Thriving Through Change: Reactivating Your Resilience

Sarah  00:04 

Hi, everyone, and thanks for joining us today. My name is Sarah and I’m here with Dr. Cynthia Scott. Before we kick things off, we’d like to start off with having you open up your questions box and just type in let us know where are your feet touching the ground and one word that describes your own resilience. And you can type your responses in the questions box there on your control panel. So we have Christina from Yorktown, Virginia. Her word is evolving. We have Jenna from Lacey Washington active. We have Joan admitted shaky, very sad both feet flat on the ground, and overtaxed. Christopher is from New Hampshire and said varied. Cory is right in front of me good most days. Let’s see. We also have Mandy from California and investments. Oh, Randall said Randles from Indiana and says Just keep swimming. Teresa said a bit overwhelmed. Javier, you said you don’t see the chat right where you typed your question in there that you said you didn’t see the chat. That is the spot where you’ll want to type your answers. And have you ever you are from Northern Virginia. August is from Colorado and progressing. And let’s read a couple more here before we get begin. Ashley like drinking from a fire hose. And then we have surely in Virginia forever curious. I just want to keep reading these off because they’re so great. We have Alesia stuff is so crazy things can literally only get better. Margo says rebuilding Julie’s from Oklahoma and says ebbs and flows. And one more we’ll read off here is Carol from North Carolina trying Well, thanks, everybody for for chatting in and we can anytime you have a question or comment today, type your type that in that questions box there. We will be monitoring that. And now as Cynthia if we could get to that the next slide here and we will we’ll start the beginning of today’s session. And welcome everybody. Today’s webinar is thriving through change reactivating your resilience hosted by HRD qu and presented by Dr. Cynthia Scott. My name is Sarah and I will moderate today’s webinar. The webinar will last around one hour. And on this next slide here, we’d like to talk about today’s sponsor. Today’s webinar is sponsored by HR DQ store for more than 40 years HR DQ has been a provider of research based training resources for classroom virtual and online soft skills training. HR DQ offers learning resources to help retain employees and clients and make better decisions improve performance and much more. You can learn more at HR DQ store.com. And today’s webinar is presented by Dr. Cynthia Scott. Cynthia is founder of change works labs and has focused her work on supporting leaders to create the conditions where change is easier and sustainable. She’s focused on how we can get create how we can create resilience and to move to a regenerative future. Cynthia has been a lifelong social entrepreneur, consultant and author applying behavioral science to help individuals and organizations thrive. Her pioneering programs, models and tools that have helped accelerate adaption to change and transform cultures to help people thrive. She has provided thought leadership in the areas of personal and organizational change, burnout prevention and personal performance improvement. Cynthia is the author of mastering the change curve found at HR DQ store.com. And thank you very much for joining us today. Cynthia, I’ll pass the show over to you. 

04:20 

Wonderful, Sarah. Thank you. Can you hear me? Well? 

Sarah  04:24 

Yes, your audio sounds 

04:26 

good. Good. Well, I love that you all welcome everyone. And I’m so pleased to be with you. I’ve got to offer you a slide of the forest. And as let me invite you to kind of settle in you’ve already said you know, how are you and where are your feet? What part of the country you’re in what part of the world you’re in. I love to walk in the forest and I use this to slide to remind myself that we can all just take a nice deep breath when we aren’t something like this, you’ve probably rushed in from some meeting or gone out of the car, or, you know, put in your headset, and here we are in the forest. So I’d like you to just take a nice deep breath, as you look into this forest and feel your shoulders expand. Just allow yourself to kind of be in your body, you’ve already said, where your feet are. Now, where your shoulders are, 

05:27 

where you’re sitting, the chairs, holding you up, and just take a nice whole body breath. And think of the respiration that the forest takes all the time. The forests are kind of the lungs of our of our world. So the forest is breathing, we’re breathing. So welcome. And I do that, I do that to help us remember that. We can take a little moment, I start a lot of my meetings now with this kind of slide. And even though people say what are you doing? What are you doing? It’s because we need to remember that we can be still and quiet. So let me welcome you. And and thank you for showing up. I know what many of you had to make some choices. And this has been a really crazy time. And all of you have been resilient yourselves, your families, your teams, your organizations, and your communities in many ways. And you are not alone. We are having a time I want to I want to weigh in that we are having a time that is more challenging than most of us have ever seen. And the changes are deeper and more numerous and rapid, and on many levels. And many of you are in the process of rethinking what you’re doing and what matters to you. Actually, McKinsey had a study recently that said two thirds of the workforce is rethinking their lives. I started my research on resilience, looking at burnout in physicians, these are expensive human capital. And when they burn out they are it’s costly to restore them. And I turn my attention to reading books about physicians healing themselves and rekindling commitment from burnout to balance and leadership or sustainability and change. I like to write books because it’s a way that ideas can influence in and start conversations. And I have a training, my training is in anthropology in cross cultural work, and psychology and in leadership. And I really focused my studies and practice to help build out this resilience canvas that I’m going to share with you today. Because I like you and curious about what people are doing, and how can we do it better. And most recently, I’ve really started stretching my thinking about resilience, which is was firmly rooted in sustainability, which is about kind of doing less bad to shifting towards more regenerative nature based principles to guide my thinking about resilience. So I’m going to mix some of that in today. And here’s what we’re going to do today, I’m going to help you understand and know that you are not crazy that this is a disruptive, transformative territory and the kinds of things you’ve said about being over overworked, crazy, you know, ebbs and flows over text, shaky, all that stuff is really true. So I want to help you understand, you are not lost, you are not crazy. This is different than your grandparents and your parents territory. And I’m going to help you remember that you’re already resilient, I’m going to help you re relook at the things that you’re already doing, and give you time to explore how to apply what we know about resilience to your work in your life. And I’m going to leave you with a very simple map that will hopefully, in my experience, give you the competence and clarity to help you stand up and keep going. So this part, I’m gonna go back to this because I have a little introduction here. And I was telling Sarah, I added this from two days ago, I was actually I’m participating in a year long course on regenerative leadership, and there are 300 people around the world. And two days ago, I got to hear Charlie Felgate, who is head of visioning for decathlon. Now those of you in the states may not know what the Katholikon is, but if you’re around the world, and They have 15 1570 stores in 70 countries, they got 10,500 employees, they’re not in the US, but they’re kind of like the Walmart of sports. And their mission is, how to take how to sustainably make pleasure, the pleasure and benefit of sport accessible to many, very interesting organization. And what Charlie and his team have been doing for the last seven years, is really helping decathlon stretch into the future, and see across all this turbulence and kind of find their own path. And one of the ways that they’ve been doing that is collecting over 1000 stories from people, both within the organization and outside the organization, about the world people want to live in. So if you’re in sport, they’re they’re actually going to swimming pools and asking swimmers, you know, these kinds of questions. And what they found is that there’s key themes that have been bubbling up. And what people seem to want is a world where there’s health, where there’s some kind of transport where they can move around easily, where there’s local living, and it’s regenerative. It’s beyond sustainable, it is healed back and it’s inclusive. So what’s interesting that Charlie was talking about was the thing that he’s learned most is that it’s the fear of looking at where we’re going, and seeing the mountains that we’ve got to climb. And in some ways admitting to the missteps of our choices and actions that we’ve taken in the past. And also, especially for leaders, not knowing what to do, being in that kind of open to new ideas place. And he he also said something, and he says he changed his slides from bullets to marshmallows instead of bullet points. So he says, It sounds like I’m shooting people, he says, I’ve changed it to marshmallows. So that I, my points are now bringing ideas to people when they’re ready to digest them. So I really got a lot out of his, his his talk was both inspirational and heartening that somebody in an organization of that size with kind of the focus on profit, as well as all these other things, is looking at the future. So let’s also say that, we also know, in the same way that the future is already here, it’s just not equally distributed. And I became very aware of that, as I spent the last 10 years at Presidio graduate school, which was dedicated to teaching all of our business and administration, public administration students, every course in business through the lens of sustainability. And what I have 

13:08 

been in with these 1500 amazing people, is that we are really on the bridge and standing in the tension between the now and the future. And what what better guidance that we need now is how to be resilient and how to how to how to keep ourselves going. And the last thing that I was thinking of as I put this presentation together, it reminds me of the work I was doing at the Institute for the Future in the early 2000s. And we were working for Steelcase you may recognize Steelcase for office furniture, they wanted to know what the office of the future is going to be like, I don’t think we could have imagined that it’s going to be your home. They wanted to keep making cubicles and fancy chairs and, and also working with the healthcare industry to help them understand the impact that patient centered empowerment was going to have on facilities and, and services. But we were working on a book authored by Mary O’Hara, Deborah called navigating the Badlands. And it was titled thriving in the decade of radical transformation. And we published it in 2002. And what I did is I opened it back up, it’s up here on my shelf, and I said, Wow, here it is. 2022. The book actually opens the front page says the year is 2020. And it’s welcoming the reader as a lucky navigator of the most challenging upheaval of the past 1000 years. Well, this is the map that we had in our book. This is the map we created From all the trends, and all the different kinds of inputs that people were trying to navigate through, and basically you’ll see that it’s very dense. It basically was the kind of map that people said, Oh my gosh, you know, this, this is rough. It’s filled with paths, but they did end. And then there’s no connection between one path and the other. And you have to kind of go through and find a path, you’ll see all the people walking different ways. And you’ll see a lot of different kinds of we call them pains. They’re going to have, you know, leadership insecurity. I don’t know what to do. I got strategy, tragedy, I’ve got talent, tantrums, I’ve got consumer conundrums, we have spun, naming all these pains, and looking at value vexation and regulation, riddles, and sprinkled in here was also issues about social unrest, the wealth gap, tensions between cultures, ecosystem, upheaval, climate change, this is enough to like really make your brain hurt. And you’ll notice along the bottom, this is where the dead ends and the burials that repeat, we definitely were calling out that some things are not going to work in the future. And you’ll also see over to the right, and 2012, you know, here we are, in 2022, we started to pull out some things about biotechnology and plant based vaccines and biofuels. And that whole area has really exploded, that’s where a lot of the graduates of Presidio and other universities and like yourselves are working in this new future. But what’s interesting here is that this is showing this actually scared a lot of people. 

16:59 

In 2002, they said, Oh, my gosh, you know, it’s going to be rough. Well, the things we didn’t predict is this going to last a lot longer than we thought we’d be in that smooth sailing by 2012, I got to tell you that we’re still in the middle of this. And so I want to also say that we don’t have to be scared, because it’s important to understand that you are not crazy with what you’re feeling, and the overwork and the overwhelm. And all of these things is right on track. What I want to do is take you to the why resilience now. And I always go to Joshua Cooper Raymo and his age of the unthinkable. And he has some things because I think it’s important that we look at this complexity and say, we have two choices, we can do hope or fear. And a lot of people are kind of backing into fear and getting pretty, pretty threatened by what’s going on. And I would like to invite you out into the hopefulness. And that’s part of what we’re going to do today is help you understand what people are doing well, and to encourage you to take risks. Opportunity awaits when you take risk. Staying still in the Badlands doesn’t work so well. And the paradox is, the more risk you take, the more hopeful you become because you bump into others doing other things. It’s been so great to go out to conferences, I was just in Sun Valley with a group of, of senior leaders and you know, 250 of them that hadn’t met in two and a half years. And it’s like hearing the stories of what they’ve been doing all over the country, and innovation and entrepreneurism and struggling, it’s bumping into those stories makes you more hopeful. And the lessons from history and I would insert here nature is that winners engage in more change, nature has been changing and inventing stuff. And if it doesn’t work, it goes away. So there is this diversity and prototyping, that is inherent in being able to engage with change and not need to go back to the things you’ve you’ve done before, even if they’ve helped you survive. And I’m really convinced that it’s this individual and organizational resilience is going to be the place that we really find our way through. I put this list in this is the list of many people who’ve been doing lots of research on on this topic and you know, you’ll see the words coping and positive psychology and flow and stress and hardiness. I like saluto Genesis, and grit and mindfulness. All calm names of people have been trying to figure out what people are doing. And my my experience has been to take all this because I’m a psychologist and an anthropologist and I like to see what people are doing. But how do we make it into a map of how we can navigate? And I’d like to take a moment and maybe it’s Sarah we were so good at the first one is where are you seeing the manifestations of Babylon the of the Badlands in your life? You know, what, where’s it popping up? Where is it bubbling up? Where’s it got you in a box canyon? Where does it where’s it? You know, pivot in you off the path. So let’s just take a moment in the question box because that’s our that’s our place where we can pull chat together and wanting to kind of see how you are experienced that. So let’s, let’s let’s see how this is landing for you. So Sarah is going to be my reader because she can see this. Yeah, we are we on track. Are you in the Badlands? 

Sarah  21:09 

We have some responses coming in here. So we have a shake guna who said dealing with unending organizational change. Rhonda said people unwilling to embrace the current situation out of fear. Francie said trying to hand off responsibilities for managing projects with mixed results. Mandy said employee morale said hiring challenges Matt says when pulled into multiple pulled in multiple directions. Jerry said a strategy tragedy George says interaction with a new generation falling behind an empathy. Heavier set the multiple hats and competing expectations. Julie said makes me want to retire. To what? And we have a couple of three. A couple more. Here we have Femi handling multiple tasks, Randall leading in a time of change and to boost moral morale and keep and attain staff and said being micromanaged hiring challenges from Carol. And Carol said amen to all of them. Okay, okay. 

22:35 

Well, I hope this helps you we could go on because every time I open up this question, we just kind of people spill out with all kinds of experiences. So I want to keep us moving because I want to help you understand how we can translate what we know about resilience into being more resilient, even in the turbulence that we’ve got, might take you to the first 

23:03 

let me tell you, I use this this framework from David Rock. He’s a neuroscientist, and he’s really brilliant in translating all of the things that happen in the brain into organizational, helping us understand why we feel so threatened. What he’s done is show the impact of threats on the brain. And usually we think of physical threats, like in the old, you know, chased by tigers running from bears and bad dogs, whatever it is the social threat, he mapped out the social threats that we’re experiencing, because in your brain, your brain activates the same area. A social threat activates the same area as a physical threat. So it goes off if somebody punches you in the arm. Or if they say something very disrespectful in the workplace, you get your brain activated in the same place. So we are always getting fired up about these five elements, our status you talked about, you know, they’re trying to push things off on me. I don’t you know, I can’t, I can’t. The certainty the way I hired before is not how it works. Now the autonomy, I don’t get to, to set out how I do things. My friends have changed who I thought was my friend and not be my friend. And the biggest upset for people. All is fairness. And so you these are the things if it feels unfair, people feel really wronged. And so this is going on in your brain, and it’s going on in your family and it’s going on in your workplace and your community so we are being massively scarfed by by social threats as well as physical threats. So I want you to hold this in mind and the Badlands threatens every element of this social, the social, standing. This is how I think about resilience. And it’s not about it’s not about being untouched by adversity, or unruffled. It’s about how you use the difficulty to transform yourself, your organization and your world. How do you spread your roots? How do you find new places of nourishment, and resilience, and just heading into some basic definitions. Basically, in the dictionary, it’s about recovering quickly. It’s a toughness, it’s an elasticity. It’s talks about recovery, survival, and rebounding. But it doesn’t mean that bad things aren’t going to happen. And you’re going to stumble, and go to get back up again, over and over again. So I’m kind of taking resilience out to the long game. And rethinking are kind of talking about resilience as this heroic against all odds sort of one time thing in your life. In the Badlands, it’s gonna happen over and over again. So it’s an everyday capacity that you use all all your life. And I want to say that you already have been resilient, if you’re still breathing and sitting and working, you know, 20% of the employed population, people who can make it to work every day, have some kind of mental, medical, mental, or physical challenge that makes it really hard for them. So we’ve got a lot of people who are really resilient in just coming to work. And that nature can guide us in this experience of regeneration, because nature’s been at this for 3.8 billion years. And we’re being able to release ourselves from this kind of heroic mechanistic event based model that resilience happens. And then something else happens that nature is helping us to understand regenerative thinking. And the way I kind of look at this is, nature has principles that can help us restore both our ecosystems inside ourselves, and our organization. So there’s all kinds of ideas springing up around how to organize your, your workplace, how to think about products. It was just it was just so rich been at this, this conference with all these people who are making. I mean, they are making beer out of the spent grain of, of, 

28:00 

I’m sorry, beer, no beer batter they’re making, they’re making beer out of the spent, bring us in brewing. So if you have, they have stout bars that they take from the stout, they also make beer flour, which is really interesting. So we have to be hopeful in this in this ecosystem. So let’s look at your own resilience. And I’m going to invite you to think about or take yourself to a time and I know, just take a nice breath, because we’ve been talking about a whole bunch of Scarfie things and take yourself to a time in your life when you had something happen. And you restored your resilience. It could be small, it could be big. It could be a long time ago. It could be yesterday. Just want you to get one in mind, because I’m going to ask you some questions about it. And I know some of you are just like ticking off the box saying and then and then and then but just focus on one and take a nice deep breath. Let me ask you some questions. In this experience, did you make sense of what was happening? Could you make a story about what kind of time this was for you? Or did you give it a movie title or, or a song title? Did you take direct action on things that you could do something about? You did not wait for permission? 

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Did you calm your body and mind? settle yourself down. Go to the couch. Did you stretch beyond your limits? Did you Do something you didn’t think you could do, and you did it. 

30:04 

And it’s someone noticed you, appreciate you or support you. So the questions that I asked you really relate to the five areas of the resilience canvas. And each one of these have been looked at all the research and worked with a lot of people, over the years at lots of levels and organizations is, there are five chunks, and I sometimes talk about this as like Disney Land, there are five lands that we go to five areas that we use to restore our resilience. And these are simple, you can put them on one hand. So if you hold up your hand, you’ve got five fingers, these are the five fingers of resilience. And some of you are familiar with these things that I’m going to explain them now. And some of you this is like you haven’t visited this, or you haven’t visited in a long time, what I’m going to help you remember and see how you have been activating your resilience all along. A couple of things before we go into that is age does not predict resilience. This is not something for a younger person or an older person is how much exposure to challenge that you have navigated through. So it’s better to have had some experience rather than the first time you wake up is, you know, I’m in the middle of COVID, and nothing like this has ever happened. And this thing about being on a trusted team, or having trust somewhere in your life. And we’ll talk about that when we talk about the sea of connection. Because this matters. And so those of you who are in charge of teams out there, building the sense of trust with a small group really helps people do well and helps them do better. And resilience is tied to where you are in the organization. And this is very peculiar, because if you are in a high demand, low control roll, we have all kinds of data that shows you tend to get sicker more often. Because you have less choice less involve less involvement, and less participation. And so what happens is, if you’re higher in the organization in the traditional hierarchy, you’ve got more flexibility. And so what happened during COVID is people got access to this flexibility. And they don’t want it to go away. They we need to apply that level of trust and flexibility to all levels of work, and giving people choice about how they how they make it through their day. These core practices are universal. I’ve been doing workshops all over the world, it’s been very interesting. And people have really found that they can translate them into their daily lives in ways that that make sense to them. And the last you can, we can learn, we can build this stuff. And all we need is some attention and some feedback. And a little time. So what I’m gonna do is tell you a story about someone who called this was my first workshop out after COVID. And this happened to be a Presidio grad. And she was actually heading up a very large global winery, and not just any winery, they made champagne. So it was really fun to go work with these folks. But these folks were in California, but they had been through really turbulent times. Their Badlands consisted of fires and smoke and damage to the grapes and challenge to the vintage. They had COVID they had deaths in their staff and in their families and in the communities in which they lived. They had a lot of disrupted customers pretty upset because they had paid ahead for this certain kind of experience of the tasting room and they were not happy with his modified kind of experience. And the staff were exhausted and burned out and they felt stretched and they were washing glasses at night and trying to open the thing back and forth. And so basically what we did is we brought them together, and they hadn’t been together for two and a half years. 

34:56 

And the request was please help us renew Help us understand what we’ve all been through, help us get back to what we had before and help us kind of re re recreate the energy in our team. So what I did is I took my experience a mind map, and I said, I’m going to bring you you know what we’ll meet for half day and a half day, it was glorious to actually see live people out of zoom boxes. And I brought them a map that helped them understand what they’ve been going through. And again, with coherence, having a map having an understanding of you are not lost, you are not crazy, you are in a territory or in the Badlands. But let me also say, the map is not the territory map is just a representation. A map is a picture, a picture of what you think might be going on. And just like with any GPS, every time you start down a path, it changes a little bit. So it does give you a courage to begin. That’s what a map does, it says there is Knapp, Utah, and I can drive there, there is this road, and I can go there. And it gives you some sense that there is a future and that you’re going from here to there. Now, what also is funny is the bridge is too small here. We had to get it on one page, because if there’s a lot more that happens from going to burn out and COVID and all this stuff on the left hand side, and how do I start the journey on the right hand side? How and notice I didn’t say excellence, I said enhanced resilience, you know, because the the horizon is going to keep shifting, we’re going to have to go around and around this map over and over again. And I often use these kinds of pictures to help people feel that they’re not lost. And just like what Decathlon is doing, they’re going across the bridge with what is going to happen to scheme and golf with, with the reduction in water and snow. So they’re having to think across this. Let me take you now in the time that we have into the resilience canvas and give you some examples of how these chunks of experience are bubbling up. And as you do this, I want you to look for and think about and you may want to write down little signs of resilience. And I’m going to talk both about from the personal side, and from the team and organizational side. Because I really have seen and I use these as ways of creating capability in persons and capability in teams, organizations and communities. So I use this kind of as my map. Coherence is that that part where you make sense of it? It was that question, what did you tell your story? You know, how do your values line up with what you’ve got going on? What what how have you changed your story? What is no longer important? What is now important? So the restore in the making up of the way you understand what’s happening? Are you a victim? Or are you finding your way through with people? They are really looking at? What am I doing with my life? 

38:45 

You know, how can i What do I want more of or less of people are in massive resetting of coherence. This is the resignation. This is the hiring challenges you’re having. They are not coming back. The Google bus is just starting to come through my neighborhood in San Francisco, but it’s like people are not willing to put in an hour on the on the bus to go to some desk. And we have to have compassion for ourselves. This is not an easy thing to do. This used to be called, you know, midlife crisis without having it all the way through our life. And what’s happening at the organizational level is helping people see and this is a i i worked with an organization that was taking all their branches and turning them in you know, taking them out of branches and taking them back into a virtual setup. And this happened way before COVID They were they came up with this you know mighty transformation that they were doing and and the importance of metaphor that the senior team came up with something they call the three legged stool. So And I said, this is not very inspiring. Who wants to sit on the three legged stool? I said, How can we transform and I use the person that I, that draws these wonderful maps, and she put them in, the three things became sales of their ship, and how they will use those things, to guide themselves to catch the winds to steer around competition. And we did a lot of work with that organization of harvesting the history of times before when they had steered and pivoted. So, the coherence is a very important part of how are you explaining and whether it be to your family, your kids, the people you bump into at the grocery store, what is happening in your life, and you if you are explaining danger and fear and threat that is scarfing on your brain, you are running your brain and sort of self scaring yourself. So look at what story you’re telling. And this is that whole reframing new narrative. How can you tell a new story? How can you tell a story of the future that you want to see, the second one has to do with control? And this is really about I asked you Did you do something that you could control this is not flailing about stuff you can’t control. But people are really getting local. They are doing things they can do something about. And with small actions, micro actions, I was part of the team that worked with Walmart to introduce the personal sustainability practice, which was basically sustainability for 1.2 million people. And what we did is we didn’t show pictures of polar bears and make people feel guilty and helpless. We said What is one thing you can do that is a daily practice, not clean up one stream, but pick up the trash on the way to work every day? Or get the plastic bottles out of your kids sports team? So what people did is they made it into a personal practice, something they could and they got to choose. We never told them it was reusable cup monthly, you have to do this. What would you do and people were very creative. They walked around their building, they recycled cardboard off the back dock. They did they stopped smoking, they did all kinds of things. So this personal control, this ability to do something at the personal level is very important. And at the organizational level, it also has to do with not waiting to be waiting for somebody somewhere to decide that it’s okay to do things. You know, I worked with a plant that was actually I got a call last week. Same thing. So here we are, again, they’re closing their manufacturing site and moving it to Austin. But they haven’t told anybody. And so what happens is they’re scarfing people massively, because they’re not giving them any kind of choice, involvement and participation. And the fear people usually have is if you told them, they wouldn’t be upset, yes, they’re going to be upset. But figure out what pieces of the choice they have, do they have? Do they have options to you know, do this on a Thursday or two weeks from now, small choices give people control. So you can do this at the individual level, you can do this at the organizational level. The next one has to do with the centered capacity. And this wasn’t this is all that mindfulness stuff. And you know, being able to give yourself a practice or different ways that you can settle yourself down and get yourself back on track or get yourself into flow or into mindfulness or whatever people are calling it. And I’m I’ve coached a number of senior leaders, and it’s like this, this woman was on this train and she was going to this board meeting I said, let’s stop right now let’s, let’s give you a chance to remember you your place of ease inside your body. Let’s take four minutes to center yourself. You can do this as you walk up the stairs or you take the elevator. Whatever you do, that gives you a way to take a breath. Go somewhere else, be calm and return again. I started this with physicians when they went from one clinic room to the next and they never used to take any time in between. I said what about 30 seconds? What about standing there and taking a breath and anchoring in your mind’s eye onto a beach, a mountain or whatever? Just give yourself a break. This is what’s happening with the six Stream, edit zoom hours, stop this, change them to 50. Give yourself some time in between. So breeze between your zooms, and what happens at the organizational level. And working with organizations that actually, they start their meetings with kind of their version of the picture of the forest in, let’s all gather, let’s take one minute to arrive, and they do this on Zoom calls, they do this in their leadership meetings, you know, you have to give people a chance to collect themselves. So this centered capacity is not a nice to have thing, it’s a must have thing. And it’s if you’ve been scuffed, you have to have a way to unscarred yourself. And you can do this while you’re sitting in a meeting while you’re riding on the bus. How do you center yourself and give yourself away to take a pause? The fourth one has to do with challenge and challenge is that we like challenge. You know, maybe I think a number of you have had enough challenge. I think we’ve all a little tired of challenge. And we want to not be challenged so much. But in the Badlands it’s not going to stop. And in some ways this is this self stretching piece. This is that people like to stretch themselves, but they don’t like to be stretched. So instead of saying this is our new target, ask people what they would like to have or what is a reasonable target? Or how, where would they set the bar of achievement? Because what happens is, it’s a very interesting data people will sell stretch more than their bosses would, which is hard to believe right now. But it has to be within that trusted team environment at the same time. And when I think about stretching, it’s not like giant pulling you and making it pop. But what’s the shade war? What’s the shade war. And in terms of challenge, it also revolves around change. And the process that you know, the HR DQ has with the change curve is moving people out of I can’t do this, too. I won’t do this, too. How could I do this, too. Now I can do a piece of this. So it’s making it small enough, giving people some chance to say to go through those four phases of the change curve, and not be rushed from. We don’t know anything about it to you will close your plant next week, give people some time, give people some way to stretch themselves. And the last one is really about connection. And we talked about that before. 

48:08 

But this is really clear data that actually Kaiser the HMO has made this a whole campaign, it’s what they call it friends can be good medicine. Because we know that people who have a community of emotionally supported relationships do much better. Whether it be the arthritis support group, that cut that Kaiser runs, choosing to take a drink of water to get people together who are facing the same health challenge. And what was interesting in doing that, what we found was that not only the people who had the health challenge, but the people had to drive them to this meeting, they met in the coffee room, and they made their own support relationship. So it’s little clusters of connection. And it’s it’s beyond talking about food. It’s about emotional. I have another group that they call it the 2am Club. Who can they call in the middle of the night when everything goes wrong? So it’s the how is your connection working and during COVID We got a little thin because we didn’t bump into people much anymore. So it’s time now to maybe tune up again. rekindle the friendships in my family. We started the cousins group. Again, we hadn’t talked in years. But during COVID we started meeting and say, how are you and spending time together? I’m working with a small business owner that basically is had to close the store during COVID and The end, you know, how does? Do they make the rituals of saying a good goodbye? How do they gather together and tell the stories of all the fun they had? To cake store? Big fun wedding cakes, you know? So it’s like, how do you tell the stories? And how do you bring yourself closer. So this is the resilience canvas, these five things. And basically, you can start anywhere, don’t don’t have anyone telling you, you need to do this, or you need to do that, or, you know, all these things are interconnected. And each capacity is kind of distinct. It has different kinds of tools, mindsets, practices, that can be sprinkled around, and they come with lots of different names. So you’ll see books and relate and workshops, and all kinds of things that really address all these elements. There’s no right place to begin. And you shouldn’t, you shouldn’t say Well, I’m really bad at challenge. So I should start there, I encourage you to start where you have energy, go to something where you’re already doing something that’s working, if you’re feeling really good about your connection, do more of that, and then visit some of the others. So I made it into this round model. There’s no, it’s like, it’s like those things in the in the playground of kids that goes round and round around. And what you don’t want to do is fall off. But if you fall off, get back on, you know, that’s really the secret of resilience. And as I talked about through this is like the same things work in your team, your organization and your community. So if I was to say, you know, this is my cheat sheet page, you know, I look at I go in and say, how do people, how are you doing personally, with these five areas, and then how’s your team, or your organization, or your community doing? So I use these as kind of a simple needs assessment, and allow people to kind of tell me how they’re doing. So as we kind of circle up at the end here, I’d like to talk just a little bit and give you a chance to go back to, I’m going to ask you these questions. So take a scan and see which of these elements would make the most difference for you? Would it be coherence, the set the same of the story and kind of how you’re seeing the big picture? Would it be small actions of control and choice and involvement? Would it be ways of balancing? Would it be ways of stretching yourself or ways of emotionally becoming vulnerable and authentic with people. And which one of these if you paid more attention to would give you the most lift? 

53:06 

And if you strengthened it just a bit, you’d have more energy? And if you take it from personal, which one are these in your workplace, on your team, in your church group in your scout group, whatever would give you the most resilience? So let’s put this in the question box. Let’s, let’s kind of let’s kind of see what what has landed with you all in this and let’s take a few minutes to kind of let you digest. So which one is gently calling you? 

Sarah  53:48 

So when you’ve had some time to think you can type that into the questions box, as Cynthia had said, we can, you know, share out some of the responses that we received. Outside control. 

54:09 

Yep, that’s a good one. That’s a real good man. Oh, teeny tiny things. Don’t wait for permission, Tom. 

Sarah  54:17 

And Jerry said coherence and connection. 

54:21 

It’s very common to have to 

Sarah  54:24 

we have Tracy saying connection. We have a lot of connections coming through actually, 

54:32 

as well as controls. Yep. That’s at that. I’ve actually found that with in one organization when they’re going through lots of change. People started doing all the exercise because the only thing they could control was their body. They went to the gym a lot. They went to the they started doing something about their physical health. So it’s very interesting. The Walmart group People stopped smoking had nothing to do with sustainability. But they felt that they could take control there. 

Sarah  55:08 

And we had a nice comment come in from Katherine. Katherine said, Thank you. This is one of the best webinars I’ve attended in two years very well organized and presented. 

55:18 

Catherine, thank you. I’ve been working. We’ve been working at this. Sarah and I have been rehearsing. I’ve had a lot of time to get better get clear about this during the pandemic? 

Sarah  55:34 

Well, that’s great. Yeah. So yeah, so we had a lot of a few more challenges coming in, as well as Yeah, and connection, I would say those are the overall popular, I think people’s support and connection got a little thin, during this pandemic. And a lot of the things that we used to go to, or have as just ways of bumping our social network have decayed or gotten thinner. So I’m also seeing a lot of people saying with these, these leaders this last week is like, they have to reach back out to their customers, to the people in the different, who, in the different parts of their organization who have been doing the work. And just as we end, thank you, as we come to a pause, and this is not the end, I just kind of ask you, these are questions that I use to go to each of the seas, that how are you now doing, which of these elements do you have some kind of refreshed understanding of, you know, starting to let that little bud come up about the future life, things you might like to re recalibrate things that you can do that you don’t have to wait for permission. Still ways to stretch yourself just to shave more. doing the small things to help you feel calm and balanced. And, you know, get some feedback, talk to somebody call somebody up. So at the end, this is what I’m going to end on. Let’s remember that resilience is not about being untouched, or unruffled, or discombobulated or overwhelmed. It’s about how you use this, to transform yourself. And it’s built from exposure to change and challenge, we’re getting more agile, we’re getting stronger. And you’re not alone, you are not alone. And people have forgotten that you’ve already been doing this. And you’ve come from families that have long history of resilience. So harvest those stories go backwards to go forwards. And when you when you get into a challenge, notice what’s going on and do some things that worked. So it’s been a pleasure to be with you today. And I’ve had a great time bringing you what I think are a map and a compass and some encouragement and some compassion for how much we’ve all been doing the best we know how to do. So I encourage you to practice and step forward and hopefully use these things on your teams, your families and yourselves. So thank you. So is there any more questions or burning things that we have to people want to know? 

Sarah  58:51 

Yeah, if you have any questions, you can drop those into the questions box. We’re just approaching the top of the hour here. And then Cynthia, if we could just move over to the next slide.

Sarah  59:05 

So for today’s webinar, you can receive the HRDQ-U certificate of completion, you can scan that QR code right there to receive that. And with that, then here, it doesn’t cook. We have any additional questions come through and that does bring us up to the top of the hour here. Thank you so much, Cynthia, for such an informative webinar today. 

59:30 

Thank you. Good, Sara, thank you for HR DQ for sponsoring this for all of us and see you in the future. 

Sarah  59:37 

Yes, we will see you in the future. Thank you all for participating in today’s webinar. Take care. Bye bye