Listen To Episode 8 of Michelle Steffes’ Podcast: “Resilience in times of change”

Welcome to Reframe and Rewire: Greatness Through Daily Routine. This podcast is designed to alter your mindsets and transform your day to day, from the second you open your eyes, to you close them at night. Adapting what I would call a success routine. This series is liable to change your life, and it’s never the big things that you do, but the littlest things you do every day that make the biggest difference. And now, onto the podcast. Thank you for joining.

Welcome back to the podcast, as we continue in this series on Resilience In Times of Change. And as I had mentioned, when I started this series, this has been my number one requested workshop and, or keynote address throughout the last two years. As you can imagine, we have all had to endure a lot of resilience, or at least learn how to be resilient in times of change and endure a lot of change. So, it’s been a very well requested topic. And, I try to come at this with lots of interaction, engagement, especially in the virtual context, but even in the in-person context.

I understand that in order for people to really take ownership and really to be able to move forward, they need to have some hands on work. So what I want to mention to you is that if you do have a team that you’re working with right now, if you’re a leader in other words, and you need to try to build in some kind of empowerment or give people hope, one of the things that you can do, and this is kind of where I take a pause, and ask people to take an index card, tape it on your back, and then give them about five minutes to write on as many backs as they can, some kind of an encouraging word or a specific compliment to that person. And then afterwards, let them take the card off and read it. So, that’s where I kind of pause and do that right now.

If you are virtual, I would often ask for them to do a quick gratitude exercise, and just mentioning one thing that they’re truly grateful for in their organization. And, it proves to be quite effective, because really where the rubber meets the road is when we can stop for just a moment, and just encourage one another, and make a difference. And whether that’s through gratitude or whether it’s an encouraging word, it can make a massive, massive difference. And, it’s something people can think back on or look back on, and realize that they have more going for them than they thought. And, that helps with the whole resilience process.

So, now I want to move into creating inner awareness or choosing to release positive neuro-chemicals. And obviously, it was through the exercise I just mentioned. But I also want to talk about where you will spend your energy, because let’s just face it, energy is limited. Most of us know that when we are under a lot of stress or disengagement in an organization, or there’s a lot of frustrations going on, it can be easy to get wrapped up into that and get our energy absolutely sapped early in the day, to where we have nothing left to give the rest of the day. And, that’s sad, because not only does it affect our career or our profession, but our ability to be there for our families when we get home. And many people will end up taking those frustrations home with them, and unfortunately taking out on their family or their significant other, or whatever.

So, really the best way to resolve all of that is to think about what you can, versus what you can’t control. And making that differentiation throughout the day is a huge game changer, because then what happens is you get to be more discerning and more, I guess, budget your energy to intentionally push it towards what you can control, instead of allowing the things you can’t control to suck it all up. All right. And I’m speaking of your energy, obviously.

So, when it comes to things that you can control, you can control your choices and actions. You can’t control the choices or actions of others. You can control your attitude and your behavior at any given moment, but you can’t control the feelings or opinions of others. As much as we’d like to, as much as we think we can, being persuasive or nagging someone, it just doesn’t work. Okay? So it’s a waste of energy and it can be quite exhausting.

We can also control our schedule and our efforts, believe it or not, as much as we think, or want to make excuses for the fact that our schedules are incredibly overloaded and full. The fact of the matter is, you can say no to certain things, especially if they’re not pushing you towards the destiny that you want to fulfill. Especially, if they’re not really that important, and you’re just being bullied into them, or perhaps you are lying to yourself in terms of thinking that you need to do them, because you want to be accepted. And that’s honestly, most of the time people are just taking you for granted or taking advantage of you. And we need to be able to think about which one of those may be that case, and which ones may not be. But the whole point to bringing this up is that we can actually control our schedule and efforts by prioritizing the things that are the most important, and making sure that we are courageous enough and willing enough to say no to the things that are not pushing us forward.

We also can’t control adversity in societal chaos, but we can control our response to that adversity in societal chaos. And so, if you’re out there on social media, and you’re constantly telling people how stupid and worthless they are, and how dumb they are for believing this or believing that, and getting engaged in these terrible arguments, is it really worth your energy to do that? Because, have you ever had a post where you put it out there and somebody responded with, “Oh my goodness, you’re so right. I need to back down. I need you to stop being stupid and worthless. I just need to get better.” That’s, I mean, that’s just not reality, right? So we need to decide what we can and can’t control every moment of every day, and decide how we’re going to budget our energy out in such a way that it is productive, and it moves us towards who we want to become, rather than just ripping the life out of us, or sucking the life out of us.

So, that’s all I have time for today. I’m going to go ahead and close this out, and we’ll move on to tomorrow. And I’m going to talk about some sources of negativity that affect your resilience. So, please join me back. This is Michelle Steffes, Reframe and Rewire. Thank you for joining.