Transcript

00:12
Hello, I'm Lori Jo Vest. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Work Mom Says “Don't Be An Idiot!” Today we're going to talk about how to grow your resilience. Resilience is a really important skill. And basically what it means is that when something happens, good, bad or otherwise, you are able to quickly get back to your normal setting. 

For example, if you are on the phone, you hear something terrible happened. When you get off the phone, maybe you have a client meeting. Resilience means that you can take some deep breaths, put that aside, get to it later, and face the next thing you encounter from that strong foundation of calm and stability. 

Because resilience is- it's one of those things that if you can be the calm in the storm—that would be another way I would define it—if you can be the calm in the storm when crazy things are happening, when things are chaotic, you'll be the one that people rely on when things go crazy, because they'll know you'll be the one that'll be, you know, steady and stable. And, you know, I'll give you a quick story.

01:25
I've told this one before, but you may not have heard it if you didn't catch the episode. Early in my career, I worked for a company that was a television production studio. I was recruited into this organization. And at the time I remember thinking, ‘If they hired a recruiter, recruiters are expensive, so they must have a lot of money. This must be a really solid company.’ And they hired me for marketing. They hired a gentleman named Tom for sales. And Tom felt so strongly about this company and its possible success that he moved his wife from Chicago to Metro Detroit. She was six months pregnant. She had a really good job at Bloomingdale's. 

And about I'd say two months after the hirings and—you know, Tom and I were settling into our jobs and there were about 20 other people at the company. It was a small company, but we were doing great, you know, great work for big organizations, for automotive companies like Ford, lots of great things were happening—and we found out that the major financial backer, the silent partner, had decided that they weren't profitable enough and they were losing money. And he needed to start making some cuts to the budget immediately. 

And one of the first things that he said he was going to do was start with a payroll budget. So he was going to meet with each one of us that same day. Now, keep in mind, the day before, we felt like everything was great. And then we get called in for an early morning meeting and we're told that finances are really bad. And we are going to leave work that day knowing how much less we were going to get paid for our jobs.

And now think about Tom. He just moved his wife from Chicago. She was a little against the move. She wasn't real happy about it. She went along, but she wasn't really happy about it. And Tom, all that day and over the next week while we figured out what was going to happen, was just calm as a cucumber. We couldn't believe it. We were like, ‘What? Tom, what's your secret?’ Because, I mean, everybody else was freaking out. How am I going to pay my bills? And what's going to happen? And Tom was like, just smooth. And, ‘How's it going?’ ‘I'm doing good. I'm hanging in there. We'll figure it out.’ So smooth. 

And I asked him one day, ‘Tom,’ you know, ‘how do you do that? What is it that's keeping you so much calmer than the rest of us?’ And he said, ‘I really love spy novels.’ I was like, what does that mean? And he really was very into spy novels. Reading about these international spies who could create brand new identities for themselves and engage in these really long programs or whatever they call them, you know, projects where they would have to embody this new person for months on end in order to get to a certain person that they had to stop or get information from or whatever. It was really interesting. And he said, so as far as I'm concerned, if I take what I read and I apply that to the situation, why can't I stay calm? How good does, you know- what good does it do me to get upset? And I just keep reading my spy novels and I get through it.

So it was a really interesting approach. There are lots and lots of ways of approaching resilience. And that was just one example of many, many ways that you can develop your own resilience so that when things go a little sideways, you're not the one that's emotionally overwrought and unable to manage it in a professional way.

5:07
So what exactly is resilience in a professional context? That means you are able to manage negative emotions in a way that brings you back to a steady emotional state and do it quickly. And there's a lot of different things that happen. There's a lot of uncertainty There's a lot of setbacks, there's a lot of stress in the office.

Resilience doesn't mean you just push through it. Resilience means that you adapt. You look at the situation, you act as the observer. That's one way of being resilient. It's just kind of, stop for a second, instead of jumping in and starting to gyrate around something that happened. Pull yourself back. Look at it from a distance and consider,—especially an emotional distance—and consider what you would do if you weren't emotionally invested, if you were strategic, if you were able to be non judgmental, if you were able to look out for everyone's best interests instead of reacting out of anger or stress or sadness or whatever it is. Resilience is a strong leadership skill. So it's worth developing. It's worth taking the time to study it, to talk about it, to maybe put together a group of people that look at your different skills that you need to grow and find resources to help you grow those skills.

The kind of challenges that you're going to run into during your career can be things like not getting that job that they told you you were this close to getting. Career setbacks, getting laid off, imposter syndrome. You may go into the office one day just feeling like you don't even know how to do your job. Why did they hire you? Regular stress can cause emotional issues and cause you to react in emotional ways, maybe even inappropriately. You may get a new boss that's extremely challenging. You may get a whole bunch of new responsibilities without the accompanying pay increase. It happens when you have the ability to be resilient in those kinds of situations, you will handle them in a more positive way that creates stronger relationships and helps you become a better leader and become a stronger employee and honestly just a better person.

Because if you're resilient, then if something happens in your personal life that can be really, you know, can knock you off your feet, you'll be able to pull yourself back up and so again, just such an important skill. 

7:54
So let's talk about four different ways that you can build your resilience. Couple things: self care. Believe it or not, self care is a huge part of being able to manage your emotions and be resilient. Getting enough sleep, eating properly, being hydrated, not being out drinking with, you know, friends on a work night, or you know, coming into work hungover in the morning. All those kinds of things are self care. Taking care of yourself so that you can bring your best physical self to the office. That does translate to your emotions. 

And self care also includes quiet time. If you're one of those people that you just run hard all week long, maybe you're in sales and you just run hard all week and you need to take the weekend to just power down and you know, lock to the couch and watch some Netflix. Perfectly okay. Whatever you need to do to practice self care and get yourself back to an even keel will help you be resilient. 

9:00
The other thing that we can talk about is emotional regulation. One of the things that I would study early in my career is mood management and emotion management. Because when you are in a state of emotional dysregulation, you can't really handle anything properly. 

Let's say you, you know, you had- were in a- just having a bad day this morning and you woke up and there wasn't enough air in your tire and you had to fill that and then you, oh my God, didn't have enough gas in your tank and you had to stop there. You went to Starbucks and the line was really long and you're just really annoyed and you get to the office and somebody stops you and says, oh, that thing you turned in yesterday, it wasn't right, you'll have to do it again. If you are not able to regulate your emotions, you will not respond to that situation in a way that's positive.

And guess what? It will happen. It's- part of life is like that. So emotional regulation means you take a breath and you put the effort in to handle the situation properly, no matter how you feel. What resilience means in a lot of cases is making sure that your feelings do not dictate your behavior.

We all have a logical side to our brains and to the way we think that we can call on. The more you call on it, the stronger it gets. So when you've had that horrible morning and you walk in, and that coworker says that… Deep breath. And you'll know if you take a second before you react and you give yourself a minute to respond instead, you will know that the right thing to do is to say, give me a minute, let me settle into my desk, and I'll come see you so we can talk about it. And you'll keep going to your desk, and you won't let that ruin your day at the office. 

That may mean taking a walk around the building before you go to your desk, if the morning was really that bad. But don't bring your dysregulated emotions into the office if you can at all help it. Not a good idea, and it's not productive. 

11:10
Another thing you can do is build yourself a support network. And that means making some friends that are maybe a couple notches up the ladder from you at your office, finding a few mentors in your industry, having girlfriends or, you know, male friends, having friends that you can talk to that will help you when you are, you know, struggling with the situation at work.

You may have a new boss that is just, oh my God, all over you with minutiae. And all of a sudden, everything you're doing is being picked apart and you just can't handle it. Well, you can handle it and you will handle it. And if you have a good support system, what'll happen is when you go home, you'll be able to vent some of that by calling someone on your support system list.
You know, whether it's your friend, whether it's your, you know, your old boss, whoever it is that can help you kind of figure out what's going on, make sense of the, you know, of the spaghetti mess, and move forward in a positive way. 

12:13
So let's see, what else do we have here? Continuous learning. Another way to build resilience is continuous learning. And what that means is study it. You know, look, do a Google search. Spend 15 minutes a week. Do a Google search, how to grow your resilience. It will be so worth your while. Do that for 90 days, once a week, 15 minutes, you'll know everything there is to know about it. You'll know enough about it at that point. To build your resilience. It's really not that hard.

12:43
One final way to build your resistance is to shift your mindset. And there's two things I'll recommend here that I really, really love. One is called reframing. And what that is, is consider this. There's what happens, and then there's what you tell yourself about what happened. And what you tell yourself about what happened is the framing that you're giving to that situation.

For example, if I get a new boss and all of a sudden that new boss is just all over me and wants to see everything I do, I can frame that in many different ways. I can say, she doesn't think I could do my job, she thinks I'm incompetent. Or more positively, I can frame it as, she just got here, she's trying to figure out how I do my job, how to best manage me, if my work, you know, dovetails with her vision for how she wants the work done, those kinds of things. And that is a much more positive way of looking at that situation. And it is a form of resilience.

Another way to reframe is to look at failures as learning opportunities. When something really crazy happens, instead of gyrating around it and going down the rabbit hole of self hatred and all of that, immediately go to, ‘Why did it happen? What did we learn and how can we prevent it from happening in the future?’ And when you frame failures and mistakes as learning opportunities, it's a form of resilience. It helps you get past the negative feelings and into a much, much more productive mindset.

14:25
Those are the tips I have for you today around resilience. I hope they're helpful. If you would like more career advice from Work Mom, I have a 40-year career in business. I would love to have you tune into my podcast on Spotify. I'm on YouTube. If you are watching this on YouTube, please hit the subscribe button. Give me a like, help me spread the word. I am here to help young professionals learn how to play the emotional contact sport of business. I have a website at workmomsays.com where I have some blogs and a contact form if you'd like to suggest a guest or ask a question. I am also an open networker on LinkedIn. So if you have heard this podcast out in the wild, please, please feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. I'd love to hear from you. So that's all I've got for you. I'll see you very soon.