Flexible and adaptable. That’s certainly what we all would like to be know for as effective leaders.

And resilience, being identified as the ability to bounce back from setbacks, is a terrific characteristic for women

At Skirt Strategies we focus on a different leadership goal each month, providing a training tip via video and weekly training assignments for subscribed members. Ergo, our topic coming to you this month …. Resilience. See the video for more!

Video Transcript

Katie: We’re bringing you the monthly leadership tip, a different topic every month. A different compelling, fabulous, incredibly enriching topic and this month is about resilience.

It’s kind of a hot topic nowadays. And I have a theory why.

Carol: Why?

Katie: Because resilience is the ability to bounce back from setbacks and we are seeing so much change in your lives and in our businesses and our organizations, personal and public that it seems that we’ve got to be more adaptive. We’ve got to be able to bounce back faster.

Carol: We’ve got to be resilient.

Katie: To we’re going to talk just for a little bit about the concept of resilience. We’re going to share with you a model. We’ve got a couple of models that the monthly subscribers will get but we’ll give you the more simplified one and we’ll give you some indications of whether you have low resilience or high resilience.

Let’s start right off with the model that I like the most because it is simple, it’s manageable and it comes from the Cumberland Group with is a consulting group from out of the east coast. Thank you Cumberland. The model, it has five qualities of people that are resilient.

Five qualities, see where you fit into these. First one: having a positive view of yourself.

Carol: Yeah that’s a little difficult for women but yes it is very important.

Katie: Which is why we work with women quite a bit. We beat ourselves up more than the average bear and I will tell you, there is so much advantage to being able to bounce back by seeing yourself as somebody that can bounce back. A positive view or yourself.

Secondly: maintaining focus, values and goals.

Carol: Oh we teach that a lot. So we really tend to go back to that a lot. Maintaining focus, really figuring out what your goals are and going for them.

Katie: I tell you. Our followers which I love our followers, because they are the doers in that. They actually go forward and do much of that.

Having supportive and caring relationships is the third quality. I love this because in Shawn Achor’s book, The Happiness Advantage, one of my favorites. He identifies the answer to this question, “What one quality do you think has the most effect on living a longer, happier life?”

Carol: And that is relationships.

Katie: Relationships. It’s not your genes. It’s not how well you eat. It’s not how well you take care of your health or exercise. It’s not what part of the country you live in, it’s the network around you that socially supports you – your friends. You know girlies that having your gal pals around, oh my gosh it’s one of those things that I just find so rewarding.

So the fourth quality to being resilient is being proactive. Do something to other people before they do it to you.

Carol: No Katie that’s not it.

Katie: That’s probably not it, but being a doer rather than the victim mentality.

Carol: Get out of the victim mentality and just get it done.

Katie: And then the last one is being adaptive and flexible which has all sorts of implications itself.

Carol: We talked about that last month – how to flex in conflict.

Katie: Flexing in conflict, when things are looking at you. So resiliency meaning the ability to bounce back from setbacks. When you are faced with all of those how do you look at it?

Just having brought this terminology more recently into our conversation, I had a setback. It’s been kind of a strange last 3 or 4 months and there have been 2 or 3 setbacks that really tested me. I mentally pulled myself out of it and asked myself what is it that’s going on? How am I reacting and do I want to be in a funk or do I want to really get past it?

Carol: So that’s kind of the broader concept of this is, the power of positive thinking.

Katie: Positive psychology.

Carol: And bringing positive psychology and positive thinking into your life and how that makes a difference to your ability to be resilient.

Katie: Exactly. So I thought the other thing I would share and we’re getting some of this from a booked called The Resiliency Advantage, as well, another one of our sources by an author by the name of Al Siebert.

He has another model, it’s a little bit bigger one so we didn’t really have the time to share it with you but when you look at where you are on any of the models, some indications that you are not really flexing back so well would be if you tend to get down quite a bit from having a setback. You dwell on it.

Carol: You let it hurt you. You let it keep you down.

Katie: You feel hurt when people criticize you. You sometimes feel helpless. You sometimes feel hopeless. That would indicate maybe you should take a look at your self-worth. What is it that you are looking at? How do you see yourself?

On the opposite end of the scale, those folks that see themselves with really high resilience, are ones that are self-validating. They know that they are doing right or they give themselves the positive feedback that they need to. They also are the real doers. Here’s the proactiveness. They are the real doers when they are taking their leadership skills and doing more with it.

Carol: So those women who are members of Skirt Strategies, they are the ones who are really taking this on and saying, “I am not just going to commit to watching the video.” Love that you watch the video but “I’m going to commit to doing lessons as well.”

Katie: Preaching to the choir.

Carol: That’s right and it’s $8 a month. So why wouldn’t you?

Katie: So those of you that are watching and you find that resilience is something that you would dig we’ve got a whole month full of it. Every month we dwell into or dig into just a little bit deeper of a different leadership topic for women so this month happens to be, resiliency.

Next month is networking which we’ll go into. Those that are on the monthly subscription for $8, they get held accountable. They are the folks that like to have something in their inbox every Monday morning. We call it the Monday Morning Detox. So they’ll get an assessment and an assignment, something that looks like a description around a model. And they are getting small pieces of regular training. If you’d like that please be with us. Be in the tribe.

I think that’s about it for resilience.

Carol: That’s it.

Katie: Love it.

Carol: There’s more.

Katie: Stay with us, thanks.

(Music plays)

[end of transcript]