Five Secrets to Resilience
Photo by Karim MANJRA on Unsplash
This past Monday, I received some professional news that put me in a state of tears, failure, shock, and disappointment. It was the lowest that I’d been for almost a year. The experience itself felt devastating, and its effects were compounded by the overall anxiety of coronavirus and week 4 of shelter-in-place. Through this week, I’ve been experiencing all the emotions— shame, anger, grief, resentment, hurt and also freedom, compassion, love, support, confidence, and curiosity.
I’m definitely still in it and will continue to experience the cycles of grief throughout the coming weeks. At the same time, I’m sharing five secrets of resilience that have been fueling me through the week.
1. Acknowledge the Grief
The one coronavirus article that I keep returning to is a Harvard Business Review article explaining That Discomfort You’re Feeling Is Grief. We are grieving the loss of freedom, liberty, and the fact that so many things have been cancelled— weddings, events, gatherings, graduations, amongst others. We have loved ones who are sick, in pain, or dying, and we cannot be physically with them. The world has changed. It has become wildly uncertain. There is a sense of anticipatory grief that the article describes:
Anticipatory grief is that feeling we get about what the future holds when we’re uncertain…. Anticipatory grief is also more broadly imagined futures. There is a storm coming. There’s something bad out there. With a virus, this kind of grief is so confusing for people. Our primitive mind knows something bad is happening, but you can’t see it. This breaks our sense of safety.
Grief proceeds through all the stages: denial, anger, bargaining, sadness, and acceptance, however, it’s not linear. We may pass through all of these in a day, or even an hour, and they will continue to cycle over weeks, months, and years.
In the immediate day 1 of my news, I went through bargaining and denial. And then, knowing that I’m someone who typically processes bad news by driving myself into action to fix & change & learn quickly from what has happened and jump into an action plan, I decided to try something different. I took the counsel of my support system and my coaching training to Slow Down to Speed Up. I stopped to process my emotions rather than escape them by being busy.
What has worked for me when processing deep disappointments in the past is to deepen and acknowledge my feelings and sit with the emotions, acknowledging the reality of the sadness. Two exercises have helped me:
A) The RAIN method, which has us go inside to
Recognize what is happening;
Allow the experience to be there, just as it is;
Investigate with interest and care;
Nurture with self-compassion.
Tara Brach has guided meditations to lead you through this introspective process which allows naming of difficult emotions and letting them be experienced.
B) The loving-kindness meditation helps me to quiet my high performer who demands that I spring into action, often by criticizing myself for not having avoided this mistake by doing more, trying harder, and just being better. I use this series of guided statements to help me focus my attention. Jack Kornfield has a wonderful guided meditation.
May I be happy
May I be protected and safe
May I be healthy and strong
May I be kind to myself
May I live my life with ease
This is how I name and recognize that I’m grieving the loss of a potential future, and acknowledge that it hurts. That I have lots of feelings, and it’s OK to spend time with these feelings.
2. Permission to be Angry
Anger is one of the stages of grief, and sometimes in the attempt to be calm, to be contemplative, to be meditative, it feels that anger is not-OK. My long-time leadership coach immediately picked up on this and in our session, he pushed me to be angry. To express all the negativity, the judgment, the hatred that I was currently feeling for myself, for them, and even for him right now as he pushed me be angry.
We ran through exercises where we both yelled out the most extreme profanities against the news and the bearer of the news. He had me scream and be ugly. He had be push against a solid wall to feel the rigidity of something that I couldn’t control or move. I might have told him that I hated him.
This reminded me that I’d used my anger before in the past to help me get through the deaths of close family and also through my divorce. With my personal trainer, we’d done a sledgehammer and tire exercise that used all my physical strength against a giant tire, helping me feel the anger in my body. And through feeling it, be left with a feeling of satisfaction and physical exhaustion that allowed me to move beyond it. Since I’m not at the gym right now, I immediately texted my trainer and he gave me a home version to do ball slams involving a weighted medicine ball and slamming it against the ground. We will see if amazon considers this an essential item.
My coach gave me permission to be angry. He gave me a gift to express the anger inside myself. By naming it and fully starting to feel it, I’m able to start moving through it rather than suppress any slow simmering resentment.
3. Perspective across Time
I am grateful for my community of support. I’ve known one of my oldest friends for 27 years. He’s seen me and seen my stories as I’ve grown over time. I called him so that he would help give me a perspective based on all the “disasters” that have happened in my life. With that perspective and longevity, we both agreed that this news was a 3 out of 10 on the devastation scale. Hmm… maybe not so bad. And I’ve also recovered from the other “disasters,” some easier than others.
Another take on perspective When making a decision, my business coach asked me to think of how it would feel to make the yes decision and the no decision given the perspective of time:
In 10 days
In 10 months
In 10 years
With those 3 timeframes, my resilience kicked in and realized that this might still sting in 10 days, but that in 10 months or 10 years I’ll likely have forgotten about it, or perhaps use it as a major turning point to learn from. Perspective is powerful. Perspective helps you see things from a meta-view where the future version of you is already resilient and has moved on.
4. Find the Humor
Part of lasting resilience for me is not taking myself so seriously. The universe has a funny way of messing with you. Laughter is a release from the tension & severity of the situation. It’s a way to let loose and not take things so seriously.
I have a selfie of my sister and I at our father’s creation. We are outside the cremation chamber with a line of people behind us waiting to pay respects. We are both hysterically laughing & crying at the same time. The more people that gave us side-eye and shushed us for being inappropriate, the louder we laughed. It felt really good. Especially with the absurdity of taking a selfie in the moment.
When I talked to my oldest friend, after all the storytelling and processing, at the end of our conversation, we laughed together. We laughed because the way I was feeling now was reminiscent of all the times he’d comfort me in college when a boy who I liked, wouldn’t like me back in the same way. I felt like the world was over, and that I would never ever have someone fall in love with me. He wryly commented that it was his first thought when we got on the phone, but he had wisely avoided that analogy until I brought it up. Which led to more laughter.
Life is ridiculous. It helps to laugh at yourself. It helps to laugh at what the universe throws your way.
5. Connection to Meaning
Finally, towards the end of the process, when all the feels have been felt, and there may be a light at the end of the tunnel, what helps me with resilience is connecting to what really matters.
I have a strong sense of my values. I have a strong sense of what showing up as myself and playing full-out means. I have a sense of who my people are.
My meaning comes from helping people become better leaders. My people are high achievers, often senior leaders within tech companies or founders & CEOs of startups. They create products with meaning and value for the people of the world. Often they are “others,” they feel under-represented in some way, whether it’s being female, or black, or gay, or an immigrant, or ex-military, or bullied as a child. Often they have big dreams and would like a little help and creativity to dream bigger north stars, and some accountability to help them get there. When I help leaders become the best versions of themselves, they show up and inhabit their unique, values-based version of their leadership. With that strength, they inspire their teams and create more humane & ethical products for everyone else in the world to use.
Knowing my meaning and that I have a personal definition of success means that any setbacks are simply a bump. It helps me to find the inner peace to pick up and keep going. It lets me ask what value or meaning can I find from the setback? What is the gift that can derived from it? Perhaps that it’s a NO, so that the Next One will appear and be even better. Perhaps it drives some insight and learning about myself. After every event, positive or negative, my frequent question is “what can be learned here?” Taking all the answers and threading & theming them together starts to connect to a greater meaning.
Bottom-Line
Many things will happen that are out of your control and make you feel judged, a failure, or stuck in a bad situation. Five secrets to lasting resilience that have worked for me are to 1. Acknowledge the Grief, 2. give yourself Permission to be Angry, 3. view Perspective Across Time, 4. Find the Humor, and finally 5. create Connection to Meaning. They’ve helped me climb out of many pits of despair, and I hope they can also help you.
Deepest thanks to David Darst, Rich Litvin, Gilad Karni, Bob Russo, Danielle Baldwin, Moe Badi, Jeralyn Mastoianni, Pam Christian, Corrine Sandler, and my Kairos family for the support through this week.
Impatience, My Nemesis
Photo by Ahmad Odeh on Unsplash
I am not a patient person. I tend to move fast, be action-oriented, and eager to jump into solving the next shiny problem. This can make me anxious and overwhelmed as I commit to too many things. I logically know that I’d like more patience in my life; and I simultaneously struggle with it. I’ve learned that I often need to run head-long at the struggle and in moving through it, truly internalize the value of patience. I’m sharing what I’ve learned through working with my coaches, and also while experiencing coronavirus and shelter-in-place. It is a work in progress.
Have you heard the old Zen story of a woman who speaks to a Master, to ask about enlightenment?
Woman: Master, I want to reach enlightenment. How long will it take me?
Master: It will take you 10 years of studying, praying, meditating, reflecting…
Woman: But Master, I will study, pray, meditate and reflect harder than anyone you have ever met. How long will it take me to reach enlightenment?
Master: Well, then it will take you 20 years!
The first time my business coach shared this Zen story with me, I wanted to scream in frustration. Why can’t I work harder to make things happen faster? My bull-headed approach, is to work harder and faster, to put in more hours and more effort because I believe it will pay off. And after a couple of minutes, I laughed and laughed at the Zen paradox and begrudgingly accepted that I could see the perspective of the Master. Perhaps the working extra hard was not doing me any good.
Slowing down and being patient is a mindset that I am continually cultivating. This is what has worked for me.
1. Slow Down to Speed Up
Slow Down to Speed Up feels like the essence of patience for me, and it’s also liberally stolen from Rich Litvin. It’s a mindset that I aspire towards. It’s focusing on the long-term vision. It’s the recognition that it will take time to build any good and long-lasting thing.
I learned this when I moved from the design agency world where we would spend 8–12 weeks in an innovative field, such as the connected home. We would dream up the future of the connected home— create a product brand, understand the customer, and bring this future home to life with end-to-end stories, nifty interfaces and industrial design of useful devices. This was green field, making a new vision from nothing. Yet after doing this repeatedly for 5 years and rarely seeing any of the products make it to market, it started to feel fluffy and frivolous. In contrast, working deeply on a system for years, whether it’s a data visualization enterprise product or Facebook ads or the new Facebook Watch video platform had a completely different rhythm. Yes, there is the initial dreaming up a north star vision and bringing it to life with a concept video. But it felt so much more satisfying to release an MVP and then continue to iterate month over month. The iteration involves putting the products out into the world and having real people use it (sometimes to their own bad actor nefarious ends) and then evolving the product based on the learnings. And if the initial vision didn’t quite match people’s needs— that Facebook videos could be content that people bonded over socially— you could work over months and years towards creating meaningful social interactions around video. It requires patience to take this long view. It requires grit and perseverance to continue to experiment, iterate, and launch over and over again while keeping the North Star vision in mind.
I’ve learned that the long-term, the marathon no the sprint is what satisfies and fulfills my urge to create meaningful products and processes.
2a. Mind Tools: Reflection & Gratitude
If Slow Down to Speed Up is the mindset, two mind tools help when I’m in the midst of impatience. The first is the gift of reflection. I’m able to look back over my life and find instances where slowing down and taking the long view worked out better and gave me more fulfilled outcomes. Taking that long-term perspective only feels possible when I’m now in my 40s and have more professional experiences.
The second is the gift of gratitude. I’ve recently started a gratitude practice with my 9 yo daughter to help her get to sleep. As we snuggle in bed, we take turns talking about what we’re grateful for from the day. As we get beyond 5 things, they start to get a little more outlandish and creative— “I’m grateful that when our cat went poop outside of the litter box, he went in the hardwood hallway and not on the rug.” We keep going until each of us is out. Yes, we’re both slightly competitive which also stretches our imagination.
Some research behind gratitude practices and how it affects your brain comes from psychologists who write that gratitude improves happiness, relationships, health and ultimately changes the neurostructures in our brain. A UC Berkeley research study, shows lasting positive effects of gratitude on the brain, and, in another vote for patience, that these take effect over the long-term.
2b. Body Tools: Physical Exercise
We hold anxiety and tension in our bodies. I hold impatience within my body. My throat and core clenches. My shoulders feel tight. My whole body bounces up and down with nervous, anticipatory energy, all-wound-up with nowhere to release it. It’s a familiar body pattern for me.
Physical movement releases that energy and impatience. I like variety so I typically do 3 types of exercises:
Reflection. I go on gentle ambling walks around the neighborhood simply to get moving. As I walk, I notice details of the houses, landscaping, and streets. Next, I occasionally do yoga vinyasa flows and stretches. They help me move without pushing me so that I have to flow between poses and notice what’s happening.
Discipline. I strength train to reach weight goals and to build up muscle mass. It’s another source of patience as I’m adopting the long-view of taking care of my body. It requires mono-focus to do the reps on a front squat while exquisitely paying attention to form.
Expressive / adrenaline. I can’t get myself to run, or do most forms of cardio. However, dance raises my heart-beat, activates my brain to follow the routine, lets me be goofy, and also relate back to my dance-obsessed self in college. I’ll also go hiking, typically up mountains, as the other other way to raise my heart-rate.
Reflection+Discipline+Adrenaline: My ultimate physical love affair is with surfing. It gets me outside, spending lots of quiet time floating on the ocean. There is the discipline of maintaining physical fitness, especially upper body to make it out past the break, especially at Ocean Beach in San Francisco. And finally, the adrenaline of being pounded by the waves or the sheer joy of being up and riding.
When dealing with my impatience, depending on the moment in time, different forms of these physical movements work for me. Consistently, I know that I need to be in the water and surfing at least once a week and I have a planned trainer workout (now remote) twice a week.
3. Create Whitespace
Finally, if Slow Down to Speed Up is mindset and the Mind & Body Tools are strategies to mitigate symptoms, the biggest payoff and inspiration for me is creating whitespace. When I’m impatient and my mind is whirring, I watch for busy-work, for activities that I may be good at, but don’t necessarily have much impact— it simply makes me feel good to do them. When I notice myself doing that, I make whitespace in my schedule.
Whitespace in my schedule is similar to whitespace in a design layout. It is the unplanned, no to-do list time, to be open and breathe. It’s typically a block of 2–3 hours to think. It helps me connect to my longer life vision of what really matters. And it helps me contextualize the goal that I’m impatient with. If I want to build my leadership coaching business faster, and I have the luxury of time, I can open a sketchbook and capture all the experiments I could play with to grow. I can ideate what fun things I’d love to do.
Alternately, if I don’t feel like being too directed within my whitespace, I first establish an intention in my — e.g. take a long-term creative view of growing my business— and leave it there while doing something completely different. I might chat with a friend, play boardgames with my daughters, or bake a rainbow layer cake. Inevitably, I find that my mind will keep working on the intention and something unexpected comes up.
Whitespace is magical. We often don’t have enough of it in our lives. We are too busy to step away from the daily weeds. It makes us think strategically and long-term, and opens up untapped creativity.
Bottom-Line
Impatience is my nemesis. It’s something I’ll keep working on for the rest of my life. I’ve found that three things help mitigate the impatience: 1. Switching my mindset to Slow Down to Speed Up, 2. Using mind and body tools to manage the impatience, and 3. Creating whitespace to dream.
Coronavirus and the Myth of Control
Photo by Peter Hansen on Unsplash, not an actual infected cruise ship
“It’s apocalyptic!” exclaimed one of my clients at the start of our session this week. The stock market had crashed, Costco shelves are empty, school is closed, friends in Italy are under lockdown, and when you drive over the Bay Bridge, you see the docked Grand Princess cruise ship with quarantined passengers finally being released onto various air force bases around the US.
With all the chaos going on in the world around us, it’s human nature to slip into a state of anxiety, fear, and helplessness. These states of being are our saboteurs, which hold us back from our full leadership potential. Saboteurs are limiting beliefs and inner critics that harshly judge ourselves and others, keeping us paralyzed in the present and limiting forward progress. One of mine is the Controller. As described by Shirzad Charmaine’s research, this saboteur is an:
“Anxiety-based need to take charge and control situations and people’s actions to one’s own will. High anxiety and impatience when that is not possible.”
Emotionally, there is the need to take control because you fear being controlled by others or life. Through these past weeks, with coronavirus potentially becoming a pandemic, we can obsessively focus on controlling the micro-actions around us in an attempt to mitigate the uncontrollable macro-trends relentlessly blaring at us through feeds and video.
What can we do about the anxiety?
Using a mixture of leadership coaching and design processes, we can control our own mindset and energy. We control how we react to the world around us. We control what choices we make when circumstances land upon us. Within the myth of control, we can exercise this 4-step NEED process.
N—Name it
Awareness that control is a myth and recognizing that your Controller is a saboteur is the first step. Call out the fear and anxiety for an emotion that you’re experiencing, rather than who you are. Instead of saying:
I need to buy more toilet paper and 30-days worth of supplies to protect my family.
Try this alternative:
My Controller is anxious. It wants me to buy more toilet paper and 30-days worth of supplies as it thinks it will protect my family.
Naming the myth or fear allows a bit of space and some choice to appear. It allows a separation of identity between who we are, and our saboteurs.
E—Empathy
Design starts with research, and research starts with empathy and understanding for people. Empathy is curiosity and listening to different perspectives on a situation.
It immediately shifts the perspective from one of selfish preservation to a deeper understanding of the risks to a high-risk patient.
Empathy stops us from judging & shaming others:
“You’re overreacting, you don’t need to wipe down your desk.”
“Stop wearing a mask. You’re not high risk and you’re using up all the supplies that others may need.”
“You bought 3 gallons of milk? Really?”
“Eww… did you really need to give me a hug?”
Brene Brown’s research has shown”
“Shame needs three things to grow exponentially in our lives: secrecy, silence, and judgement. Shame cannot survive being spoken. It cannot survive empathy.”
When interacting with others in this age of coronavirus, start with empathy and curiosity. Ask how they’re doing. Share how you’re feeling. Make a connection.
E — Explore
From a place of empathy & curiosity, we can start exploring what makes sense for our reaction to coronavirus in this moment. I’ve recently shared how to Use the Design Process to Get Unstuck and it involves using the divergence of ideation and brainstorm to unleash creativity. As part of exploration, you can try on different perspectives, perhaps the ones of the various people around you and play out what that perspective could mean for you. For example:
I’m taking my family out to our cabin in the woods for 2 weeks.
I’m stocking up a 30-day supply of food & other necessities for survival mode.
When I wash my hands, I’m going to make like I’ve been chopping jalapeños and am about to put my contact lenses in.
Why take the risk? I’m going to limit all non-essential social gatherings.
If these are different perspectives, how would they feel for you to adopt them in your life? What else opens up when you try them on? How else could you react to this pandemic?
Another technique that Shirzad Charmaine advocates is the concept of 3 Gifts. Using the design process of divergence & ideation, it pushes us to adopt 3 positive perspectives for every negative circumstance. It can feel forced to begin with, but like brainstorming, the more you do it, the easier it becomes. The process stimulates the brain to be creative and visualize alternate scenarios.
For example, consider the scenario: I’m really disappointed, I was going to give a keynote at SXSW and it was critical to launching my business. 3 Gifts could be:
I will move my talk online and potentially reach a broader, more international audience for this topic.
I can keep refining & iterating this talk. By the time I give it at next year’s SXSW, it will be even more powerful.
I had set aside a week of focus to travel to Austin. Instead, I’ll take that week to write the first draft of my long-awaited book.
D— Do Small Actions
Then finally after exploration, having all those ideas makes it easy to pick one or two actions that feel meaningful and can be small experiments around control. Design thinking is about divergence and then convergence. After opening up the creativity, it’s often very easy to move into problem-solving mode and do one or two small actions. Treat them as experiments. For example:
Try using hand sanitizer (and hand cream) every couple of hours for a couple of days. Does it make you feel better?
Try limiting reading the news to once a day. How does that feel?
Try planning out a Saturday of indoor time and family bonding. Was that fun, or frustrating?
Bottom-Line
The 4-steps— Name it, Empathy, Explore, and Do — make up the acronym NEED. In the coming days, when it feels like the apocalypse is here and you’re stuck alone working from home in a cramped apartment, recognize that you do have control over your choices, and think of what you NEED.