In this episode of the Raise The Bar Coaches’ Corner, Coach Kimberly Flood discusses how to cultivate resilience to meet the challenges of an uncertain world in both yourself and your team. Kimberly is a transformational coach and organizational development consultant with nearly two decades of Fortune 500 work experience, who weaves her passion for environmental sustainability and resilience building into her work.
Here are my three big takeaways from the conversation:
We have a choice in how we choose to react to situations, especially those we cannot control.
Being open and mindful to what you are feeling is an important step in becoming more resilient.
Creating a safe space for your team allows them to be vulnerable and have a growth mindset.
I know you’ll find this episode thought provoking and inspirational!
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TRANSCRIPT
Kimberly: When folks come with a challenge and they talk to me about, the behaviors they are working through or their current coping mechanisms, I often ask, well, how, how is that working for you? How's that serving you? And almost always, they say, well, it's not. And so the opportunity being offered in that question is a space to say, are you ready to make a change?
Aaron: Hi, I'm Aaron Levy and I have this vision of workplace where your manager doesn't suck or instead your manager is your coach helping you to reach your full potential.
I founded Raise The Bar, wrote Open, Honest, and Direct, and started this podcast to help companies transform their workplace into a place for both the company and employee succeeds. In this podcast, I get to interview leaders who build high-performing teams and learn from them and what it takes to unlock a team's potential.
In today's episode of the Coach's Corner, our head of marketing, Tina, talks to coach Kimberly Flood. Kimberly is a transformational coach and organizational development consultant with nearly two decades of Fortune 500 work experience, including business management, consulting, organizational effectiveness, change management, and corporate responsibility consulting. Today, she's thrilled to continue weaving her passion for environmental sustainability and resilience building into her work.
I know you'll find many nuggets of wisdom in this episode. Enjoy.
Tina: Hi, Kimberly. Thanks for joining us today. I'd like to start off by having you tell us a little bit about yourself - your interests, your coaching philosophy.
Kimberly: Awesome. Thanks so much, Tina. I'm thrilled to be here. A bit about myself. Okay. So I like to think of myself as a transformational coach, and that comes from my context in history and business management consulting, supporting organizations through transformational change. A couple of years ago, I shifted into this space of coaching.
Tina: We know that in this kind of a changing world, but that also applies to starting a new business, taking a new position, having children, a lot of different things that are going to be uncertain and that we cannot necessarily control in our lives. So what I would ask you is, as a leader, what kind of tips would you give to someone to build resilience in their selves and in their teams?
Kimberly: Yeah. I think resilience is, you know, it's, it's kinda as buzzword, but it's a really important concept. Right. And for our listening audience, just to make sure we're all talking about the same thing, what I'm talking about today is this concept of resilience being a process, kind of to adapt and how you show up in the face of adversity and stress.
And so it's kind of this bouncing back right from difficult experiences. And just like we started talking about COVID has brought so many difficult experiences to so many of us. I think there's kind of two key learning points or things that encourage people to understand. One is this link between our thoughts, our emotions, and our behaviors. And really what we as human beings need to recognize is that these emotions and these reactions, we have feel like kind of a knee jerk, automated thing.
And the reality is we have the capability as humans to create a space in between whatever that trigger point is, and that reaction. So an example of this might be, you know, if you're driving down the road and someone cuts you off, your natural reaction might be just to hop the horn and get really angry.
And I might ask you, Tina, you know, if you were in the midst of that, would you feel different if you knew that the person who happened to cut you off was on their way rushing to the hospital because they just received a phone call that said their loved one was admitted to the emergency room?
And so there's this link between our thoughts, our emotions, and our behaviors. And when we can create that space to recognize sort of the emotion and sort of ask what's behind that, and could there be a space to choose something different in terms of our reaction, it's this beautiful opportunity.
Kimberly: And there's this wonderful quote from the Australian psychologist, Viktor Frankl that says between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response and in our response lies our growth and our freedom. So I think that's this first kind of thing to understand, as we think about building resiliency is recognizing that we do have some choice in terms of how emotions show up and how we choose to react to some of those emotions.
I think the second thing I want to talk about in terms of supporting people and building some awareness around resiliency is often in the work I do and in what I see our human nature to be is that we all love control. It's where we feel best as human beings when we're in control. When we know it's happening, when we get to control the circumstances.
And the reality is that's not really how life works. Right. So I think the key learning or the thing to keep in mind for us as human beings is we need to recognize where we have influence and control and where we don't. So here is that the serenity prayer, right? Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to know the difference.
This is absolutely kind of essential to this concept of where are you spending your energy? Are you getting all worked up and anxious or stressed about things that are out of your control? Well, can you make a choice to focus on the things where you do have control?
And I lay the groundwork of these two kind of foundational concepts upfront because once you have this base level of awareness or understanding, we can talk about how do you now create more of that space between that stimulus and the response, you know, and I think the first real practical tip here is in mindfulness.
So I would say if somebody is trying to build their resilience, and if you don't already have a mindfulness practice, start one. That's the first tip I would offer and mindfulness can show up in different ways. Some people or most people think of it as meditation. And that's a great way to think of mindfulness and there's other ways too.
But the concept of mindfulness is really kind of being in the present moment and noticing what's there for you specifically around the emotions. You can also notice what the thoughts are, but what is actually happening kind of in your body? What is the feeling that's happening there without judging?Just being open to it.
So I think the second tip I've got here in addition to building a mindfulness practice is showing up or having curiosity. So being able to, instead of that judgment, that is I know my natural tendency and probably many of our listeners too, when we're noticing kind of what we're thinking or we're feeling have curiosity about that. Wow. Why is this such a strong experience for me? Why is this emotion showing up? What is important about this for me? And you can have that curiosity, not only for yourself and your situation, but even as a leader, perhaps. Wow. What might be going up on with your people?
The third tip I have in terms of building resilience is this concept of self compassion and acceptance. This is something also that humans really struggle with- being kind to ourselves and recognizing, or creating a space to kind of note that this concept of human suffering is not ours alone. That suffering is sort of part of life. We all have similar experiences. We all have similar struggles and creating a kind of safe space to sort of either accept yourself as you are, give yourself space to make errors and mistakes or patients to try again.
Tina: But as a leader, it's important to have a team that is resilient as well, especially in this changing world. So how do you as leader build that resiliency?
It's easy to say in yourself, I'm going to be mindful, but we know that there's going to be different types of personalities that we are going to be leading. So what would you recommend to them?
Kimberly: I think the first thing that pops into my head is really this concept that's been discussed a lot in the last decade or so of a growth mindset; of having a growth mindset, recognizing that mistakes are essential as a part of learning and that failure in fact is truly an opportunity to learn.
And so I think it's really important for leaders to ask themselves about whether or not they're functioning in that space or whether they can embrace that space of learning to take on a growth mindset and create this safe space to fail. The other kind of key phrase that's coming to mind is psychological safety, right?
How do you create a safe space for your team? Where it's accepted and maybe even expected that in the midst of achieving excellence, there might be some hiccups on the way; you know, how do you encourage a space where people can speak their mind or ask questions and make decisions without a fear of negative consequences?
I think those are going to be really essential for the leader to be thinking about in terms of helping build that resilience for his team, his or her team.
Tina: So, Kimberly, I really loved all your thoughts and it's been wonderful. I guess, finally, to wrap this up, what I'd like to know is what's your best tip or one of your best tips that you like to give somebody, whether it's about resiliency or transformational change?
Kimberly: I think that one of my favorite tips is really to encourage people to be conscious of some of the choices that they're making, meaning when folks come with a challenge and they talk to me about, you know, the behaviors they are working through or their current coping mechanisms, I often ask, well, how, how is that working for you? How's that serving you? And almost always, they say, well, it's not.
And so the opportunity being offered in that question is a space to say, are you ready to make a change?
Tina: That is wonderful. Kimberly, thank you so much for spending some time with us and creating space for us to get to know you a little bit better.
Kimberly: Thank you so much, Tina. It was my pleasure.
Aaron: Open Honest and Direct is produced by Raise The Bar, where we help organizations level up their leadership by empowering their managers with the tools, skills, and training to be better leaders of people. You can get in touch with us at raisebar.co
Thank you for listening and go put your learning into practice.
