Making Resilience Real: Reflections on Ordinary Resilience

Do you ever feel like you’re trying harder and harder, and yet the harder you try, the more you fall behind?

It could be a sign that you’re up against a resilience limit. And it’s time to deepen your resilience before you weaken it.

Luis Velasquez MBA, PhD. – a brain tumor survivor, executive coach, dedicated father, endurance athlete, Stanford facilitator, proud husband, and overall good human (in no particular order) – has written a book that sheds light on a topic that is all too often exaggerated or simplified.

Resilience is, in fact, ordinary. And we can all practice it – starting with the five pillars Luis outlines in Ordinary Resilience: Rethinking How Effective Leaders Adapt and Thrive.

Step 1: Embrace the Suck.

Something about the situation is not what you want it to be.

The traps:

1.?????? Waiting for the situation to resolve itself

2.?????? Trying every possible solution yourself

Whichever trap you may find yourself in, chances are that the situation persists – and you keep responding to it in the same way.

Perhaps you’re communicating more (but you still respond by communicating).

Perhaps you’re doing more (but you still respond by doing).

Perhaps you’re avoiding getting in the middle of something (but you’re still responding by avoiding).

Perhaps you’re crying more, and it’s very upsetting (but you’re still responding by being upset).

The list goes on.

Like the boiled frog, the situation intensifies little by little – without our noticing just how bad it’s really getting – until it’s all the sudden too much.

Step 1 involves being willing to see the parts that we may not want to accept, accept it for what it is, and work intentionally to see other options.

As Luis often says, to do differently, we have to think differently, and to think differently, we have to see differently.

Sometimes, seeing differently requires an outside perspective. Our commitment to seeing the situation as we want to see it may run deeper than we know? - often butting up against fears we didn’t’ even know were there.

Which brings us to Step 2: Face Your Fears.

Luis provides a nuanced list of fears in the book, and for our purposes, many of them boil down to:

What does this say about who I am, what might happen to me, or what might happen with others?

We can get so stuck in our stories about who we are, what might happen to us, and what others might do that we start to believe these stories are real.

It’s important to recognize what's behind the stories and call it what it is: fear.

Fear is not reality, but it can create a response in our body that is so strong it makes us believe we are under attack. And then we want to push away reality. By telling ourselves a story.

This is no way to address a problem.

Five years ago, when I started planning to venture away from my corporate role, I had no way of figuring out exactly how to proceed. I simply had a general direction: an idea of who I wanted to help and how.

I would have never been able to figure it all out, as my day job and my new “job” pulled from the same area of my brain – one that was already working on overdrive.

So I listed my fears – all with the goal of devising solutions.

I created two columns on a sheet of paper. On the left side I wrote down every possible fear I had, no matter how ridiculous it seemed. On the right side I forced myself to think of at least three solutions or actions I would take if each fear should come to pass.

When it was all said and done, I had listed more than 20 fears and 60 possible solutions.

Getting it on paper made it all seem that much more possible – and made me realize how silly some of my fears actually were.

Only two or three required an actual action – all the others were various scenarios my brain was going to continue to run on repeat until I had them down on the paper.

Writing it down may sound trivial or minor, but it matters immensely for both individuals and organizations trying to move in a new direction.

As long as it’s in our brain and not on paper, we can trick ourselves into thinking we really know something about it, or that we’re actually doing something about it. It’s often only when we get it outside of our own head that we see it closer to what it actually is.

Amy Webb , CEO of Future Today Institute and a #1 ranked management thinker and expert on strategy and foresight, often refers to resilience being critical to the success of a company’s strategy.

In her world, resilience comes from scenario planning – essentially a more sophisticated way of listing your fears and planning for them, based on which are more likely to pass. Doing this allows us to reasonably evaluate the risk of each scenario, and plan accordingly. So that we can pivot when it matters.

Jane McGonigal , author of Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Be Ready for Anything, has taken participants through immersive scenarios for decades. Her work provides ample proof that those who play scenarios out - thinking and even acting through what they would do in various imaginable situations - are much more prepared to handle the situations when something similar comes to pass.

Until we acknowledge our fears – which as Luis shows in his book, is possible by unearthing them – it is very difficult to run appropriate scenarios that allow us to move forward in wise and measured ways.

Which is what makes us more resilient.

If you don’t know what fear feels like for you, try doing something that makes you uncomfortable. For no other reason than to know what fear feels like in your body.

One of my favorite examples from the book was Luis going through the McDonald’s drive through to ask for a refill on a hamburger. Of course he would get rejected – and the resistance to doing something that makes us feel like we might get rejected is a form of fear.

It could be something a little scarier. Scott Simon , founder of the Scare Your Soul movement and keynote speaker on courage, sang and played guitar outside a restaurant. He didn’t sing and had scars from grade school around singing.

Whatever it is for you, do it. However big or small. You have to prove to yourself that you can feel it and live through it.

The more you do it, the faster you can recognize what it feels like in your body.

Only then will you be able to embrace reality enough to face your fears and run the scenarios.

Then you can choose to ignore it when it doesn’t matter – and choose wisely to address it when it does.

Once we have run the scenarios, we have a better idea of where we really need support to move to that next stage.

It’s time for Step 3: Build Relationships.

You need other people in your corner – lots of them. We can get so immersed in our level of responsibility that we can forget to look around.

Sometimes we are so zoned in on the issues that we forget who is already in our corner.

Sometimes we only have one type of person in our corner – and we need different types of people to advance.

Luis breaks these down into five categories – mentor, sponsor, partner, mentee, and competitor.

I like to think of his these types of people in question form. If you are able to answer yes to each of these five questions, you have support network you need to practice resilience, grow, and thrive:

1.?????? Am I learning from at least one person who has “been there, done that?”

2.?????? Do I have at least one person who is advocating and opening doors for me?

3.?????? Do I have supportive and trusting partners that grow with me and give me a fresh perspective?

4.?????? Am I learning by trying to teach what I think I know to someone else?

5.?????? Is there at least one healthy rivalry out there – someone whose edge of excellence inspires me to be better and continue to work on my own. ??

For some people, one person in each category might be enough. I have found that I am at my best when I can identify multiple people in each category. These people are those that I admire and respect, that I try to give to at least as much as I take.

With the exception of when I am paid to be someone’s “thought partner,” strategist, advisor, or coach – as part of their network of support – I typically don’t have anything specific that I seek to get out of these relationships.

In other words, I am interested in them simply for who they are, not for what I can get. Relationships need to inspire, and in my book, even the ones that involve an exchange of money should be inspirational!

That said, we all only have a certain amount of time to invest in our network – Dunbar’s number suggests we can only reasonably keep in touch with 150 people – so we do need to be choiceful about the people in our circle of regular contact.

When we need a specific change to happen, it can be time to look more critically at that circle – what it’s doing for our energy as well as our goals. ?

From there, we can go to Step 4: Find Your Inner Strength.

We can lean on others for support, but no one can do it for us. At some point we have to take a microscope to our real goals, challenges, choices, and commitments so that we can make the progress we want to make.

This level of detail often allows us to identify the choices that are actually ours to make and adjust our pace - so that we can make progress, and build stamina.

Borrowing lessons from endurance running, Luis shows us how failing to pace yourself often means you won’t have the resources you need to make it all the way to the finish line. Clarity of choices and steps makes it possible to run better experiments and build our endurance over time – not having to pull back and recover each time we shoot for the moon and get exhausted by it. This makes us more likely to actually reach our "moonshot" goals.

From there, we get to move on to Step 5: Solve for Fulfilment. It’s the thing we all want, and the thing you’ll have to read more about in the book.

For now, it’s important to note that resilience is not a one-time event.

Neri Karra Sillaman, Ph.D. - 3x TEDx speaker and expert who sits at the intersection of business longevity, resilience, and sustainability - says “it’s wrong to assume that… once you are resilient, you’re going to continue to be. Resilience is a dynamic skill that has to be nurtured and developed.”

What Luis does in Ordinary Resilience is shows us how to pull ourselves out of the trenches of survival if that’s where we happen to find ourselves, and then to cultivate that skill of resilience. A skill that allows us to spend more time, more often in the place we all want to be: fulfillment.