Resiliency – Enabling Transfer of Deep Learning Into Practice

Your headspace is riddled with bullet points, your chest is puffed up by enthusiasm, and you are locked and loaded with mentally rehearsed phrases and gestures as you feel optimally primed to unleash the newfound leadership wisdom at the threshold of the meeting room. By the time you exit the same, your ego is punctured by strange stares, your heart is weighed down by imaginary ridicule and your emotional body is firmly embedded in the trenches.

When it comes to transferring deep learning such as leadership development into practice, our professorial neo-cortex holds commendable intents; however, we too often relegate the execution to the more volatile, reptilian part of the brain, which has a hair trigger for defensive tactics and takes little responsibility for the carnage it often ends up conjuring, leaving pockmarks of guilt, blame and frustration for its more informed counterpart to ruminate over afterwards.

So, how does resiliency come in?

Whilst principally touted for dissipating stresses and bouncing back from challenges and failures, from a more prophylactic perspective, resiliency practices – to be physically fit, mentally agile, emotionally balanced, socially attuned, and spiritually focused – enable us to spend more time in our optimal realm, where we can enact the mindful alchemy of deliberateness and spontaneity; the former being the rational, calculated consciousness and the latter draws from the wellspring of learned intuition.

Inherently, human beings generally possess the propensity to rise to the occasion, if not for the psychological and environmental stresses that are like anvils tied to the bottom of a hot air balloon, which would naturally elevate without further injection of efforts if the counteracting weight were simply lessened.

We can certainly light a huge torch under the balloon in the form of working harder on the learning commitments, but without being aware of the debilitating elements that may be weighing us down, the blood, toil, tears and sweat may end up being just… hot air.