Little Things That Matter

Learn From The Past, Live The Present and Have An Open Mind to Face Tomorrow

Resilience And You

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“Everything will be all right in the end. If it’s not all right, then it’s not the end.” Unknown
For me this quote is a gentle reminder of building resiliency.  Resiliency and character is built through tough time and adversities.
Resilience draws from strength of character, from a core set of values that motivates you to make efforts to achieve your vision. It helps you to overcome setbacks and bounce back on the path of success. You need to be self-aware, have self-control and acknowledge there is a set back and be willing to persist.
In an organizational capacity, resilience is the ability to pick yourself up despite the hurdles because you are responsible for others and see yourself as a support to others.
In several organizations and in the political arena of many countries, you hear statements like the growth will be maintained amidst numbers consistently proving otherwise. You continue to hear positive futuristic statements and that it is “business as usual”. However, reality is that no effort is being made to review, examine, critique and change the path to achieve the goals or work towards promoting the economy of the country or the growth of the Company. The internal structures and policies of some companies are designed to stagnate the growth and development. The propellers of change are the biggest hurdles to the very change they claim to want.
Resilience is not about:
→Resistance
→Denial of reality
→Creating a culture resisting change and questioning the archaic methods and beliefs
→Continuing to hope things will change for better without making any effort to rectify the means
→Crumbling under the pressure of challenges along the way
→Being blindsided by competition, mishaps along the way and giving up
→Putting out fires
→Complacency, arrogance, greed or narcissism.
“When things fall apart and we’re on the verge of we know not what, the test of each of us is to stay on that brink and not concretize.” Pema Chodron
Resilience is manifested in actions towards achieving the goal, re-examining, renewing, unlearning and re-learning.
Leaders are resilient in the way they bounce back from setbacks. Disruptions and pitfalls happens to the best of us. Resilience is finding the courage to bounce back and figure out how to achieve your purpose.
How can resilience help you and your organization to progress ahead despite problems?
Problems are not the end but symptoms. If you are falling sick very often, it is up to you to figure out what is wrong. Is it your diet, your lifestyle, stress or something else? You need to figure out the symptoms to be able to rectify it. You need to figure this out and also possibly consulting a  doctor.  Similarly in organizations, low morale, high employee turnover, sluggish sales may be some of the symptoms. Resiliency is about figuring out what is the cause and figuring out ways to bounce back. Problems are opportunities. It enables you to make corrections, and go to the depth of why things are not working out as expected. It is amidst the chaos and uncertainty that we clarify and display our character and values to others and most importantly to ourselves.
The real test of your leadership lies in identifying the issue and addressing it.  Your leadership skills are tested in times of adversities and in the attitude you take to face them and bounce back. How you face these challenges is an embodiment of and a testament to your leadership. You lead by example and this empowers and motivates your team.
Why Resilience? Resilience is required for
→Higher engagement with your colleagues, clients, friends and within the overall environment that you are working in
→A positive attitude which enables you to become more engaged, creative and productive
→Creating a vicious circle of Consistency, humility and integrity
→Leveraging your skills and talents
→Source of inspiration from your own stories and lessons learnt from each of life’s situational challenges.
Resiliency is well summarized by Pema Chodron in her book “When Things Fall Apart” and I quote “Life is a good teacher and a good friend. Things are always in transition, if we could only realize it.  Nothing ever sums itself up in the way that we like to dream about. The off-center, in-between state is an ideal situation, a situation in which we don’t get caught and we can open our hearts and minds beyond limit. It’s a very tender, nonaggressive, open-ended state of affairs.”
What are you doing today to be resilient?
How can you find ways to be resilient?
Are you going on the journey within and looking inside to create the necessary shift to rethink and renew?
How do you build Resilience? For Coaching, Facilitating, Speaking and Workshops Connect
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How Do You “LET GO”

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Life is the best teacher, a friend, a soul mate. She teaches you what none others can teach and it is in living life through the challenges she throws at us is what makes life.

There are things in life you can’t hold on for ever and life isn’t for ever either. Life from the day you are born, moment by moment, tells you to let go. Nothing lasts forever, you are at this stage in your life because you have let go of your childhood, your youth, some of your age-old habits and idiosyncrasies. Through the years of your life to date, you may have different ways of doing things, you may have changed your job, your career or possibly even some of your relationships that were not working for you.

In each of the transitions in life be it natural, by accident or by choice, you have been able to move forward because you have let go of something. Yet, there are modes in your lives where you continue to grip on some things that you expect to last forever. You refuse to Let Go.

This could apply to your relationships, projects that you have put your heart and soul and yet don’t see the desired results, business venture that you are passionate about but ROI tells you otherwise, your behavior at work or socially, and may be aspects of your overall being.

What is the emotion you undergo when you refuse to let go?

  • Fear of the unknown
  • uncertainty
  • perspective of failure in your mind
  • discomfort
  • denial to see the benefits
  • negativity
  • love the perceived sense of control

Destiny isn’t always good and be it in some paths chosen in relationships or with respect to our professional life, you have to let go and consider the people and the opportunities in those paths as lessons learnt for better things in future. You may say easier said than done.

♠Letting Go is not to regret the past, but to grow and live for the future.♠

I’ve found that the more I cling to outcomes and things, the more I create an anchor that drains my energy and in turn I discourage myself.

So how can you help yourself Let Go?

1. Internal conversations – each of us have a conversation that we have with ourselves. This could be self talk or negative talk. Your thoughts control your feelings and these feelings translates into your internal conversations. Your brain drives your behavior from your internal conversations.

♣What are you telling yourself when you hold back from letting go ?

2. Labeling Emotion – each time you struggle with the idea of letting go, stop to reflect. Do you understand your emotions and beliefs? Why do you think that way? Try to label the emotion (could be fear, anxiety, uncertainty, failure) associated with the struggle of letting go – this helps to calm your brain and focus on action forward.

♣Do you tend to dwell on what used to be that is distracting you from taking the necessary action to move you forward?
♣Do you tend to complain and take no action to see what can be done differently to achieve desired outcomes?

Our brains are geared to rewards and thus expecting desired outcomes from our efforts is but natural. However, consuming yourself with the negative outcome only results in frustration and negative emotions. Instead, when something doesn’t go as per your expectations, train your mind to view this circumstance as a chance to learn something you didn’t know. Every experience teaches you something and it a matter of consciously looking at it from a perspective that helps you to move forward.

♣Learning to understand your emotions, reflection on your actions and the experience sets the path for refocusing your energy and “letting go” less painful.

3. Reframe – Do you reflect and once you reflect do you reframe the situation by finding out what’s really going on?

Our brains are constantly on the lookout to move towards what it perceives as a reward and away from what it perceives as a threat. And is five times more likely to perceive something unknown as a threat than a reward. This possibly explains many disquieting parts of our life. Certainty concerns being in the know. Being able to predict gives us that feeling of control and certainty. Without prediction our brain needs to use a lot more energy intensive PFC. In today’s fast paced global world, it is becoming more difficult to anticipate what’s next. To fuel this uncertainty is our own beliefs and biases as to how we perceive a situation. All this makes letting go more difficult.

♣Reframing a situation helps you to manage your beliefs, your perception and your feelings. It helps you to look at situations from a different context and not narrow yourself to your own bias.♣

4. Criticism – do you criticize yourself and everyone else, every time something doesn’t go as per your plan. Does this stop you from letting go of unfair expectations of yourself and others ? Life is a roller coaster and not perfect. Letting go eases your agony that you put yourself through by engaging in “blame game” and “know it all”. When you catch yourself thinking and behaving in a manner that signifies that you know everything and have little tolerance to any new ideas or methods, it is time to stop and reflect.

♣How flexible are you to expand your mind and go out of your comfort zone?

5. Control Freak – one of the common hurdles to letting go. Each of us are unique and have our contribution to make. We can control out behavior, our choices but how others act or behave is outside our control. Positive change occurs when you decide to let go of control over everything in your life and work.

Imagine you are on your way to an appointment at 3 pm. You leave well ahead of time. However you get caught in a nasty traffic jam. You try to change lanes, honk, curse, get agitated and yet nothing changes. Each time you succeed at changing lanes, your frustration increases because you realize that the new lane is no better. There are many situations similar to this which are beyond your control in your day-to-day life. You cannot have everything you want despite your efforts to make it a success. Let go or else you get caught in a negative vicious cycle.

6. Negativity – negativity breeds negativity and saps your energy. Your surroundings in terms of the people you are with matters to your overall being. There are some people in this world who are full of negative energy and drain you. There are others who provide soul food and are full of positivity and energy. Be with people who support you, challenge you but help you grow. Let go of relationships that jeopardize your being and don’t accept you for what you are.

♣What would you experience if you surround yourself with people who believe in you and help you get better in what you do? 

♣What would it be like if you spend more time with people who have positive vibes and make you feel valued?

Letting go is difficult when we allow ourselves to be overly attached to outcomes, when we have given our heart and soul to some relationships. My own journey of having to let go of things and relationships which weren’t working for me hasn’t been easy. What has helped me in the journey of life is to reflect, reframe and think about the way forward and believe in myself. Gearing my brain towards the rewards associated with the new path helps ease the pain that I associate with letting go.

I’ve learnt and am still learning to be willing to open up to possibility, learn new ways, grow in effectiveness by LETTING GO.

→If you “Let Go,” it does not mean you are giving up but you make a choice to take a different path to your ultimate vision.←

How do you Let Go?

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The Zen of Conflict Leadership – 5 Keys to deal with Conflicts

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“The better able team members are to engage, speak, listen, hear, interpret, and respond constructively, the more likely their teams are to leverage conflict rather than be leveled by it” Runde and Flanagan

Conflict is not something many of us like to be in. Many situations of conflict create a feeling of fight or flight. It triggers a lot of negative emotions including anger, turmoil and a sense of threat.

But is conflict really that bad at all times ?

Is it possible to accept conflict as a learning process ?

Peace is not the absence of conflict but it is the ability to deal with Conflict by way of creative alternatives to respond to situations of conflict.

What is Conflict ? Conflict arises from differences of opinion. It arises when people disagree over values, ideas, perceptions or even when led by different motivations.

Conflicts cannot be avoided because no two people can agree on everything at all times.  A better way to resolve conflicts is not to avoid it or runaway from it but deal with it in a constructive and positive manner.  Confidence comes from knowing that you have the skills to communicate in a difficult situation, and you have the ability to diagnose the situation accurately as you choose the best strategy for the situation.

5 Keys to resolving or dealing with conflicts – please click the LINK  for DETAILS

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