Upping the Downside

Interview: Knowing Yourself: The Key to Resilience

Dr. Steven Wilke advocates you "Use self-knowledge to avoid pitfalls, clarify purpose, and create resilience." On Monday February 25th I interviewed him to talk about this in-depth. Listen as we discuss beliefs, motivation, how we make choices and how knowing who you are paves the path to resilience.

Dr. Steven Wilke has spent a life in pursuit of the answer to the question, why do we choose what we choose and do what we do? On that path, he has worked in manufacturing, both the retail and wholesale grocery industries, insurance, and for the past thirteen years, as a chiropractor. He has a BA from Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, and his DC is from Palmer College in Davenport, Iowa. He currently practices and resides in Madison, Wisconsin, with his wife, Julie, and children, Michael and Sophia.

Listen to this interview here.

Interview: Emotional Intelligence for Resilience

Last Friday I had the pleasure of interviewing outstanding Executive coach William R. Murray about topics such as emotional intelligence, leadership and executive coaching. What you learn from this entertaining and illuminating interview will boost your understanding of professional excellence and leadership, including personal effectiveness and relationship management.

William R. Murray (www.WilliamRMurray.com) holds a Harvard MBA, Yale M.Div., is a graduate of Corporate Coach U and a Master Certified Coach. He has over 30 years of experience leading as a line manager, and coaching and training business owners, leaders, and professionals in companies ranging from large companies like JC Penney, to small businesses.

Listen to the podcast here.

Why Resilience?

I believe that most people are suffering from the design of their lives. In my opinion, people don‘t really understand themselves at a deep soul level. For the most part they do not know what to do, even when their own soul work appears in their lives.

During the dance of life, resilience is operating one way or the other, whether we are conscious of it or not. Our soul dances to the adaptive music played by the times. Along the way, we have the opportunity to discover ourselves to our soul’s content.

Our soulful expression of who we are and how we approach life is to be honored in whatever forms the authentic dance of soul emerges. There is no right or best way for your soul to emerge as life. It just is.

Life will present us with opportunities for resilience, and these are challenges to the soul in our families, our relationships, our activities, our faith, and our work. In those moments, we may choose to engage, account, author, and respond through design—or not. The methodology in my new book will give you tools with which to become more resilient by design . . . if you choose.

One of my daughters said, "I believe that most people are suffering because their lives are being designed without their knowledge. When we don't understand ourselves at a deep soul level or know what to do when we encounter that knowledge, we are not consciously participating in the design of our lives."

If I could implore you to do one thing: make certain to take the Reiss Desire Profile  online. If you do nothing else in regards to resilience, identify your motivational sensitivity and use that knowledge to design a better life.

Event-Based and Path-Driven Resilience

Resilience can be achieved in at least two different ways, which I call event-based resilience and path-driven resilience.

You achieve event-based resilience by relying on your capabilities to overcome demands of the conditions you are faced with in the moment. Event-based resilience naturally occurs when we are in a situation with demands that happen to be aligned with our particular gifts.

Everyone can be resilient at times. This is because everyone has capabilities and will encounter events which place demands on them that are naturally aligned with their gifts. But what about events with demands beyond the narrow band of our capabilities? What happens when we are in situations where our particular gifts are not aligned with the demands? We don't demonstrate resilience.

Path-drive resilience produces resilience across a wide-bandwidth of conditions. Path-driven resilience is natural to a few, but possible for most. It is natural to people that exhibit a hardy personality. However, the ability to learn the hardy personality---to model outwardly the behaviors of the hardy personality---is not probable. Change is expensive and inefficient. The reality is that people in large part don't change.

If we operate on the fundamental principle that people in large part don't change their map of capability for resilience, except over very long periods of time, then what are we going to do in the short term?

Change the paradigm from "you can be anything you want to be" to "you can be everything you can be". Instead of making efforts to change yourself to broaden the band of your capabilities, look at your gifts, your capabilities and identify a path where events can occur and you can respond to them effectively. Identify areas of low resilience and move the path to accommodate through design. This is creating resilience by design.

The Countdown Continues

Today we are almost halfway to publishing Upping the Downside: 64 Strategies for Creating Professional Resilience by Design.

At this point you should be getting a better idea of what resilience is, why it should be important to you and have some ideas of how the principles of resilience play a part in your life. I'll keep expanding on all of these topics over the next few weeks.

I want to remind you of a couple of things related to the book launch.

First, you can download the report: 5 Resilience Myths, for free. This report introduces some common myths people hold about resilience and immediately gives you some strategies for designing resilience.

Next, business experts, online marketers, coaches, consultants, speakers, authors and other professionals: now is the time to sign up as a joint venture partner and participate in our massive promotional campaign.

All you need to do is provide a sample of your best work – in the form of an audio, video, white paper, e-book, etc. – and send out a standalone email to your list. In return you'll get huge exposure for your business to a wide market. This will reinforce your standing as an authority.

You can also get paid to help us promote Upping the Downside.

The Top 50 JV Partners receive GOLD Sponsor status for more prominent positioning in front of our community.

To get started, confirm your interest in being a JV Partner. No obligation, no cost, nothing to lose. Just be sure to register right away as the number of top positions are limited.

Do You Share This Problem With 33% of People?

When you drive on the freeway, you keep about 3 - 4 seconds worth of distance between your car and the car in front of you. This is an example of slack. If something unexpected happens---like the driver in front of you slamming on the brakes---your slack allows you to get where you are going without disaster.

Research indicates that 33% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. This means they have no spare cash. No financial reserve or cushion.

If you are living paycheck to paycheck, you don't have any slack. That means that when something unexpected takes place it will instantly disrupt your finances and everything that is attached to your finances.

What happens if a crisis like any one of the following strikes?

• Emergency health problems
• Emergency home and car problems
• Sudden economy changes/problems
• A disabling injury
• Death of spouse or family member
• Loss or change of job
• Reduction of income
• Sharp increase in living costs (heat, food, clothing, fuel, electricity, health insurance)

Any one of these would completely wipe out somebody living paycheck to paycheck.

Think about what it costs to survive and what it further costs to maintain your standard of living. Are you using debt to maintain your standard of living? Are you using debt just to get by?

Your finances are a system. A basic principle of a system is that it requires enough slack for something unexpected to take place without disrupting the underlying process.

The phrase "expect the unexpected" is cliché but it is true. Learn to create slack in your life so that you can accommodate the unexpected and keep moving forward.

Look Well Into Thyself

Look well into thyself; there is a source of strength which will always spring up if thou wilt always look there. -- Marcus Aurelius

What leads to a happy life?

Money certainly helps us avoid pain but although buying power has risen over the years, happiness remains about the same.

Education makes more opportunities available to us but there is actually an inverse relationship between education and measures of satisfaction.

What about overcoming our weaknesses? Learning to work harder, learning to have more willpower, improving our shortcomings, trying to bring our weak points on level with our strong points.

Much of the Self-help industry operates under a flaw. It assumes you are a blank slate, that nurture triumphs nature, that we are all on equal footing genetically and that any one of us can be anything we want to be if we simply learn to overcome our conditioned weaknesses.

I want you to consider that this belief that we can be anything we want---that only our weaknesses and lack of will power hold us back--- actually lowers our level of happiness. And that this denial of the self is an impediment to resilience.

Do we as people need to be fixed as the self-help industry would have us believe? Or do we just need to get to know ourselves better so we can make better, more congruent choices? Which path leads to better resilience?

Wellth?

You operate in your business day-to-day and the money is coming in. But what happens if some kind of catastrophic event occurs? What will happen to you professionally if your income is disrupted for a few days? A few weeks? A few months?

In 1992 Hurricane Andrew struck Florida. The result: $30 billion in damage, the destruction of 47,000 homes and the permanent loss of 20,000 jobs. This type of unpredictable, catastrophic event is why you need to develop the discipline of wellth.

What is wellth?

Well + Wealth.

Wellth is the starting point of professional resilience. Wellth is survivability in terms of physical (well) and monetary (wealth) well-being.

There is a proverb:

"He who has health has everything."

That's a good start but realistically, if you have health without financial security, you could eat your cake if only you could afford to buy it. On the other hand, if you have financial security but no health, you can afford the cake but now you can't eat it. That's why wellth is the starting point of professional resilience and why the concepts of well and wealth fit together.

Wellth is something that you develop by design. You create systems to support wellth and remove obstacles that stand in your way. You also develop buffers buffers in terms of money and resources to safeguard you against the unpredictable.

What kinds of things could you do develop more wellth?

Resilience and 5 Reasons it Should be Important to You

Resilience is your ability to keep moving forward when anything and everything goes against you. To stay on track when everything says you can't. To handle turbulence and bounce back.

Here is why resilience should be important to you:

1. You can't predict the future. You have goals and strategies. You take action. You collaborate with other people in an organized way. Despite all of that, you will constantly be bombarded with events and situations beyond your ability to foresee, plan for and control. When you start to understand resiliency models and build resilience strategies into your life, you are able to handle these unpredictable possibilities.

2. You can only learn to work so quickly. While it's possible to become more efficient and to leverage your time, gradually people  tend to squeeze the slack out of different areas of their life. That slack is crucial: it's cushioning that provides the ability to absorb the impact of things going wrong. Resilience by design teaches you how to create and maintain the correct cushion in all areas of your professional life.

3. Surviving is not the same as moving forward. People often plan to simply survive in worst case scenarios. Why not plan to succeed despite worst case scenarios?

4. Knowing what to do for every possible crisis is not the answer. It would be impractical to inventory and  prepare for every possible crisis that is similar to one you have already encountered. On top of that, it's impossible to predict the characteristics of new and different crises. What you can do instead is learn the basic patterns that underlie success for all possibilities and learn how to apply them.

5. You can't be resilient if you don't know yourself. Who you are dictates what you do. In order to become as resilient as possible, you must have a clear understanding of what you believe, what you value and what motivates you.

In my new book, you'll find 64 strategies for creating professional resilience by design. To understand resilience is to understand how to be successful---no matter what.

Is Your Belief in This Myth Putting You at Risk?

While many people focus on teaching what to do in a crisis, it is a myth to think resilience is about knowing what to do. It's only possible to prepare for crises similar to those that have come before.

That leaves us with two problems:

• We can't predict the future or foresee new and different crises.
• It is not practical to learn what to do specifically for every single possible crisis under the sun.

What is the solution?

To become resilient. To become adaptable. This means:

• Knowing yourself: your motivation, personality, talents and values.
• Knowing what you really want.
• Learning how to use the downside to move you forward.
• Understanding models of resilience based on the patterns of success that underlie all possibilities.
• Applying the strategies for creating professional resilience by design you'll find in my new book.

Don't be fooled by myths. Dig deeper and get a better understanding of what it takes to stay on track when everything says you can't

Later this week, I'll tell you how to download a free, cutting-edge report that will give you more information about this and 4 other Resilience Myths.