Anton Guinea
Entrepreneur, Speaker, bestselling author, and founder of The Guinea Group of Companies. For over 15 years, Anton has helped leaders move their teams to become psychologically safe, physically safe and overall better versions of themselves.
Leaders need to be resilient, and they need to help their teams be resilient. Leadership is pressure packed, and when things go boom, which they will surely do, leaders need the skills that will help them advance through the adversity.
But resilience is not about coping. Resilience is about being ready to cope. Resilience is not about being present during the boom, it is being prepared for the boom.
When we train resilience, I talk about it as the most important life and leader skill that needs to be learned. Yes, learned. There are some things that you can learn on the run; resilience is not one of them. Spoiler alert.
Resilience is about personal and professional development.
There are six key elements of building resilience, including vision, composure, collaboration, tenacity, health, and reasoning.
In short, having a vision will help you know that the tough times are speed bumps, not brick walls.
A strong vision is compelling, it is contagious, and it is confidence inspiring. Your brain doesn’t know the difference between a strongly head vision for the future, and reality, so the stronger your vision, the stronger the chances that you will be ready to weather any storm and keep working towards it.
Composure is about emotional control, and emotional intelligence.
It is about responding, not reacting. When things go boom, it is easy to react … on instinct, or on a purely emotional response. Uncool. Breath, think, and process. Remain in emotional control, by being aware of your emotional state, and controlling it, and then responding to the situation with courage and care factor. Engage the frontal lobes of your brain, don’t act on emotion.
Collaboration is perhaps the key resilience skill that you need to develop … way in advance of any boom.
Collaboration is fostering the relationships that will help you if and when you need strong people around you. In your personal life, these are the people that you can call in the middle of the night to help you move house the next morning. In your professional life, they are the team that will walk over hot coals for you if you need them to. But don’t think that just because they are in your team, they will step up when you need them to … if you haven’t built those relationships through leadership.
Tenacity is that skill set that is a ‘never say die attitude’.
This is the skillset of determination and persistence. It is aligned with vision, and it is about the personal power that it takes to deal with the boom and keep moving forward. In the words of Rocky, it is not about how many times you get knocked down, it is about how many times you bounce back up. Tenacity is a learned skill, and it is the ability to have a future focus, and a mindset that keeps you moving forward, regardless of the size of the boom. Look past the present and see the opportunities not the current issues.
Staying in good health is important to your resilience.
Not sleeping enough, not eating well and not moving your body all contribute to your ability to not deal well with a boom event.
Finally, and most importantly, resilience is about reasoning.
And reasoning is about reframing. Reframing involves understanding that life is about lessons and blessings – in general terms, these are the two types of experiences that we get from life. When things go boom, we can tend to get stuck in the moment … and stay there … for a long time … Reframing is the skill set that helps you take a life lesson and turn it into a life blessing, by understanding the importance of the experience, and why you were given it. From a career boom event to a character-building event. From a personal tragedy to a profound turning point. The quicker you can reframe something, the quicker you can move on.
For me personally, reframing is the skill set that has served me so well over all these years.
And how does this help the mental health of your team.
Well, help them to build these skills too, and see how they personal and professional lives change for the better.
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UPGRADE your Mindset
UPSKILL your Leadership
UPLIFT your Teams