Preparing for Resilience with Kathryn Britton
Senia Maymin, PhD
Chief People Officer | Stanford PhD | Data-driven, ROI-focused, people-first leader | Board Presentations, HR Strategy, M&A, Employee Life Cycle
What can we do right now to be ready if disaster comes? How to we prepare ourselves to face whatever the future brings?
Watch the entire conversation here, or play the embedded video below.
All the words below are Kathryn Britton's, except where otherwise marked.
Senia: Could you tell us what you mean by preparing to be resilient?
Back in 2008 there was a lot of uncertainty about jobs, even in the tech world. The Anita Borg Foundation invited me to write an article answering the question, “What could you do during this period of waiting to be better able to face whatever came?” That caused me to write Building Resilience for Hard Times.
These ideas aren’t to be tucked in a drawer until you get laid off. They can help you prepare now so that you are ready whenever major difficulty arrives.
Overview of the Four Practices
Here's a quick summary of the practices you can use to build resilience now for situations in the future:
- Calm. Learn how to calm yourself down.
- Your Spirits. Collect your personal positivity portfolio, the set of things that raise your spirits.
- Framing. Work on the way you frame what happens to you. Know how much interpretive latitude you have, and then pick interpretations that leave you with hope and energy. Many resilience programs are focused heavily on the skill of reframing what happened in a beneficial way.
- Assets. Keep an inventory of your assets so that you know what you have to work with. These can be your strengths, your skills, your connections, your financial resources.
With all four of these practices, you don't have to wait until disaster strikes. You can practice calming yourself now, figuring out what technique really works for you. You can collect your positivity generators. You can observe the ways that you tend to interpret events and practice more resilient interpretations. Finally, it makes sense to update your inventory of assets periodically.
A Technique to Calm Yourself Down
When things go wrong, it really is important to calm yourself first because if you are in a state of high fear or anger, you have less access to the analytical thinking part of your brain. All of the rest of the practices require analytical thinking. My suggestion is to experiment to find what works best for you. I find that breathing at a slow steady rate of six breaths per minute calms me down physically. I have heard that 6 breaths per minute is the rate associated with Tibetan chants.
I had an app with a little bar that went up for the inhale and down for the exhale. Now I have a feeling from having practiced enough. You could try the coherence breathing that Brian Branagan described recently. What works for me may not be what works for you. Experiment with breathing, meditation, yoga, distraction, going for a walk, visualization, listening to music, talking to a friend, or anything else that you find calms you down. Then if you find yourself getting very anxious or very angry or very upset, you know what to do. This can be a tool in your resilience toolbox.
Positivity Portfolio
The second practice is also very much based on knowing yourself. What kinds of things raise your spirits? I have certain books that I reread because I know they make me feel better by reminding me of the good side of human beings. I have music that gives me pleasure. I have videos and cartoons that make me laugh. I have a file of appreciative emails that I reread when I need to be reminded of people that are important to me and what I’ve done to help them. Senia made me a YouTube video for my birthday that I frequently watch when I need a boost. Nico Rose wrote a recent article about creating your positive portfolio on your Smart phone so you can access it in odd moments. Collect things that raise your spirits so that you have them handy when you need to a boost.
Use Interpretive Latitude
The next practice is to find the most beneficial ways of interpreting what happens to you.
Let's assume for example that I've just lost my job. I can view this as, "I have just been totally rejected," or as, "There are business reasons that my services aren't needed right now." Thus, I have at least two interpretations that could be true.
If you have multiple ways that you can interpret a particular event, any one of which could be just as true as any other, why not pick one that puts you in a place where you can feel as whole as possible in that moment?
Senia: On behalf of the skeptics, let me ask, “But what if it's not true? Why am I deceiving myself?"
You have to be able to distinguish between what one researcher, Sandra Schneider, calls fuzzy knowledge and fuzzy meaning. Fuzzy knowledge is when you just don’t know the facts. You can’t just pick the fact you want. For example, if I've been exposed to COVID-19, I can't choose to say I don't have the disease. I either have it or I don't. If my boss tells me I’ve lost my job, that is a fact. I am not free to choose to say “I didn’t lose my job.” That would be a falsehood.
Fuzzy meaning refers to making meaning out of the circumstances. There are often multiple possible meanings that could fit the facts.
I am not suggesting that you talk yourself out of the truth of what you've experienced. But when there's a range of possible interpretations, many people have the habit of choosing one on the negative side that makes them feel bad. That’s often not necessary.
This interpretation skill is often called reframing. Look at a situation and say, "How much latitude do I have here? What are the facts that are known, and how much is stretchy and could mean a variety of things?"
If my manager had said, "You lost your job because you're a total screw up," that would have narrowed the range of possibly true interpretations. But let’s assume he did not.
So why pick an interpretation that puts you in a worse spot than you need to be in? Figure out how much interpretive latitude you have, and then choose an interpretation on the positive side.
Take Inventory
Taking inventory is something you can do and redo many times. Make lists of your assets.
What are your strengths? If you don’t know, you could take an online strengths inventory or ask friends what they see as your strengths.
List your specific skills and certifications. List the people in your network. Look for people who are weak connections, friends of friends of friends who might be able to help you find another job. Create SARI stories about your major accomplishments so that you can tell them humbly, truthfully, and powerfully.
Collect this information so that you know what you have to work with. Perhaps make a habit of updating it on a semi-annual basis. You might come up with skills that you want to build further, or relationships that you want to nurture.
Many people are surprised by how much they have going for them. When you have your inventory ready, you know what you have to offer.
So that's a quick trip through the four ways to prepare to be resilient. You don't have to wait till disaster strikes to do any of them. You could help a friend with a reminder to calm down before taking any other steps. Perhaps you could offer to breathe slowly together.
Using the Four Practices with a Team
Senia: How do you suggest that a team use these ideas to work toward team resilience?
I hadn't thought of that before, but why not? A team has to face various resilience threats, such as difficulties meeting tight deadlines.
The team could start by breathing together or starting a meeting with a guided meditation to help everybody stay calm. At the very beginning of a meeting about a disaster, you could say, "Let's take a few minutes and breathe in a really slow, steady rate. Let's do that together to calm down the general sea of worry.”
Teams can create shared positive portfolios. What things tend to raise the spirits of team members? Are there ways that team members can play together to reduce stress? I was on one team that used Nerf toys to unwind. What things do team members like to talk about that help them feel connected? Shared interests in sports? Maybe the boss always tells a really dumb joke at the end of team meetings so people exit with a shared groan or laugh.
Teams can practice interpretive latitude together. Are there other ways to look at this situation that don’t feel like quite such a threat? That could be a group discussion, "Okay, maybe it is a threat or maybe we can find another way of interpreting it that gives us more energy."
Finally, the inventory. What strengths do we have on this team? Who can help us with these threats? What kinds of assets do we have that can help us face this difficulty?
I can really picture doing it in a group setting.
Primary Takeaway
Senia: What is that one thing that you most wish for people to take away from this discussion?
Be prepared to calm yourself down. That is fundamental. To have the other approaches ready to go, but to be able to pull yourself back from the edge of high anger, grief, or anxiety to open the way for zest and curiosity.
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Photo by Xiaolong Wong on Unsplash