Resilience Myths: What really makes you stronger?

Episode #228 Resilience Myths: What really makes you stronger?

Since the COVID pandemic, resilience has captured a much greater share of our collective consciousness and, as tends to happen, the world now seems to be flooded with resilience ‘experts’ who profess to be able to teach us how to handle the most difficult situations effortlessly.

I’m not an expert in resilience per se, but through my own journey, I can confidently say that I’ve become an incredibly resilient person. Maybe it just comes with a little age and maturity, but very little fazes me.

Over the course of my corporate career, I became really comfortable handling all sorts of crises, while operating at the highest levels. And if you were to ask the people who worked closely with me over the years, I’m sure they’d tell you that I’m extremely calm under pressure.

In this world of trite and pedestrian advice on how to become more resilient, I was really happy to find a beacon of hope. Steve Magness released a book just a few months ago called Do Hard Things: Why We Get Resilience Wrong and The Surprising Science of Real Toughness. In this LinkedIn newsletter,  I look at some of the principles he outlines in the book which, in my opinion, beautifully describe the relationship between the choices we make and our levels of resilience.

WHY SHOULD WE DO HARD THINGS?

It’s one thing to be able to handle adversity yourself, but when you lead others, you need to have the mental, emotional, and psychological resources to support them as well. This adds another layer of complexity to the resilience equation.

Resilience is a core competency for leading others, which is why one of the seven imperatives of my No Bullsh!t Leadership framework is, Build Resilience. Every truly great leader is demonstrably resilient. In Steve Magness’ book, he exposes some of the myths about resilience.

One of the most striking of these myths is the outdated concept that acting tough is actually the same as being tough. It’s not. This is the old ‘suck it up, don’t show any emotion and just get on with it’ mentality. And it effectively causes an individual to operate from a place of fear rather than a place of composure and control.

Real strength is calm, and it comes from within. It’s about confidence, not arrogance. You may have heard me talk about this principle in a slightly different way. I often talk about the difference between game face and grace under pressure. Let me explain:

GAME FACE VS GRACE UNDER PRESSURE

Game face is the ability to put on a facade of control: to appear as though everything’s okay because you’ve learned how to mask the crushing panic you feel inside. And look, learning to put on your game face isn’t a bad place to start. If you can at least do that, then you’re less likely to negatively impact the people around you. But they’ll be able to sense the incongruence between what you project outwardly and how you’re feeling internally.

This isn’t real resilience.

Grace under pressure, on the other hand, is the state when you are genuinely calm on the inside. You are confident and controlled. You are rational and relaxed. There’s absolutely no disconnect between what you feel and what the people around you see. This takes a strong connection with the emotional aspects of a situation and the ability to control your mental, physical, and emotional state under any circumstances.

This is real resilience

IGNORING DISCOMFORT

Another of the common myths about resilience is that you should avoid the pain and discomfort associated with any difficult situation simply by ignoring it. This is completely the opposite of how the principle actually works.

If you ignore the pain and try to get through on bravado, you’re going to come unstuck. I mentioned in a previous podcast episode an interview I listened to with adventurer Bear Grylls, of Man Vs Wild fame. In this interview, he talked about his life as a member of the elite SAS, the British equivalent of the Navy SEALS. During the weeding out process, the guys who were the most vocal and cocky about how tough they were, were invariably the first ones to fold when the real pressure was applied. And this is the thing about resilience: you can’t fake it. When the chips are really down, the cracks will appear and you’ll collapse under the pressure.

The concept of resilience being somehow a measure of your ability to ignore pain and discomfort is a myth. Instead, you need to become incredibly attuned to listening to your body, reading the signals and dealing with them accordingly.

I’m really grateful that I spent a number of years as a long distance runner, training for marathons. I ran countless thousands of miles, often alone, and I learned to listen to the cues my body was sending me. I became incredibly sensitive to the feedback it was giving me.

I could feel, the second it occurred, the onset of lactic acid buildup in my blood, and I could interpret that signal to ease off the pace ever so slightly so that I could come back from that threshold.

If I felt a tweak in a muscle, I could tell whether it was telling me about the risk of a potential injury, whether it was the first signs of a cramp, or maybe just the onset of fatigue. Knowing the difference was critical in deciding whether to back off, to push through, or to pick up the pace.

Resilience doesn’t come from ignoring the warning signs. It comes from understanding them and dealing with them.

In a business context, there are loads of examples where this ability to read your own emotions and respond accordingly is critical to your performance under pressure. This is at the very core of being a resilient leader.

For example, in a high-stakes negotiation, you’re in a situation that, by its very nature, is adversarial. It’s really common to experience many emotions, and not all of them are productive, trust me. Fear, anger, apprehension, frustration… they all just come with the territory in a big negotiation.

This is why learning how to read your own emotional responses, to understand them, and to choose an appropriate course of action based on that is so important. Without this ability, you’ll try to suppress the negative emotions: but the energy it takes to do this is all-consuming. It distracts you, it breaks your concentration, and it diminishes your ability to remain calm, decisive, and rational.

I’ve never seen a great leader who isn’t also a great negotiator. It takes enormous self-awareness: the ability to read and respond to your emotions without letting them dominate you takes real resilience.

THE ROLE OF ROUTINE

Let’s consider the role that routine plays. What if you could do something simple every day to prepare yourself for any adversity that comes your way? Resilience, in part, relies on the fact that you see difficult circumstances as being familiar. It’s not all foreign. It’s a place you’ve been before. You are physically and mentally prepared to take charge when the need arises.

There’s an excellent podcast I listen to occasionally called The Greg McKeown Podcast. He released an episode some time ago, which we’ll put a link to in the show notes, called The Genius of Routine. In it, McKeown talks about the routine of Michael Phelps, the iconic American swimmer who won 23 gold medals across four separate Olympic Games.

Phelps followed the identical routine in the lead up to every race: everything from his stretching, to his in-pool warmup, to his starting sequence. His timing was down to the minute.

For example, he’d put on his race suit 30 minutes before the race, he’d get into the warmup pool, and he’d swim 600 meters. With 10 minutes to go, he’d walk to the red room and find a seat alone, putting his goggles on one side and his towel on the other. He’d do exactly the same series of stretches when he got to the starting blocks. He also had a routine for what to think about as he went to sleep and first thing when he woke up, so the mental rehearsal put him in the race situation again, and again, and again.

When it came time to actually race, he was literally just following the script that he’d followed hundreds of times before. Phelps did what many people at the top of their game do: he took something inherently difficult and uncomfortable and made it routine and comfortable.

How could you use routines to support your own resilience?

Well, every day’s different. Some days you feel motivated and some days you don’t. Some days you’re tired and stressed. Some days even conspire to stop you from doing the things you know you should do. Learning to stick to a routine in any area of your life can help you build resilience because you get into the habit of doing it whether you feel like it or not.

Whether it’s an ice bath after training, or going for a swim in the ocean 365 days of the year. Whether it’s getting up every morning at 5:00 AM no matter what. Maybe it’s intermittent fasting, or reading for an hour each day. Building a routine, a daily discipline of consistent habits, can help you feel more in control. And for a leader when the pressure is on, that feeling of being able to control your own mental and emotional state is everything.

HACKS TO HELP YOU DO HARD THINGS

The only way to build resilience is by becoming more and more comfortable in the face of adverse circumstances. And the trick is to force yourself to practice it when you don’t feel like doing it. How do you push yourself to do hard things?

1. Look outside yourself

If you focus only on yourself–your own feelings, fears, and doubts–you’ll find it really difficult to step into hard situations. Self-preservation will override virtually everything else, and then you’ll rationalize as to why you don’t really need to do the thing that (deep down) you know you should. Think about how stepping into the breach will benefit others. Ask yourself what it would mean to someone else.

For example, there are many situations where you may need to step in and intervene to correct a performance shortfall in your team. It’s really easy to let this slide if you only think about the potential negative consequences for you, personally. There might be pushback, or you might be seen as being too picky or overly tough.

Instead, try to think about the potential consequences of allowing that lower standard to prevail. Eventually, team performance is going to slip, and that could be incredibly detrimental for everyone in the longer term. What do they need? They need to understand that the lowering of the performance isn’t acceptable and they need to be given the opportunity to rally and improve.

2. Think of the bigger picture

As humans, we’re conditioned to short-term thinking. What’s best for me today will always override what’s best for me in five years unless, of course, I learn to develop a long-term focus.

One question that I find really useful is, “Where is this taking me?” Whenever I ask this, it helps me to get past the immediacy of what feels right for now and pushes me to consider the longer term implications.

I might be perfectly happy to sit on the couch with a beer watching a football game, and hey, there’s nothing wrong with that. But if I allow the comfort of the short term to dominate, I’ll be in a spot of bother in the longer term. Asking the question, where is this taking me?, will give you the opportunity to project forward. You’ll be more likely to choose to do something hard today because you can see the long term payoff. If you don’t look to the future, it’s much more difficult to condition yourself to do hard things in the present.

3. Align your goals with your actions

There’s a great blog from Mark Manson, which is an excerpt from his bestselling book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*ck. It’s called The Most Important Question of Your Life. Manson’s contention is that we all say we want things–to be the CEO of a large company, to be a rockstar, to be a professional sportsperson–but rarely are we prepared to do what it takes to get there.

You want to be a professional golfer? Fine. Are you prepared to hit 1,000 golf balls every day for 10 years? Because it’s only through those actions that you’ll build the skill and the resilience to achieve your goal. Without it, your goal is nothing more than an idle wish.

Once you understand this principle, if you know what actions it would take to reach your goal, you’re way more likely to do the hard things that are going to take you there.

4. Success comes with a price tag

Anyone can be successful if they’re prepared to do hard things. But there’s no success without work, sacrifice, and risk. If there was, it wouldn’t be worth it anyway: everyone would be doing it! Knowing that resilience comes from facing into difficult things and mastering them takes all of the agonizing out of the decisions you need to make. It builds a strength and confidence that you can’t get any other way.

I remember as if it were yesterday, that feeling of running through the darkened streets of Canberra in the pre-dawn, sub-zero temperatures. I felt incredibly strong as I sped past the rows of houses, all still in darkness, because I knew what I was doing would build my strength, physically and mentally, in a way that most people simply weren’t prepared to do.

Now, I know it sounds a little dysfunctional, but the harder something is, the more I relish it: that’s what brings out the best in me and separates me from the pack.

When I hit a particularly tough obstacle, I say to myself, “Oh, this is awesome. This is where it gets too hard for everyone else, and they turn around and go back. Well, guess what? I’m not going back. I’m going over it. I’m going through it. I’m going around it… but I’m not stopping.“

If you can adopt this philosophy, you’re going to become incredibly resilient in no time at all.

There are many complex facets of human behavior and performance that play into your leadership capability, but I think resilience is one of the competencies that has a clear path to mastery: not because it isn’t hard. It’s hard, right? There’s no doubt about it, but it’s relatively simple.

So, choose to do hard things. Know yourself, and don’t shy away from accepting the inner turmoil and struggle. It’s okay. Don’t be afraid to put your feelings, your image, or your likability at risk. As you become more resilient, obstacles that most people live in fear of just seem to melt away.

You become relatively unconstrained, which is an incredible feeling, and your confidence will soar, because you feel that there’s nothing you aren’t able to handle.

If you do the easy things in life, life becomes hard. But if you do the hard things in life, life becomes easy!