some more. I’d be more than happy to chat… #LifeSkillsInTroubledTimes #ResilienceCoaching #WeAreGIANT! #BiggerInsideThanLifeIsOutside