Keeping back your ultimate goal in mind is so important. I've found that when I attach myself to the short-term goal, e.g. convincing this person that my idea is good, it's getting risky for my resilience. But when I connect to my ultimate goal, e.g. as you said "immense love for humanity", then i'll be able to dance with any feeling and situation.
Ah, this ties back to a discussion Mandar and I had earlier in this chat. Is resilience more about surviving but about thriving. I wonder if we should be thinking of resilience in its most ideal form as evolution. Whenever a species is under stress, it evolves to adapt to that stress and when the adaptation is positive, it can (usually?) become a stronger species. Thoughts?
absolutely awesome! thanks heidi - you are awesome!
How will you come to terms with not receiving credit for the work that you've been spending your evenings and weekends bringing to life? People talk about the need for this, and we do experience it as intrapreneurs - I know I did, but its not as if it is always easy. I think for many of us, it takes self-work to get to this point and feel totally okay with it.
Yes, I think that helps detach our egos from the immediate outcome so we can figure out how this or that conversation can be in total service to the ultimate change goal and higher motivation.
Mandar, I'd love to read more of your thoughts on "going beyond resilience"! What do you mean by that?
It's making me think of Donella Meadows' ultimate leverage point of "Transcending Paradigms". Anything related here?
Ok - so let's more then about how to build resilience. A number of our panel have already touched on this. What is your secret to staying resilient? What resilience strategy have you learned from someone you admire?
awesome!
I really like this analogy, as it ties back to our natural selves. An interesting aspect of evolution is that a specy has to go through a lot of different iterations before finding the one that will allow to become stronger.
This implies 1) accepting to loose some specimens (what do we let go of in our life?), and 2) having a proactive attitude: prototype, prototype, prototype, which is an attitude that can be learned from social entrepreneurs.
Yes, what's so interesting about what you say (and I echo your thoughts in my own response earlier) is that resilience is about mastering our innerselves, versus the outer world. Yes, we're trying to effect change around us, but to do that properly, we have to be able to repair/let go/smooth over whatever we're feeling inside.
To be very frank... at the time, I thought cultivating my resilience meant having a drink after work with a colleague and airing out our frustrations. It meant while I was completely committed to my project, I was focusing on outward reasons as to why I couldn't get traction. Their ego, their agenda... I didn't think as much about what I was bringing to the situation... my ego, my hangups, my negative thoughts... This led to a desire to want to give up many many times. Eventually a massive restructure led to my role being made redundant and I was very sad to stop working on my project. But luckily at that point I'd executed two successful pilots and laid out the strategy to integrate it into our work, had brought an internal and external team on board to support it, and handed it off to boss... and hoped for the best! If I had looked at my resilience in other ways, I think I could have had better relationships with my tough nuts to crack!
I think part of it is to do with focusing on the end goal & what you want to achieve & giving up or not being bothered about owning/credit for certain things.
You may also be leaving an organisation for another role & what happens to the idea then? Ensuring the idea has a home after you have left. I met someone who in their notice period was putting so much effort into ensuring the idea they led on had a home after they had left. 1 person whose idea ended about a year after they left; I had one initiative I (and a lot of other people) was really passionate about that just got stopped shortly after I left an organisation - me leaving we used to end a number of things and this was one of them. I think what I'm trying to say is you never truly own it.
To come back on the dance analogy, a good way to become and stay resilient is about.... practicing the dance moves! This allows for two things to happen. First, practicing the tools, the behaviors, the ideas,.... sharpens and tailors them to the specific context of the workplace. Then, it also makes the intrapreneur more self-aware: better knowing their strengths and weaknesses. For example, starting conversations on random new ideas over lunch in the kitchen will help the intrapreneur to learn what they can rely on in their own pitching and selling skills, what they have to improve and what they need other people to help with.
I think Marjorie's insight above is super important for this: " I think that helps detach our egos from the immediate outcome so we can figure out how this or that conversation can be in total service to the ultimate change goal and higher motivation."
It's about being able to receive credit about the ultimate result rather than the process. But maybe here it's not about resilience but general maturity....?
In every job I’ve had, I’ve been an intrapreneur. I have a compulsion to tinker with the status quo and see if things can be better. Over time, I’ve learned a few things. I’d like to share three secrets.Here's my first:
Cultivate resilience deliberately.
At the beginning of my career, I took on small changes and was satisfied with change that fit the size of my resilience. But over time, I became less and less satisfied with that scenario and decided that if I wanted bigger, more tantalizing changes to occur, I would have to grow myself emotionally.
At first, that growth happened organically—as a natural by-product of stretching my change agenda. But too often, I was still hitting against the limits of my own resilience and spending a lot of time stewing in emotional turmoil. So, that’s when I got smart and decided I could focus on building my own emotional health in a very deliberate way.
The first step of the journey involved a “re-birthday” event where I spent an entire year doing at least one small thing to address all the things in my life that were unsatisfactory to me (and the list was long): everything small from constantly misplacing my keys to big like having no financial plan and a career that had gotten off track.
By no means did I solve all my problems in that year, but I can honestly say that on the morning of my 30th birthday, I was a new woman. I had lost a lot of weight through exercise and healthy eating; I had a place for my keys; a financial plan; and I had quit my job in the hopes of a better one.
After my re-birthday, my ability to effect change skyrocketed because I was so much more authentically confident, positive, happy, and convinced that massive change was possible. That kind of energy can be really contagious!
I continue to work on my emotional resilience today. The bad news is I’ve still got so much more work to do!! The good news is that the more work I do, the greater the changes I can take on. That’s a win-win proposition in my book.
Speaking of books, for the folks who want to improve their resilience and feelings of self-effectiveness, I’d like to recommend Nathaniel Branden’s Six Pillars of Self-Esteem. This is my Bible for personal growth and all the “big stuff” of life. And for all the smaller things, I also recommend Marilyn Paul’s It’s Hard to Make a Difference When You Can’t You’re your Keys: The Seven-Step Path to Becoming Truly Organized.
For the really committed, I recommend trying your own re-birthday challenge! If you want to know how I did it, contact me (mbrans@sseontario.org) and I’ll give you the scoop.
Absolutely. If you want to build something - as an entrepreneur, intrapreneur or leader of any kind - you need to learn how to grow through the challenges that present themselves. I was talking to one of our Lab participants a few weeks ago. He's in the early stages of driving a new business line within his company. He told me the thing that was bothering him the most that week was one relatively junior guy who felt his 'territory' was being encroached on and was being deliberately obstructive. He said that of all the major unanswered issues that were currently being worked through, it was this relatively minor situation that was bothering him - and that he knew he had to confront the individual in question but frankly thought there were better ways for him to spend his time - or maybe he just didn't want the conflict. But then he reflected that winning the co-operation of this junior person, may actually help him become a more persuasive person - a quality that that one day soon, when he has to persuade some very senior stakeholders of this project's worth, will have been worth the time invested today. So I think that sometimes (always?) speed bumps and roadblocks are actually lessons - mini rites of passage that we need to pass in order to gain the qualities necessary for success. And knowing this, makes us resilient.
Resilience (or beyond resilience) happens by default when we pay attention to nourishing our inner faculties: mind, intellect, memory, ego. Many ways to do this including having honest authentic friends, etc. I have done it with my daily "Sudarshan Kriya" practice (a profound breathing/meditation technique which can be learnt in a workshop called Art of Living - taught by a non profit foundation worldwide)
Another way is to plan and fail fast (not be scared of failure or being exposed/being vulnerable and it also saves you time!)
Another way is to be natural, authentic and not allowing others to pounce your dreams and having (at work) a god father or colleague who keeps your zeal high! easier said than done and takes time to find that right person (coach)
A few things for me:
Number 1 being yourself; which changes over time & often as a result of all of this.
Taking time to think about what you need to do and what you need.
Looking at the end point (or points) and allowing different routes to get there - sometimes its the route to get there that is the most exciting. When things have not gone well - stepping back, rethinking it, or thinking about how that experience could be fed into what you are trying to achieve. I learnt this last one the hard way
Being resilient can have its downsides its not uncommon to have people say to me ‘oh don’t worry Vik, you’ll be alright you always bounce back’.
love the re-birthday concept! thanks for sharing! my re birthday is coming soon!
Mark Sears, former Head of Brand at Virgin, (who has been profiled by LOI here: http://www.leagueofintrapreneurs.com/posts/trees-raves-and-jedis)
loves biology and how species interact with each other. He once shared that new species and mutations often occur at the fringes of a forest. This is where species are more likely to meet new species (sorry... don't quote me on my technical terms here... I'm going for the essence!) and so this is where we see most species evolve. Tying this back to resilience and intrapreneurs... In my own work as a coach, I've seen how powerful very simple questions can be for someone - questions that offer a new way of looking at a situation or yourself. So maybe I would swap 'under stress' with 'new stimulus' and that is when we are really able to evolve... and when the 'new stimulus' is directed towards ourselves - what are we experiencing (thinking, feeling, behaving) - then we can really evolve in a powerful way!