Our guest, Dr. Taryn Marie Steiskal (pronounced Stay-skull) is the #1 international expert on resilience, mental health, and well-being in both leadership and life, whose mission is to positively impact the lives of 1 billion people, by enhancing hope, healing, and health through the concepts of resilience.She is recognized as a leading global authority on resilience, wellbeing, and mental health, as well as employee engagement, change leadership, and women in leadership. Her work has been featured by Fox, NBC News, Worldwide Business and Modern Living with Kathy Ireland, Bloomberg Business, Thrive Global, TEDx, and Forbes. LA Progressive calls her “the go-to person” and “a secret weapon” for people who want to find and maintain their edge aS well as rise above the competition.
Living Room Conversations: A Deep Dive on Resilience with Taryn Marie Stejskal – YouTube
Hello good morning good afternoon good evening everyone thank you for joining me in our living room conversations podcast my name is Rhea ongyou and I’m a catalyst at life sciences and I will be the host for the session today the living room conversations we started this as a way to connect with people who have climbed before us in terms of exploring topics that are close to our heart especially in the ecosystem and today we will be having a deep dive on resilience resilience plays a role in the individuals as well as in organizations nowadays and we just have been fortunate to be around people who have been doing research and who have a lot of experience to share on this topic and I hope you lean in and join me as we um maybe explore a little bit together what resilience looks like in our day-to-day but also in the organizations that we are part of and um for this uh hour I would like to invite you to engage and bring your questions as well we are very fortunate to have someone who is a best-selling author and um has written a book uh recently launched a book called The Five practices of Highly resilient um people and I would really love for you to yeah join us in the conversation don’t be a stranger don’t be a bystander ask your questions on the chat if you’re tuning in to LinkedIn to YouTube and to Facebook do chime into the conversation and um show us some love and so without further Ado I would like to welcome a good friend and also one of the leading voices um in resilience today Dr Taryn Marie stays call thank you so much good morning good afternoon good evening to everyone who’s joining us I’m just delighted to be here with you and what an honor to be part of your living room conversations thank you so much um Taryn uh you have I mean we met in Las Vegas for the Tony Shea experience um about a year ago and you have also joined us a deal around the world but for some of our audience they may not be familiar with the body of work that you have been doing so I would just like to invite you to share just a little bit with us what you’re doing and what you’re so excited about well the first thing I’ll say is that um you know I’m out here on the west coast today so it’s it’s just um well it’s just 7 A.M so I’m just waking up so I’m gonna gain some momentum over the course of our of our conversation and I think there’s a couple of things foundationally for us to touch on as we do this deep dive into this conversation with resilience because as I’ve been looking at this topic for the last two decades there are some really um intentional ways that the way that I think about resilience differentiates itself I think from our common knowledge or even how we’ve thought about this word this experience inside of our lives and so the first thing that I want to touch on is this idea that resilience is the essence of Being Human and if we really let that Cascade over us resilience is the essence of Being Human what does that mean it means that for so often we have talked about resilience as something that we have to go out and get or find we’ve talked about resilience as something that maybe people didn’t have enough of or maybe a dichotomy someone’s resilient or not resilient and in fact what I’ve found in my work is that by a virtue of Being Human we all inherently have this sense of resilience the skill set of resilience within us and how do I know this because for all of us that are tuning in live today or we’ll listen to the recording we have survived every disappointment loss rejection crisis turn of events and even in those moments when we thought we weren’t going to make it we found a way we found a set of skills we’ve found strength within ourself and so there’s a sense of sort of dread for many people when we think about resilience people are um some people are saying you know I don’t want to be resilient or I don’t want to be resilient anymore and in fact it’s the large-scale challenge change and complexity that’s really overwhelming and in many ways much more intense than many of us have felt in our lives today and so I think we get to start from a place when we talk more about this concept of wholeness we get to start from a place of knowing that resilience already exists inside of us and it’s not something we have to go out and find it’s something we already are yeah that’s that’s a very interesting thing because um we all we often uh hear things like oh we need to build resilience all we need to um do this and that um to create resilience but what is it in the context of wholeness what is it exactly um how does it um maybe show up in uh in the individual um walks of life maybe uh can can you elaborate a little bit sure sure well I think that you know the next thing for us to know is that challenge change and complexity or the three C’s as I call them if resilience is the essence of Being Human the three C’s is the fabric of Our Lives for so often we’ve thought that perhaps with careful thought with good strategy with foresight with planfulness we would be able to engineer challenge change and complexity out of our lives and just make that road seamless and in fact what we know is that we can’t engineer these things out of our lives and not only that we don’t want to and so I think this is the second place we get to really flip that script because we go from you know thinking about development as being from a place of lack to a place of these skills exist within us we get to cultivate them and then we also go to look challenge is inevitable so it’s about building a skill set for these moments when we’re going to face this and if it’s part of the fabric of our Human Experience what that also means is we get to stop feeling bad when stuff doesn’t work out when Things Fall Apart when change is overwhelming because we know that’s just part of what it means to be human and in fact these moments are some of our best some of our best teachers so one of the things that I’ll just mention before I kind of talk about like what you know what does that look like within us or how do we sort of exemplify this is I do an activity with organizations and teams called the reverse bucket list right and this is meant to recast our relationship with challenge change and complexity or the three C’s and so we talk about the bucket list the pleasurable activities that we want to do uh while we’re on this planet and then the reverse bucket list is really all the stuff we hope to avoid the the lot the loss of a loved one um a health diagnosis an unanticipated crisis um a reorganization or a termination or layoffs inside of our organization And yet when we look at these sort of reverse bucket list moments we get to ask ourselves two important questions one is how did I effectively face that challenge and two how did that challenge form me into the person that I am today and when we do this reverse bucket list activity reflection what we find is that challenge actually allows us to grow of course and that there are tremendous elements of challenge change and complexity that have formed us in a in really meaningful ways into the people that we are today that’s uh that’s that’s really interesting and um I think uh for people who are listening to us um and going through these challenges it’s important uh to realize and I know that you also coded it in your book um Taran where you said being resilient and feeling resilient are two different things can you um elaborate a little bit on that I would love to elaborate on that well you know what I think we’ve all noticed to some extent whether it’s sort of come into our Consciousness right um you know directly or whether it’s still kind of floating around in our in our subconscious is that when we face challenge change and complexity it doesn’t feel good right it’s not a moment that um necessarily brings us a lot of a lot of Joy or a lot of pleasure um and so then in these moments where we’re demonstrating resilience even though we’re doing the best things where you know the right things right it may not feel you know pleasurable or enjoyable and so um the story that I like to tell about this is for a long time I was a master’s you know competitive swimmer and I went to Nationals one year and I was pregnant uh with my first son I was in the first trimester so I was hot and thirsty and Queasy and um I had a headache and then it was time for me to get up on the blocks and to swim my my race and I felt awful right and I had been training you know four Nationals in the pool and so I got in I swam that race I swam other races and I swam some of my best times so my best times you know of my life and what that showed me was you know I could not feel good but still swim well or Swim good because I’d been doing the training and I think resilience is a lot like that in the sense that that these moments of challenge don’t feel good they’re scary they’re unbalancing um they’re confusing and yet with training with the development of skill when these moments show up we may not feel good in that moment exemplifying resilience and yet we can create a better outcome a more positive and productive outcome just as with my training I was able to swim not feeling well but yet swim some of my best times yeah that’s really interesting it reminds me of people who run the marathon I’m not a runner myself but imagine in the the worst terrain and the worst weather conditions and some of these Runners actually get their best times or even just to push through um whether that they’re not familiar with or their bodies not trained with that’s already um you know something that they can be proud of yeah I mean just building on that Marathon example I mean that’s such a tremendous example of human strength and and resilience you know the first person that ran a marathon you know back in ancient Greece died you know they they were running back to you know I forget exactly what the history is right but to send a message um you know to the authorities and they ran that distance um so hard and without training that upon arrival right their body their body shot down but us as humans rather than saying nobody should ever run a marathon again because we will die this has actually become something that you know millions of people have participated in as Runners and so with that training we’ve you know harnessed this skill set you know that initially was life-threatening yeah it’s amazing how resilience place a key role in in this very challenging situations and um yeah before I um kind of go into to my next question I just want to invite people who are watching us today to please search I’m in um ask your questions uh on Facebook on YouTube or in LinkedIn live and uh we’ll try to answer them as we go and um yeah yeah so Taryn coming back to this right so there’s there’s different layers um in the work that I do and the work that you do I can imagine like a complimentary uh thing so I would like to start with the individual right so because ever although I work a lot with organizations although I work a lot with teams these teams are uh pretty much a collective of individuals who are resilient right so um how does uh your work on resilience um kind of uh show up in in the context of an individual and what were the um let’s say the challenges that you um encountered in in in in this space yeah well you know this work all started I mean it’s it stems from a lot of my own resilience stories and experience and so I say that we all have resilient stories and in fact a resilient stories are often the stories that we most don’t want to tell and yet are the stories that most need to be told because we still this tremendous shame around challenge change and complexity and so we tend to hide a lot of our resilient stories as individuals so what I wanted to understand was really two things one um are there commonalities that exist amongst us as humans that in these three C moments when the challenge change and complexity shows up in our lives that there are certain things that we can do in those moments when we’re literally saying to ourselves you know in our minds or out loud what am I going to do with this challenge are there commonalities amongst us as humans that allow us to effectively face challenge and it turns out there are and these are the five practices of Highly resilient people and so I interviewed hundreds of people and collected thousands of pieces of data and then was able to qualitatively code what people told me about the times when they had most effectively faced a challenge and so when we think about these five qualities these are qualities that individuals that we all have within ourselves that we can amplify and strengthen then we can look at the resilience of teams and also of organizations and cultures and so when we think about these five practices for us as individuals right what are they the first practice is the practice of vulnerability and for a lot of people that’s surprising because people say you know I think of resilience as strength and I think of vulnerability as weakness so help me understand what what what gives here right how can I you know make these things coexist in my mind and so the definition that I’ve found in these two decades of doing this work is that resilience is the ability to effectively face the three C’s and to allow ourselves to be in hand let’s buy those moments to allow those moments to be our teacher as we talked about in the reverse bucket list rather than diminished and so when we look at that definition the first thing that we get to know about ourselves as human humans when we’re demonstrating resilience and this is one of the myths of resilience that we carry around with us is that we actually don’t bounce back we actually don’t bounce back so we talk about resilience as being something where we go back to a prior state right and yet if if you and me and all of the folks turning tuning in if we just think about what happened the last time we faced something difficult none of us went back to the way we were before right we were all fundamentally and forever changed now this is this is a high level group right and so all of you have likely read at least one article on neuroplasticity and what neuroplasticity tells us for anyone who hasn’t is that our neurons are constantly rewiring regenerating regrouping to effectively respond and really mirror our external environment and so if every experience that we have changes us down to the cellular level right the neurological level with our neurons why would we ever expect that we would go back to the way that we were so we don’t bounce back we bounce forward we allow ourselves to be fundamentally and forever changed by our experience and so the five practices of Highly resilient people and we can unpack these to a greater degree is vulnerability which is allowing our inside self our thoughts feelings and experiences to most closely match the outside self that we share with the world those thoughts feelings and experience so that we’re running a singular human operating system that we’re being congruent with ourselves rather than trying to be two people or run two operating systems in these significant 3C moments the second practice is the practice of productive perseverance this is are intelligent pursuit of a goal knowing when to maintain the mission or be gritty in the words of Angela Duckworth in a new and different direction the third practice is the connect is the practice of connection it’s about the connection we have with ourselves first and foremost there’s a lot of conversation that we can unpack around burnout stress exhaustion and what I can tell you is that no one has become burned out or exhausted right without diminishing their connection to themselves without diminishing our connection to ourselves so this connection to ourselves is deeply important and when we start to shut that off we experience burnout and exhaustion and then how we navigate the connections outside of ourselves what’s the interplay of that the fourth practice is the practice of gradiosity being able to look on an experience after some time and to be able to see the good in that challenge even though we wouldn’t have chosen it and then how we share our resilient stories generously building on that foundational element of vulnerability that we talked about and then the fifth practice is the practice of possibility it’s about focusing on progress over Perfection for us as individuals and teams and organizations and then how in each challenge we navigate the relationship between risk and opportunity to create new and different possibilities that’s beautiful so there you have it folks the five practices vulnerability productive perseverance connection within and outside um radiosity and possibility right exploring um opportunities uh that are abandoned abundant around us as well and being able to capture those so thank you so much for this gift uh of the five practices uh Tyrion I think you know if we put a sticker in our wall and um always constantly remember this uh we can also develop this habits to form resilience uh in our own way um yeah so a question to you um and I know that uh you recently uh wrote a book uh that is uh published uh all over um including one of the top uh books in Forbes recently and um and I know there’s a lot of work that went into this and a lot of also your personal experiences um as I was listening to the audible last night um I was uh I was really deeply touched um by how personal the stories are so I would love to invite you to to also tell us a little bit of the backstory behind the book I love that well thank you so much for uh sharing with your audience the book and also to you for downloading the audiobook um I’m so delighted and honored that you’re listening to it and you know something that I learned very early on I I wanted to sort of show up um well I’ll say this so I was really I was really good oh I don’t know um probably as few years ago as like let’s see what is it now too 2023 I was really good at being invulnerable I had built this life around invulnerability and Perfection and a Flawless exterior and I was doing research you know over the course of the last two decades and at the same time when vulnerability was really starting to emerge as one of the five key practices to demonstrate and amplify resilience I also got some feedback in one of my reviews with my company and the review went a little something like everything’s good except you know you’re not vulnerable enough and I was like what is like is that a joke um now I think there’s also um some some some gender bias here because I don’t I don’t also don’t think like in reviews we go around saying to men that they’re not vulnerable enough I could be wrong about that um but I I haven’t I haven’t seen it um but what happened was that constellation of things came together for me this sort of feedback inside of my review and then also the work that I had been doing to understand how we effectively face challenge as humans and what I like to say you know a lot of people say like how did you get it you know interested in this work um because resilience lives in all of us because it’s the essence of Being Human resilience finds all of us and for me that’s a really reassuring thought that like we don’t have to go out and find it that it already lives within us and it’s already found us and so for me when we think about our resilience stories when we think about vulnerability when we think about showing up as our whole self one of the resilient stories that I’ve begun telling in the spirit of vulnerability is about my experience with a stalker growing up with developing two decades of PTSD post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of him coming to our home and his behavior escalating he ultimately uh unfortunately when I went away to college uh brutally attacked and raped another woman in our neighborhood and he went to prison for 20 years and I say you know I spent 20 years in captivity because I had this post-traumatic stress disorder diagnosis and I also realized when I was age 37 when I was ready to really kind of face this new and different way that I learned and that I saw the world I got tested and realized of course for my whole life I’ve also been dyslexic and so for a long time you know I hid these stories because as we do with our resilient stories as humans we often think these are the stories that are going to discredit us these are the stories that are going to make people look down on us or think differently of us and in fact what I’ve found in my own personal experience and working with you know tens of thousands of you know leaders across the globe is that these resilient stories these stories that you know most need to be told but are the ones that we often aren’t hold back these are these are the stories of our Humanity because when I talk about dyslexia I can talk about being neuroatypical I can talk about seeing the world in a different way I can talk about the strengths that I bring to my company and to my team and to my organizations because I’m able to see patterns in a place where people just see chaos I’m able to remember things because as being someone who is dyslexic I was I was never sure if I was going to be able to read the thing again or find the thing again so I memorized all the information that came in and you know as humans when we go through the three C’s we experience a lot of fear we experience anxiety we experience unrest churn within us and I think these early experiences with a deep sense of fear with having the stalker has allowed me to really appreciate and empathize with that sense of fear that we can all experience maybe not to that degree but in these moments of challenge change and complexity and it’s equipped me to be better able to relate to people and to be better able to show up in those moments of uncertainty and be a guide for others because I’ve navigated them myself yeah that’s um yeah when I was listening to it I was like wow um how difficult to go through that but um you know you you went through uh your therapy um of course and you’ll learn so much about yourself in the process as well and now you have a gift of that’s something you can give to others uh from from the journey you’ve been on so yeah I truly appreciate you telling your story and yeah I wonder if um yeah there’s something in there that you could maybe um share to to Inspire others to maybe going through this like very difficult Journey themselves that is not within their control right right yeah don’t we all want to know that in those moments right like I’m like so asking for a friend how am I gonna get through this um yeah so uh it’s such a beautiful it’s such a beautiful question I loved I loved that you asked that also my boyfriend just brought me coffee so um he like slid it in so quietly um since it’s 7 30 here so that’s some it’s so lovely um you know when we think about this practice of of gradiosity um which is a word you know that I that I made up it you know hasn’t traditionally been part of the English language I’m hoping that Merriam-Webster will pick it up one day um you know the first thing is to look on our challenges and after some time to be able to see the good in them to be able to see what we learned and I think one of the best things that we can do with difficult experiences personally and professionally and there’s a lot of trauma that happens inside of organizations you know I speak with my Executive coaching clients and you know when they have difficult managers um when they don’t feel appreciated when they don’t have a sense of psychological safety that is very traumatic for people um it was just in contact with a woman this week who’s leaving her organization because she feels incredibly overwhelmed by the volume of work that is constantly coming at her and she feels unappreciated by her boss and she doesn’t feel like she knows where she stands and that constellation of things and more happening to her you know 12 to 14 hours in person on email you know in slack is exhausting and traumatizing to her and that’s not to take anything away from you know from other trauma by saying that right I think trauma lives and exists on a continuum and so I think the first thing that we get to do because we know the three C’s are inevitable is to be able to take the things in our life that have been tremendously hard and to find a way to allow those things to make us better and to not make us bitter and one of the stories that I like to tell is about this gentleman by the name of Keith Jarrett and Keith Jarrett played a concert in Germany it’s called the Clone concert if you look it up um k-o-l-n and he shows up at the concert Keith is already grappling you know with insomnia with jet lag with back pain right he shows up at the concert pouring rain and the concert promoter her name is Vera Brandeis she comes out and I imagine her like with like a raincoat over her head and Keith rolling down the window she’s delivering some additional bad news to Keith it was this you know solo jazz pianist and he’s going to play concert that night for a thousand people and she says hey I have some bad news uh two pieces of bad news actually the first one is uh they delivered the wrong piano and the piano is Out Of Tune and we can’t get it tuned before the concert tonight I mean can you imagine and then the second piece of bad news it gets worse is that the piano is also broken so not only is it Out Of Tune it’s it’s broken it doesn’t work in some places the pedal stick the keys stick in the you know in the upper registers and so you know for reasons unknown to us in history because you know this was uh 20 30 years ago Keith says he’s still gonna go on stage he doesn’t turn around and go back to the airport so Keith plays the concert that night classically trained solo jazz pianist rises from the piano bench she was standing ovation from the audience and then it gets better because a couple months later his team says you know that clone concert got a really strong reception from people why don’t we take that recording and put it out as an album and so they put the recording out as an album and the Clone concert recording by Keith Jarrett becomes the number one best-selling solo jazz piano album of all time played on a Broken Out Of Tune piano and so you know and we can get into some practical strategies too right but at like a high level when I think about when we’re going through hard things or when we’ve gone through hard things and how we make sense of that I think resilience is about taking those things that feel broken like a piano you know literally or figuratively and figuring out how to create something beautiful right and so for me one of my greatest um achievement is not quite the quite the word here but like one of my greatest moments of actualization in a way that I Endeavor to live my life to take the hard things like dyslexia like having a stalker and developing PTSD and rather than feeling bitter about those things rather than feeling broken or ashamed about those things to transmute them as we do through healing through reflection through therapy and to figure out how I can glorify those things how I can make it beautiful so that in the spirit of gradiosity the second part is about generously sharing our stories that when I stand up in front of people on Big stages I get to meet with people like you and be part of living room conversations but in sharing our stories generously we do two things one we solidify our own resilience how we got through a challenge that we didn’t imagine we could ever make it through right we tell that story it solidifies that for us cognitively and the second thing it does is it encourages others it encourages others on their Journey whether we know what we’ve contributed or not we become part of someone else’s Survival Guide right people look at us and they say people have looked at me and they’ve looked at you and they’ve looked at other folks tuning in and they’ve said you know I don’t know who this Dr Taryn Marie person is right I don’t you know I’ve never met Raya before and yet I know about a story where they made it through something hard and that gives me hope and tells me I can do it too so we become part of other people’s Survival Guide we encourage them on their journey and these stories are tremendously powerful inside of organizations as part of coaching is part of mentorship as part of town halls to allow everyone to allow all of us to collectively learn from these 3C moments that we know are inevitable hmm thank you that’s so beautiful Taryn and uh for anyone who’s listening to this conversation I hope you picked up a thing or two um that you could um put in your backpack uh so when the challenge the complexity uh the changes around us will happen you can kind of take that out of your backpack anytime and um we learn in our own experiences but also from the experiences of others so thank you so much Taryn for sharing that um I saw a couple of questions and maybe I start with a question from Matt in the audience Matthew Turner um he’s asking and he’s saying thank you for sharing so when you studied brain injury patients did you also study stroke patients and when you did what’s the one thing that can be done to help them get back to close back close to normal Matt thank you so much for this question I love this question so much for a couple of reasons um the first thing I love about this question is in the dedication of my book the five practices of Highly resilient people why some flourish and others fold in that dedication section right you know on the first or second page one of the groups of people that I think are the incredible individuals that I had the opportunity to work with early on in my career who had um undergone or survived as we say traumatic brain injuries um and abis um which is an organic or an acquired brain injury which would be like a stroke or a brain aneurysm you know to your point so I had the opportunity to work um with folks who had traumatic brain injuries who had spinal cord injuries um and the ABI is the acquired brain injuries under which you know people who have experienced stroke would be part of kind of that broader category and I just had the opportunity to really learn so much um from these amazing people from their family members and this is also part of what has been one of the significant moments on my journey to really better understanding resilience is sitting you know in my office in hospital rooms with people who are in the midst of a tremendously unbalancing and life-changing uh circumstance around a brain injury and how it dramatically impacts their health their relationships their family members their partner their children and so I’m so deeply grateful uh for the ways that these people have generously taught me and invited me into their lives and I like to always acknowledge um that sense of gratitude and deep appreciation so I thank you so much for that pers that first part um the second part is you know what’s the one thing you know to help people get back to normal and I know I think here one of the things that’s really important is um that we continue to offer people a sense of a sense of hope like hope is so important and it’s so powerful and also when we think about um get back to right it’s about going back to a prior state and then there’s also this word normal right and so what I like to say what I think is important to say is that you know we’re going to bounce forward here after this challenge or in the midst of this challenge of brain injuries so what I know for sure is when we face challenge and people with brain injuries um you know are um how do I want to say it um no different yeah is that um we don’t go back to a prior state we don’t bounce back we bounce forward it’s about creating a new life a different life um when we do that sometimes we get to grieve the losses of the old life that we’re not going back to or won’t go back to in the same way I think for people who want to go back to the life that they had before challenge whether that is a is a brain injury whether that’s cancer diagnosis whether that’s a you know a job elimination like we’re not going back to the way things were before and that can be jarring for some people and it’s also I think in a way refreshing and freeing because we get to demonstrate resilience without going back to that prior State and so I think the thing to do is to maintain a sense of hope in the midst of this journey um there’s something that you might be familiar with um called the Stockwell paradox and what Jim Stockwell says he was a prisoner of war in Vietnam and he talks about you know the people that were the prisoners of War you know who were the ones that did the best right the prisoners that did the worst and this is different than what a lot of us might think were the optimists they were the ones who wanted to go home and go back to normal and bounce back the people that did the best engaged in something with Stockwell called the you know what became known as the Stockwell Paradox which is being willing to confront the brutal reality of today and this is important side of organizations too right for our managers and bosses and leaders to not just simply paint the positive picture right to just not say everything is great you know this is like toxic positivity right to really confront the brutal reality today of what it means to be someone or to be a family member or in a close relationship with someone who has had a brain injury you know to confront the brutal reality of what that means and to not lose hope for the beautiful future that this person that you your family members your friends you know will continue to allow to unfold in your lives so you know to really tie this up in a bow I think the people that do the best are the people who continue to focus on improving incrementally over time and who allow themselves and their family members allow themselves to write a new story about what a beautiful life looks like under new circumstances and rather than holding ourselves to the standard of bouncing back and going back to the way we were before to be able to write a new story about bouncing forward and about a new and different life that’s being created you know as a result of it or in response to this brain injury that’s uh that’s a really beautiful piece of advice and I was uh just uh thinking about like you know how many um organizations have um let people go in the last six months or even in the last year right so there’s a massive Exodus not only resignation but also really people being let go um because our organizations need to restructure or that they have a different Focus or they have a different um um leader and um resilience place a huge part in the individual year right because these are situations that are out of their control but do you think in organizations where you still want to preserve um the Integrity you want to preserve the value of the organization especially for the ones who are left behind they need as much resilience as the one who’ve been let go as well but in a different context right what would be your advice to leaders to to to help your organization like you said bounce back from the current stage yeah yeah I love that it’s such a great question um you know I think what we find in organizations is like there’s a lot of um there’s a lot of Survivor guilt right um so I was just speaking with the chro achieve Human Resources officer last week and I’m doing you know some Consulting work with their organization and they they’re um an organization that has grown rapidly just to give you a bit of context right um highly profitable um still in kind of growth stages and so they’ve grown recently from about you know 250 to like 1500 people right and they decided that you know as they’re shifting and growing and they’re operating you know strategy is evolving their operating model is changing they laid off three people okay so three people inside of an organization of 1500 and this was the first time they’d ever done layoffs and so the people you know who stayed that you know fourteen thousand ninety seven people this was a very traumatic event for them because this is the first time they’ve seen their organization you know lay people off and so even though it was a small small number there was trauma there was uncertainty there was confusion that was introduced you know to that for people and what we really want in our lives is we want a sense of clarity and our brain loves certainty right you know life is profoundly uncertain um you know I I think about this experience that I had early on you know with the stalker right and and to be clear like um having a stalker at 14 and layoffs inside of organizations like it’s not the same thing I’m not saying that um and there’s so much that we can learn because um when this woman in my neighborhood was attacked and and ultimately um assaulted and raped you know I felt so deeply fortunate that I had been able to thwart this person’s efforts of trying to break into my own house that I had like avoided this and yet so incredibly sad and empathetic for the fact that this had happened to someone else and so while that experience is not the same thing right um the sentiment of it is that we can often feel deeply sad and empathetic for the people who are let go the people that are departing an organization um and also have a sense that we’re like deeply grateful that it’s not us and that we get to stay and we get to continue and and be part of what this organization is doing and and you know receive a paycheck and have that stability and certainty in our lives and so you know just like just like us as people just like neuroplasticity just like our brains are constantly evolving and regenerating and rewiring organizations are doing the same organizations are constantly evolving as well and so I think what we get to do is we get to realize that not only are we bouncing forward as individuals we’re bouncing forward as teams and we’re bouncing forward as as organizations so what I say to organizations is you know our executive teams they get together and they have conversations constantly about the strategy about the market conditions about volatility about disruption about changing the operating model but all of those conversations aren’t passed to the people across the organization so you know while they’ve been talking about a change for six months folks inside of the organization have just attended one town hall they’ve gotten a couple emails right so being really thoughtful about how we Cascade communication across organizations and not just doing it collectively like announcing it to a town hall sending a mass email but really equipping our leaders and managers across the organization to be able to share that information to provide answers with people to give the why and the clarity about how our strategy is evolving how the operating model is changing therefore as an organization how we’re shifting why these positions were eliminated when we start to have more answers to those why questions for the personal things that have been dramatic and difficult for us or when our organizations are able to provide more information more clarity to help us make sense of that then we feel a sense of Greater psychological safety and I think we’re able to bounce forward be able to move forward and continue to evolve when we’re able to understand the why and the reasoning behind the what of what happened it’s a that’s a very very good point um communication lays a very crucial role um in organizations right and um really having leaders who are thoughtful who are sensitive and are empathic and bringing across communication with a little bit of um Head Start let’s say um because that’s what people need right to be able to respond positively to changes as well and I don’t I I need as a human I need to understand how to position myself inside of the landscape of this new organization and I need to know because what do we all think to ourselves we’re like am I am I next am I you know like looking over our shoulder right like there’s some research that was done this is still fascinating I’ll digress for just a hot minute um of people like in the United States we have this thing um called the 11 o’clock news right now a lot of people aren’t watching television you know to the extent that we once were streaming things we’re watching series but there was some research that was done a number of years ago around people who watched the 11 o’clock news okay and here in the United States the 11 o’clock news if you don’t know I don’t mean to like woman explain anything to anyone here but it’s like it’s like all the worst things that are happening right it’s like all the crime in your city all the fires you know all of the you know homelessness right it’s it’s just like it’s like where they talk about like kind of all the most difficult things that are happening in society and they found that people have watched the 11 o’clock news regularly um actually overestimated the amount of crime they overestimated the number of police officers and they underestimated you know kind of objectively right the the level of safety in their area and so what we call that in Psychology it’s like a fancy word it’s called the unavail an availability heuristic and what an availability heuristic is is like the things that we hear the most about that are most available in our Consciousness so people that were watching the 11 o’clock news were hearing about all the worst things that was how they began to see the world right and so if we sort of cross this Chasm right back from the 11 o’clock news into organizations you know what we find is that when people are hearing about layoffs when people are hearing about reorganization people are hearing about change that becomes part of their Consciousness that availability heuristic and that’s what people think most about that’s what people are most afraid about and so then as Leaders we have an opportunity to step forward and create more certainty more clarity and to help people understand oh thinking and the method so that then we have the opportunity to be able to make sense of that thank you so much Darian that’s a that’s a really good piece of advice and um I think many who will be watching the replay and who are also with us today could uh certainly use um uh the the stuff that you have shared with us um so I just realized the hour has flew by um pretty fast and we’re almost at the top of the hour now so Taryn I think I hear I think I hear your dog yes you do uh he wants to make an appearance I don’t know if you all have met Ray’s dog yeah he likes to make an appearance sometimes he’s so beautiful and is is he I I think I sometimes get his breed wrong is he a Samoyed yes he is oh my God it just the most beautiful dogs love him okay thank you so much um yeah so I just want to encourage those who have been with us there’s a couple of links that are ready and um Terence YouTube channel uh her Ted talk but that is a 1. 7 million views um it’s pretty interesting to to go ahead and check that out and on your screen you can see her website resilience leadership.com and last but not the least we want to invite you to download her book and um yeah and uh yeah and read a little bit more about how you can develop resilience um through the five um practices that she unpacked uh generously in that book and what I’ll just mention for everyone who’s listening uh live right in this moment and for anyone who’s going to listen to the recorded version of this episode is you know we know that not everyone is available is able to get the you know to get the book that may not be accessible for some people the book hasn’t released in some parts of the world and so what I wanted to do for this audience and because I’m just delighted and honored to be a part of this conversation is we actually have a free ebook that gives you the high level of the five practices right it’s called your resilient life so it breaks out the definition of resilience the challenge change and complexity the myths and truths of resilience and then walks you through the five practices and gives you some opportunities for reflection and integration of the five practices without without having to purchase the book so this free guide It’s called Your resilient life and we want to offer it you know to all of you who are tuner tuning in today as really just a special gift to be able to acquaint yourself more deeply with the five practices maybe you don’t have an opportunity to get the book where you are maybe you just want to learn some more before you invest in down in downloading something on Audible or in buying the hardcover book you know right now that’s a that’s a significant investment so um what you can do is you can reach out to me either on LinkedIn Dr Taryn Marie stay skull or on Instagram and if you just type it to the chat just type into the direct message Life Sciences live Sciences um we will go ahead and send you the free download for your resilient life and we want to offer that gift to all of you because it’s it’s such a delight and an honor to be here with all of you today thank you so much Taryn for that gift and to all of you have listened in please go ahead and send her a message connect with her on LinkedIn and um yeah before I close this episode I just want to invite you to also um join us in the upcoming episodes of the living room conversations um we will have Chris Brogan from appfire joining us on the 14th of June and Tom Nixon and Fanny Norland talking about feminine and masculine energies um joining us on the 28th of June so really looking forward to those conversations as well and um as we wrap up uh Taryn I’d love to give you the honor of um yeah leaving us with uh some thoughts to ponder oh thank you for that well I want to thank everyone who’s attended live I want to thank all of you who have engaged with your incredible questions um thank you Remy for reinforcing uh this idea of neuroplasticity and vulnerability and how that emerges in the important work that you do um I also wanted to thank Rosanna for connecting with us for watching the Ted Talk and sharing it with your friends thank you so much for being part of our broader uh resilience Community Rosanna said she said what do you think is the number one takeaway or most important point of that talk of that Ted Talk and I have to say Rosanna I like giggled to myself internally because it was it was such an undertaking to like distill two decades of research down into like a 14-minute talk and then to to then to think about like what’s the most important key takeaway and what I’ll tell you is I distilled the work down like really tried to boil it down and I think there’s a couple of things that people really gravitate toward I don’t know if I can say it’s one thing cap our time together you know I think it’s about resilience is the essence of Being Human that it lives and exists within all of us it’s not something we have to go out and get it’s something that we already have that challenge change and complexity are the three C’s are the fabric of what it truly means to be human these are not the exceptions to the rule but it’s the inevitable moments that we’ll experience um that we are all deeply universally connected and also of course unique in our own ways and yet knowing that in order to effectively face those three C’s there are five practices the five practices of Highly resilient people that allow us to create a more positive and productive outcome and so the last thing that I’ll just say for all of you who are joining live and those of you that listen to the replay and this is one of the last things I wrote in my book is that we are all as humans I’m convinced we are all as humans both masterpieces and works in progress and what that means is in this moment we are a masterpiece we are perfect in in what we’ve created and how we’re constructed and so often we go through life thinking we’re not enough and we need to do more and there’s something wrong with us and we need to change you know and so like to the extent that we can just quiet that talk and say like in this moment I am a masterpiece perfect in how I am and also a work in progress that we’re constantly on a journey of growth and evolution and I think if we can love and accept ourselves as a masterpiece in this moment and also love ourselves into that continued growth and evolution I think a lot of us would be a lot happier a lot less exhausted a lot less stressed out and so I’ll leave you with this idea that we are all masterpieces and works in progress simultaneously wow what a beautiful way to cap this conversation tarian thank you so much for joining our us in our living room virtually and for waking up very early in the morning in the west coast and to everyone who has tuned in with us thank you so much I hope that you walk away with a lot more energy and a lot more resilience to drive your day-to-day challenges thank you for being part of this conversation
