Cultivating Resilience

There’s a Japanese proverb:
“…bamboo, bent even to the ground, will spring upright after the passage of the storm.”

Life, as a leader, can be stressful. Juggling demands from multiple stakeholders with conflicting needs. Looking after a team that’s full of humans who need care and attention. Battling with peers to keep what’s most important at the forefront of your decision making. The list goes on.

And sometimes things don’t go the way you want them to. You lose the argument. You lose the employee. You lose points with your boss. You lose customers, despite your best efforts. Maybe you even lose your job.

How do you bounce back from these losses, both big and small? How do you sustain your energy? How do you, like the bamboo in the proverb, spring upright again once the storm has passed?

You can’t make life less stressful, but you can learn to manage your energy and perspective, and to bounce back more readily. In this talk, which I gave at Leading Design London in 2018, we look at 5 angles of resilience:

• meaning and purpose;
• self-awareness;
• the mental;
• the physical;
• and the emotional.

See how each of these impacts bounce-back-ability, and learn small changes you can make to grow more resilient.