Agile Emotional Intelligence Resilience at Work & Personal Growth

The below study focuses on the implementation of scientific methodologies on the human psychological side rather than the professional business definitions of it.

I have always been interested in applying major scientific & project management methods into my personal life, if such methodologies are very effective in turning businesses successful then definitely it can work on the personal level as well, right? We must always observe and learn from our surroundings, customize whatever we learn to adapt our life style & our needs, there is no absolute right or wrong, no absolute definition of any methodology, it all depends on the implementation of it.

Topics like Agile management , Scrum & Resilience have been my obsession lately , due to both major personal incidents & career development, the first has left me in a state where I have no choice but to survive by whatever means necessary, unleashing my primitive evolution instinct to survive, the later has led me to “dance quickly” and explore the real meanings of agility & scrum in their abstract forms.

Tackling a separate topic (that I believe must be combined with resiliency) is agility, Agile is the ability to be adaptable & to intentionally change shape & direction in a well-coordinated movement.

When mixing agility with scrum principles we can confidently say that it is framework within which people can address complex adaptive problems, while productively and creatively ensure delivery of results of the highest possible value. Growing knowledge where there was none, knowledge is derived from experience and evidence, also known as:

1. The scientific method.
2. Evidence-based management.

Since this is an empiricism methodology, it is built on the below pillars (in our case applying it to personal characteristics) :

1. Inspection - of oneself and surrounding environment.
2. Transparency - with oneself & others
3. Adoption – of new survival tactics that was never planned before.

The Manifesto for Agile Software Development is based on twelve principles, when customizing them to apply on human personal behavior we can conclude the below:

1.  Self-satisfaction attained by early and continuous delivery of valuable accomplishments.
2. Welcome changing requirements, even in late stages.
3. Maintain adherence on personal goals frequently (weeks rather than months).
4. Close, daily coordination between business, personal, health & entertainment responsibilities.
5. Sustainable development, able to maintain a constant pace.
6. Continuous attention to details.
7. Simplicity—the art of maximizing the amount of work not done—is essential.
8. Best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing attitude.
9. Regularly, one self reflects on how to become more effective, and adjusts accordingly.

Factors that contributed to agility are :

1.      Adaptive to self needs rather than wants.

2.      Style of work

3.      Faster accomplishment times

4.      Continuous self-feedback & retrospective reviews.

5.      Minimal disruptions

Tardigrades “also known as water bears” can be found everywhere, from mountaintops to the deep sea and mud volcanoes, and from tropical rainforests to the Antarctic. Tardigrades are among the most resilient living creatures ever known, with individual species able to survive extreme conditions—such as exposure to extreme temperatures, extreme pressures (both high and low), air deprivation, radiation, dehydration, starvation & even in outer space—that would quickly kill most other known forms of life.

“ Persistence is very important. You should not give up unless you are forced to give up.” Elon Musk

I honestly believe resilience is a trait given by the evolution process, it is investable that we – as a living specie- are to adapt and survive any situation however it is. This level of adaption is significantly different from one person to the other, since it require major hardened experiences to craft one’s resilience or at least to display it, then it is must be a large pile of many factors starting from cumulative experiences that produced data to help guide future’s decisions, traumas, disappointments, failures and depression, but let’s not just focus on the negative significant events (which usually are the ones triggering the resiliency) but also proving records of self-confidence, self-appreciation and the sense of self-worth, ultimately it’s the primitive survival instinct that is built in all of us , triggered by a hard extinct type situation and guided by sense of “it is inevitable that I survive” tactics.

Don’t be afraid of new arenas, you can get a book and learn something, experiment with your hands, just make it happen, find a way or make a way to make something done, just like the Nike slogan "Just do it", just showing up is half the battle. you got to try hard to do it , and don’t be afraid of failure, you also need to be rooted in reality , its easy to get high on your own supply.

More than education, more than experience, more than training, a person’s level of resilience & agility will determine who succeeds and who fails, that’s true in the cancer ward, its true in the Olympics, and it is true in the boardroom.

Looking at the holocaust victims, many of the healthy survivors of concentration camps had what is called “a plastic shield”, this shield was compromised of several factors, including:

1. Sense of humor, often the humor is black but provided a critical sense of perspective.
2. The ability to form attachments to others.
3. The possession of an inner psychological space, that protected the survivors from the intrusions of abusive others.

Most of the theories regarding resiliency in personality overlap in three ways, resilient people they posit, possess three characteristics:

1. A staunch acceptance of reality.
2. A deep belief often buttressed by strongly held values that life is meaningful.
3. Uncanny ability to improvise.

I mean come on, you can bounce back from hardship with just one or two of these qualities, but you will only be truly resilient with all three.

The fact is, when we truly stare down reality, we prepare ourselves to act in ways that allow us to endure and survive extraordinary hardship, we train ourselves how to survive before the fact, this dynamic of meaning making is the way resilient people build bridges from present day hardships to a fuller, better-constructed future. Those bridges make the present manageable, for lack of a better word, removing the sense that the present is overwhelming. We must never forget that we may also find meaning in life even when confronted with a hopeless situation, when facing a fate that cannot be changed.

I remember when I was a little kid around 6 or 7 years old and I was stuck an apocalypse type situation like my parents finding out about something terrible that I have done and waiting me back at home , I still can remember my heart beats and how scared I was , but I also remember how I handled the situation , how I kept assuring myself that this situation won’t last forever and that it must come to an end and surpass it and things will be normal again. That is both logical & inevitable, it’s like seeing a large wave coming your way at the sea and there is no way for you to out swim it , you just take a deep breath and you yourself jump right through it just to pass it and get it over with. Knowing for sure how calm the waves will be at the other side of the wave.

The third building block of resilience is the ability to make do with whatever is at hand. This skill is called “bricolage”, the roots of that word are closely tied to the concept of resilience, which literally means “bouncing back”. In the modern sense can be defined as a kind of inventiveness, an ability to improvise a solution to a problem without proper or obvious tools or materials, Bricoleurs are always tinkering=building radios from household effects or fixing their own cars, they make he most of what they have, putting objects to unfamiliar uses. When situations unravel, Bricoleurs muddle through imagining possibilities where others are confounded.

That is a good evidence that when people are put under pressure, they regress to their most habituated ways of responding, what we do not expect under life threatening pressure is creativity. The rules & regulations that make some people appear less creative may actually make them more resilient in times of real turbulence.

Since many situations appear that luck plays a good part for the favor of the people. Being lucky is not the same as being resilient. Resilience is a reflex, a way of facing and understanding the world that is deeply etched into a person’s mind and soul, resilient people face reality with staunchness, make meaning of hardship instead of crying out in despair and improvise solutions from thin air, others do not. This is the nature of resilience.

There are two ways to become more resilient:

1-     By talking to yourself.

2-     By retraining your brain.

If you have suffered a major failure, loss or a hit, talk to yourself, give yourself a cognitive intervention and counter defeatist thinking with an optimistic attitude. Challenge your downbeat thinking and replace it with a positive outlook. Within yourself and on your face and interaction with others, fortunately major failures come along rarely in life, but what about bouncing back from the more frequent annoying screwups, minor setbacks and irritating upsets that are routine in any leader’s life?

Resilience is, again the answer, but with a different flavor, you need to retrain your brain!. Your brain has a very different mechanism for bouncing back from cumulative toll of daily hassles, and with a little effort you can upgrade its ability to snap back from life’s downers.

Whenever we get so upset that we say or do something we later regret, that’s a sure sign that our “amygdala” the brain’s radar for danger and the trigger for the fight-or-flight response has hijacked the brain’s executive centers in the brain. The neural key to resilience lies in how quickly we recover from that hijacked state.

The synergy that brings us back to full energy and focus after an “amygdala hijack” concentrates in the left side of our brain area, one of the successful ways in order to go to this area is mindfulness, an attention-training method that teaches the brain to register anything happening in the present moment with full focus but without reacting, Thanks to my manager who introduced me to this amazing & brillianttactics, these are the instructions :

1-     Find a quiet, private place where you can be undistracted for a few minutes. For instance, close your office door & mute your phone.

2-     Sit comfortably with your back straight but relaxed.

3-     Focus your awareness on your breath, staying attentive to the sensations of the inhalation and exhalation and start again on the next breath.

4-     Do not judge your breathing or try to change it in anyway.

5-     See anything else that comes to mind as a distraction like thoughts, sounds, whatever, let them go and return your attention to your breath.

Make this a routine of 30 mins a day and after a couple of weeks you will find a major shift in your attention and focus.

Build up your positive energy, approach that is grounded in actual positive interactions, events & memories, factors that are known to boost resilience, this energy is only produced and stored as assets when we focus on positive things and express gratitude for them, why ? because maintaining a positive outlook and regular expressing gratitude are the billion bars that have real value in backstopping and building resilience, this can significantly decrease anxiety, reduce symptoms of illness and improve the quality of your sleep, all of which of course lead to greater personal resilience.

Keep records, when you commit positive interactions, events & memories to the written word, they register higher value than other non-written forms of positive based activities. Record them down in a journal or a digital equivalent, take a portfolio approach, resilient businesses diversify risk, accordingly resilient individuals diversify their positivity. They look to increase their overall resilience by evaluating what it is that provides the highest returns across their entire life portfolio, and then investing more in those areas most frequently, these high return assets come from our lives outside of the office, while we may spend the majority of waking hours at work (and in transportation like in my case living in Egypt), our job should not be central to our overall positive outlook. Family, friends, health, hobbies & community play major roles. Find a regular time to celebrate and reflect on your positivity. I do it while I am drinking my morning coffee & on the way to work. Make it a habit and your level of resilience and that of your co-workers & surroundings will rise as well.

Among the tests of a leader, few are more challenging & painful than recovering from a career or personal catastrophe, whether it is caused by natural disaster, illness, misconduct or slipups, but real leaders don’t cave in defeat energizes them to rejoin the fray with greater determination and vigor, what prevents a deposed leader from coming back ? leaders who cannot recover have a tendency to blame themselves and are often tempted to dwell on the past rather than look to the future, they secretly hold themselves responsible for their career/personal setback, whether they were or not and get caught in a psychological web of their own making unable to move beyond the position they no longer hold. This dynamic is usually reinforced by well-meaning colleagues and even by family and friends, who may try to lay blame in an attempt to make sense of the chaos surrounding the disaster, sadly their advice can often be more damaging than helpful.

Since I was 9 years old and I was writing novels & movies scripts , and in my research for the best writing methodologies I have realized that In every culture, the ability to transcend life’s adversity is an essential feature of becoming a great leader, the various stories of great leaders around the world in every culture & Era are all essentially the same story, the “hero Myth”, this myth is embodied in the life stages of such universal archetypes as Moses, Jesus, Buddha, Aeneas, Odysseus, etc. they all follow a path that entails a call to greatness, early successes involving tough choices, ongoing trails, profound setbacks & ultimately triumph as they reintegrate into society.

I am convinced that leaders can triumph over tragedy, provided they take conscious steps to do so, for a start, they must carefully decide how to fight back. Once this crucial decision has been taken, they must recruit others into battle, and utilize the tools in their surroundings in their favor, they must then take steps to recover their heroic status, in the process proving to themselves and others that they have the mettle necessary to rediscover their heroic mission. Turn all this process into a structured routine & a daily habit and the inevitability of odds will play in your favor.

The first decision you will face in responding to a disaster is the question of whether to confront the situation that brought you down with an exhausting, expensive & perhaps embarrassing battle or to try to put it behind you as quickly as possible. In the hope that no one will notice or remember for long. In some cases, its best to avoid direct & immediate confrontation.

Getting beyond rage & denial is one of the most important steps on the route to recovery. It is to confront & acknowledge failure, so you set about rebuilding yourself & kingdom, make sure you

1-     Remember that failure is a beginning, not an end, comeback is always possible.

2-     Look to the future, preemptive actions are often more effective than reactive ones, even if they only take the form of standing back & reflecting on what to do next.

3-     Help people deal with your failure, even close friends may avoid you because they don’t know what to say or do, let them know that you are ready for assistance and what kind of aid would be most useful.

4-     Know your narrative, reputation building involves telling & retelling your story to get your account of events out there and to explain your downfall. Be consistent, again the power of Routine & habit.

Fights that will result only in a Pyrrhic victory are best avoided, battles of pure revenge can resemble Shakespearean tragedies, where all parties lose, whether you fight or tactically retreat for a while, it is essential to engage others right from the start to join your battle to put yourself back on track. Friends & acquaintances play an instrumental role in providing support and advice in the process of recovery. The quality of connections is more important than the quantity.

Its not enough for you to recruit others to advance your personal/career status back. To launch your comeback, you must actually do things to win back the support of wider audience, to manage this, you must regain what is called “your heroic status”. The great leader has a heroic persona that confers a larger than life presence. You can achieve this status by developing a personal dream that you offer as a public possession, if your dream is accepted, you achieve renown, if for whatever reason your public vision is ultimately discarded, you suffer the loss of both your private dream and your public identity. After a disaster you can rebound only if you are able to rebuild your heroic stature, that is the public reputation. A significant part of recovering this heroic status involves getting your story out. This calls for a public campaign to educate & inform, find a new heroic mission that renews your passion and creates new meaning in your life, again ... even when forced from familiar arenas into totally new fields, some leaders remain unafraid of trying new ventures, this capacity to bounce back from adversity to prove your inner strength once more by overcoming your shattered confidence is critical to earning lasting greatness & victory.

It is the single minded, passionate pursuit of a heroic mission that sets leaders apart from the general population, and it is what attracts and motivates followers to join them , in the worst of cases, to have that life purpose ripped from you and to be prohibited from its further pursuit can leave an unbearable void and doubts as to your reason for being finding a new mission to replace your lifelong purpose can be a great struggle, but one that is necessary if you are to recover.

Whatever the arena in which your recovery takes shape, the important thing to remember is that we all have choices in life, even in defeat, we can lose our health, money, loved ones, jobs, marriage, kids, but much can be saved, no one can truly define success and failure for us, only we can define that for ourselves, no one can take away our dignity unless we surrender it, no one can take away our hope and pride unless we relinquish them, no one can steal our creativity, imagination & skills unless we stop thinking and lay down dead, no one can stop us from rebounding unless we give up.

We often take a tough approach to resilience & grit, imagine a marine slogging through the mud, a boxer going one more round or a football player picking himself up off the ground for one more play. The longer we tough it out the tougher we are. and therefore the more successful we will be. but it is important to “STOP” and relax. to have your own time to madidate, to release & to practice the steps I have mentioned before to recharge, or else a collapse is inevitable.

As in the most popular movie “Rocky” when he said,

“The world ain't all sunshine and rainbows. It's a very mean and nasty place, and I don't care how tough you are, it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain't about how hard you hit. It's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward; how much you can take and keep moving forward. That's how winning is done! Now, if you know what you're worth, then go out and get what you're worth. But you gotta be willing to take the hits, and not pointing fingers “

The key to resilience is trying really really hard, then stopping, recovering and then trying again, this conclusion is based on biology, homeostasis is a fundamental biological concept describing the ability of the brain to continuously restore and sustain well beings. When the body is out of alignment from overworking/stressing we waste vast mental and physical resources trying to return to balance before we can move forward , hence the “STOP” time. Make it a habit to go every week to the pool , the Spa, to completely disconnect & recharge , I do that with my son every Friday.

Do not worry , reslience is a genetic evolution trait that is built in your DNA by default, the probability of you being born is about 1 in 400 Trillion which are the number of sperms at the moment of your concieving, now think how resilient you are ??

Aladdin Nabil Zayan

[email protected]

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Originally written & adapted by Aladdin Zayan from refrences & sources :

• "Emotional intelligence-Resilience" by Harvard business review press.
• Scrum guide.
• Scrum Values.
• Agile software development principles.
• From Recovery to regulation.
• The collapse of sense-making in orgnizations.