Listen To Episode 2 of Michelle Steffes’ Podcast: “Resilience in times of change”

Welcome to Reframe and Rewire: Greatness Through Daily Routine. This podcast 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 brand new series Resilience in Times of Change, a course on resiliency. And I’m going to walk you through much like I’ve done for multiple organizations over the last two years, it really has been the most popular topic that I have presented globally to really a lot of different audiences and I hope you find it as helpful as they have. So let’s go to the next section, or actually really the first official section of this course on resiliency.

And I want to begin talking to you about what it takes and why it’s important. First of all, when we talk about resilience, it’s something that we don’t just roll out of bed someday and suddenly we’re resilient or roll out of bed someday and we’re not resilient. It’s not like that. Rewiring the brain for resilience requires a change of lifestyle. If you were to go on a diet, say, for 10 weeks, and you had an objective to lose 10 pounds. And so you got to the end of the 10 weeks, you’ve done well. You’ve changed your lifestyle, obviously, in order to lose the weight, because there’s really no other way. There’s no magic pill, if you will. And even if there is some sort of magic pill, you have a tendency to gain all the weight back and more, unless you have changed your lifestyle. So let’s say you changed your lifestyle, you lose the weight, you get to the 10 weeks. And you say, “Okay, good. Now I can get back to my normal life.”

Now is that reality? We all know that’s not how it works. We have to stay with this changed lifestyle if we want to continue to keep the weight off or hopefully even lose more weight. And so resiliency is the same way. It requires a complete shift in perceptions. Much like you have to shift the perception on a diet to lose weight, you have to shift your perceptions on how you’re living and what you’re feeding your brain. You have to literally rewire your brain and alter your state. Now your state being your physiology or body chemistry. And those of you who have listened to me for any length of time know that I talk a lot about that, so we may mention that again during this course, but you’re also going to hear a lot of information you have not heard, or maybe have not heard. So I’d encourage you to stay with me with to the end. As I’d mentioned yesterday, I’m going to include specific tools in this podcast series that you will be able to access and download. But if you need anything further, you can reach out to me.

So when it comes to resiliency, reaching your fullest potential requires high resilience. Well, why is that? Because when you’re in low resilience, it inhibits your potential, meaning if you’re in low resilience, you’re going to fly off the handle, you’re not going to feel like you can communicate well with people. You’re going to be in brain fog a lot. You’re going to be struggling. You’re going to see doors shut on you. You’re going to have troubles in your relationships. You’re going to feel on the edge all the time. And people are going to pick up on that. They’re not going to want to come near you. And it’s going to start to affect every part of your life. Financially, relationally, potentially even get you fired.

Whereas if you’re in high resilience, you’re going to live your full potential. So this is where people look at you and they say, “Wow, how are you always so calm? How do you deal with so much chaos and so much craziness with such a calm spirit?” And you get invited to things and you get offered promotions and things start going your way and you have better relationships and it’s just all the way around a much, much better potential for you, but also for your future and your destiny.

Now on the next part of this, I want to talk to you and actually we’re going to divide this into four parts. So we’re going to talk about coping with change. I’m going to walk you through the cycle of change and help you understand not only why the cycle of change is normal, meaning you’re normal, and all of us have to walk through that cycle. But I’m going to also give you really distinct clarity on how to see the light at the end of the tunnel and what it’s going to take to get there. And then we’re going to talk about building resilience and I’m going to teach you specific habits and ways in which you can do that. And then we’re going to talk about responding with resilience under pressure. And that’s where we’ll go ahead and finalize at that at that point.

So part one, coping with change. Now, I want you to think about something that, besides COVID, because that’s kind of a give me, one major change that has thrown you off in the past year. So just think about one big change. And I oftentimes ask this to a live audience and if I’m virtual, it’ll be answers that come into the chat bar. If we happen to be live, I’ll ask them to raise their hand and share. Sometimes I’ve done word clouds and things like that on my presentations, but I want you to just think about that a minute, because we’re going to use that kind of as a premise once you get that in to your mind, as we walk you through this cycle of change, to help you see how you can get to the other side and what it’s going to take to get there.

So be thinking about that as we move into this. And I want to start with identifying the process of change. There are absolutely seven cycles that you have to go through to get through the change. So there’s seven of these stages in the cycle that are common, whether we’re talking about a death in the family, maybe some kind of a dissolving of a relationship. Maybe it’s a loss of a job. Maybe it’s massive health issues or financial issues. Maybe it’s worse. Maybe it’s something else that you’re dealing with that’s just a major storm in your life. And so you’re having to cope with this change.

Well, I’m actually out of time today. So stay tuned because I’m going to walk you through these seven cycles beginning tomorrow, these stages, and you’re going to really begin to identify what stage you’re in and then I’m going to show you how to get to the other side. So I thank you for joining. This is Michelle Steffes, Reframe and Rewire. As we continue this course on resilience, I invite you back tomorrow. Also encourage others to join us. Have an amazing day.