Brain Savvy Resiliency
I work with leaders and change makers whose experiences and stories share some common threads.
All of them characterize their current workplace environments as high demand, complex, fast paced, undergoing non-stop change – overall challenging.
They love being productive, developing people and solving tough problems but they describe that lately they are feeling more leadership stress and fewer moments of leadership success.
Their lives include daily hassles that feel like hurricanes… waves of change crashing overhead and all around them… more responsibilities, more expectations and more relationships to manage… so much to do… so much more to learn… everything being urgent and important… no time to catch their breath…no down time to be strategic… a constant struggle to balance greater responsibilities at work with home and family… so much stress!
They are also committed to developing or enhancing skills for success in their challenging workplace environments.
If you are a leader today, you are definitely navigating mounting workplace pressures and demands, disruptive and destabilizing requirements for change and improvement and the inevitable emotionally charged reactions to this new world of work.
You know that the most important skill set for today and tomorrow is our readiness and ability to change, adapt and grow. Did you also know that the “skills for leadership success” - change readiness, emotional agility and resilience - can be learned and profoundly strengthened.
The key to becoming more change ready, more change - able and more resilient in this world of unrelenting and continuous change can be found in cutting edge insights from the field of neuroscience and the emerging field of neuroleadership.
These powerful insights offer a new lens for understanding why change is hard, how people change and how to stay resilient, brilliant and high performing even in a high change environment. When we are resilient we can be our best at work more of the time.
Resilience is our capacity to respond to pressures and demands quickly, effectively and adaptively.
Resilience develops as the brain learns from experience and integrates that learning into its neural circuitry. Our brains begin to encode lessons about coping that keep us safe from the very beginning. These responses learned early in life - to other people and events, are deeply embedded in our neural circuitry. These response patterns shape the way we cope with change, challenges, disappointments and unmet expectations, even today.
Although the initial wiring of our brains is based on our early life experiences, we now know that it is possible to undo and overwrite that early learning to help us cope differently and more resiliently. We can strengthen our capacities for resilience and even strengthen the brain structures that encode new coping strategies.
When we understand how our brains work, the flexibility and changeability of our brains and how to make mindset and behaviour changes that stick, we can:
Amplify and accelerate our learning and growth
Change our default patterns of coping with life’s challenges and requirements for change
Create new neural pathways that are more effective in responding to the challenges in our personal and professional lives.
Build greater confidence and competence to effectively address the people side of transformative change, continuous improvement and high performance
Feel more hope, excitement and joy and less fear, anxiety and stress
This is brain savvy resiliency!
I work with leaders and leadership teams to enhance their capability to deal with both the stresses and strains of daily life and the additional demands of leadership in the new world of work.
