Negotiating Change Building Resilience Podcast

In todays episode of The Resilient Professional we will take a look at 8 rules to do everything better. This episode today is based on an article written by Brad Stulberg at Outside Magazine. He was heavily influenced by Ray Dalio's Principles when writing this article. Lets get right into it. 

Rule 1: Stress + Rest = Growth 

Rule 2: Focus on the Process, Not Results 

Rule 3: Stay Humble 

Rule 4: Build Your Tribe 

Rule 5: Take Small, Consistent Steps to Achieve Big Gains 

Rule 6: Be a Minimalist to Be a Maximalist 

Rule 7: Make the Hard Thing Easier 

Rule 8: Remember to Experience Joy 

Click here for the article.

How can you super charge your day? In this episode of the Take Charge of Change Podcast we will unpack a few principles to supercharge your day that are NOT rockets science. They are simple habits that, when followed diligently, will yield results that far exceed your expectations. Everyone needs a refresher and this will be your call to get back to the basics. These basic principles will work like the hyperdrive in the Millennium Falcon and propel you toward your biggest goals and aspirations. 

Lets dive right in. 

1. Take 15 minutes at the beginning of your day to write out your priorities and tasks. Don't stop there! Review the priorities and tasks throughout the day to keep on track. 

2. Focus on the most important goals first, the others can wait. 

3. Do the most important priorities or tasks first. 

4. Circle back at the end of the day to close off loose ends. 

5. Do not leave your desk cluttered. 

If you lead teams and you are looking for ways of increasing capacity through the cultivation of enhanced physical, emotional, cognitive energy be sure to reach out to us. We'd love to start a conversation on how we can assist your organization through customized training and workshops.

Visit us at www.takechargeofchange.com to learn more. 

Energy Demands Increase Over Time

So far, we have discussed the degree of change going on in the world and how technology can be a force for good, but ironically, can erode personal resiliency as well. Now let's look at the reality of our own personal energy and why it's critically important to the resiliency equation.

Physical energy peaks in your 30s and often begins to diminish (unless you take proactive steps to fight this trend) as you transition into your 40s and 50s. At the same time this erosion of energy begins to happen, the demands on your time and energy begin to increase, due to such things as:

• Aging parents
• Still helping your children
• Increased job responsibilities

If you don't look after your energy and resiliency reserves, you could hit a crossover point where your capacity is outpaced by the demands on your energy. This can lead to:

● Stress leave and burnout ● Heart disease, stroke, cancer or other health maladies ● Emotional and psychological disengagement

Take a few moments on the current state of your energy and capacity. 

If you lead teams and you are looking for ways of increasing capacity through the cultivation of enhanced physical, emotional, cognitive energy be sure to reach out to us. We'd love to start a conversation on how we can assist your organization through customized training and workshops.

Visit www.takechargeofchange.com to learn more. 

s I've mentioned in previous posts, our lives are changing at a faster rate than at any time in human history. The amount of information in a single issue of The New York Times is about equal to the amount of information that people in the 17th century would have assimilated in their entire lifetime!

Not only are we experiencing an explosion of information, we are seeing significant changes politically, socially, environmentally, economically and technologically. These changes are creating an environment that is extremely stimulating but can challenge our ability to prioritize and focus.

We are all trying to understand and respond to the changes occurring in our work and personal lives. Most of us try to react to these changes in positive and productive ways, but sometimes we feel overwhelmed and confused. The skills and strategies in these posts will help you to manage effectively key "Transition Points" experienced through your life.

The experience of change can cover a broad spectrum. It can be unexpected, sudden and unsettling, or it can be welcomed and planned. External global forces, as well as internal economic and social pressures, contribute to accelerating change. Today, change and new transitions are a way of life and resiliency training will help individuals to deal with change and take advantage of the opportunities that emerge.

In response to change, you need to:

● Be change capable (the building of resiliency) ● Meet the challenge by staying effective and productive (applying the skills)

We Need a New Set of Skills

Keeping yourself afloat in the face of change demands skills beyond what you learned in school or at work. We need to be very intentional in how we manage all aspects of our lives; physical, emotional, relational, psychological, financial and spiritual (purpose, vision, and missions).

Impact of Change

Everyone reacts to change differently. For example, some of us find that adjusting to a new home takes enormous effort, while others say very little adjustment is necessary. Your ability to handle stress is also dependent not just on the primary event, but on other events that are taking place at that time. Let's say you have just been given a promotion at work. If this event happens when life is calm and things are going well, you will experience this event as exciting or as a positive new challenge. However, if this promotion takes place when you're going through a marriage separation and your teenager is struggling in school, the promotion may be experienced as extremely stressful.

Similarly, there is a growing body of research that confirms that how you experience and internalize stress has as much to do with your attitude toward the stressful event as the actual event itself. People who practice change management skills have learned to reduce the stress of change and challenge

Negative Effects of Stress

Stress can be defined in many different ways. For our purposes, excessive stress is defined when you come to the point of feeling that "things are out of control." It's essentially when the demands being placed on you are in excess of the personal and social resources that you have available to you.

In 1967, psychiatrists Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe decided to study whether or not stress contributes to illness. They surveyed more than 5,000 medical patients and asked them to say whether they had experienced any of a series of 43 life events in the previous two years. Each event called a Life Change Unit (LCU), had a different "weight" for stress.

The more events the patient added up, the higher the score. The higher the score, and the larger the weight of each event, the more likely the patient was to become ill. Within their group of 5,000 medical patients, they determined that those who had suffered serious illnesses or were involved in accidents had the highest scores, meaning they had experienced the most stressful changes in the previous years.

Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale

One of my main goals for this series of blog posts is to provide you with strategies you can use to build resiliency into your life. My expectation for you is this newfound resiliency will help you deal more effectively with the change and life events going on in your life.

By understanding your stress, you will improve your self-awareness and self-care strategies, enabling you to deal more effectively with stress and maintain your health as you transition through stressful periods in your life.

By using the Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale that follows, you can measure the stress load you carry, leading you to think or reflect on what you should do about it.

Take some time to reflect on what's going on in your life. Did you feel good about your score or did it cause concern? Remember, self-awareness is the first step to improving your situation.

If you find that you are at a moderate or high level of risk, an obvious first thing to do is to try to avoid future life crises. This is easier said than done. However, we usually have some level of control that may allow us to reduce our stress load. It's about avoiding times that will make things more difficult. For example, if you are planning to move homes, it may be prudent to time this event the year after you have successfully transitioned your daughter to a new University 1500 miles away.

You can learn conflict resolution skills to minimize conflict with other people. You can avoid taking on new obligations or engaging with new programs of study if you know that your partner is going through a major life change. Sometimes, it's about choosing to take things easy and look after yourself. All of this takes the cultivation of self-awareness, which is something that these blogs will help you with.

More than anything else, going through this exercise brings attention to stress that you may not be aware of. Awareness can lead to reflection and reflection can lead to positive action.

Next Steps

Are you looking to enhance change readiness and resilience for your teams? We would love to start a conservation about customized workshops for your team. Visit our website www.takechargeofchange.com to learn more. 

In this article by Travis Bradberry, Ph.D., he discusses 10 things that confident people simply do not do. 

"The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease for ever to be able to do it." - J.M. Barrie 

Shortlist for quick reference: 

TIP: Put these in the notes on your phone or on a que card in you breast pocket and reference whenever you experience moments of self doubt!

1. They don't make excuses.
2. They don't quit. 
3. They don't wait for permission to act. 
4. They don't seek attention. 
5. They don't need constant praise. 
6. They don't put things off. 
7. They don't pass judgement. 
8. They don't avoid conflict. 
9. They don't let a lack of resources get in their way. 
10. They don't get to comfortable. 

Download your free copy of 'The Resilient Professional'  by clicking here to dig deeper on subjects like these and others like productivity, exercise and time management to name a few.

Thanks for listening! Please reach out if you have any questions or would like a customized training program designed to improve the productivity of your team or employees.

Could there be one single strategy that could change everything? It should come as no surprise that the one thing is sleep.

What do we know about those of us who sleep 6-7 hours?

1. This level of sleep destroys our immune system
2. It doubles our risk of cancer
3. It increases our risk of heart disease
4. It can put you in a pre-diabetic state
5. It causes negative cascading of health defects

"There MAY be the odd person who can hack their sleep but that is RARE. There is no such thing as training your body to not need sleep!"

So what should we do?

1. Researchers say to shoot for 7-10 hours of sleep
2. After 10 days of 7 hours of sleep your mind becomes "mush" so avoid this bad habit
3. Lack of sleep destroys empathy
4. Sleep clears out and organizes grey matter

Now that you know that, here are some practical tips:

1. Make sleep consistent.
2. Make a sleep schedule and strictly adhere to it.
3. Blue light isn't the only problem! Get all light out of your room, maybe invest in blackout blinds like these!
4. Make your environment cool.
5. Take a hot bath before bed, this encourages the release of your temperature internally.
6. Exercise can help with sleep, but avoid exercise 3 hours before downtime.
7. No booze, coffee or sleeping pills.

Download your free copy of 'The Resilient Professional'  by clicking here to dig deeper on subjects like these and others like productivity, exercise and time management to name a few.

Thanks for listening! Please reach out if you have any questions or would like a customized training program designed to improve the productivity of your team or employees.

In this episode we will look at how to reduce negative thinking. To read more on this episode, visit this blog post.

"Reduce blue thoughts with true thoughts."

We have all experienced "blue thoughts." They creep into our minds at the worst times and can be hard to kick out. But what are these thoughts? Lets analyze them.

B: Blaming myself

L: Looking for bad news

U: Unhappy guessing

E: Exaggeratedly negative

By understanding the autonomy of the blue thoughts we can take steps to prevent them from ever happening in the first place.

Download your free copy of 'The Resilient Professional'  by clicking here to dig deeper on subjects like these and others like sleep, exercise and time management to name a few.

Thanks for listening! Please reach out if you have any questions or would like a customized training program designed to improve the productivity of your team or employees.

In this episode of The Resilient Professional, we will look at how exercise impacts your stress levels and productivity. We will also reveal two exercises would serve you well if you could only do two moves in the gym (or your home). The conversation around exercise is often narrow and highly polarized with different people all pushing for their own agenda. The reality is we need to strike a balance between the mantras. Enjoy this episode.

Two best moves (if you must pick two):

1. Squats
2. Plank

Clink here to view the study from the Journal of Circulation. 

Click here for the study from the Journal of Aging.

Download your free copy of 'The Resilient Professional'  by clicking here to dig deeper on subjects like these and others like sleep, exercise and time management to name a few.

Thanks for listening! Please reach out if you have any questions or would like a customized training program designed to improve the productivity of your team or employees.

In today's episode of The Resilient Professional we will look at 6 habits that will help you to management you emotions in even the most tense moments. These practical strategies will have a positive impact on your professional and personal relationships. There is no way to avoid conflict and disagreement and these interactions often bring up strong emotions in that can cause us to act irrationally or do things we may regret. Overtime, using these 6 tips, you will become a master of controlling your emotions.

To implement these strategies in your life they need to be accessible to act as a reminder in tense situations. Maybe don't go and tattoo them on your arm but putting these 6 strategies on a cue card in your breast pocket or in the notes app on your phone for quick reference could be a great way to always have them with you.

1. Emotionally intelligent people put boundaries on people that make them angry.
2. Emotionally intelligent people realize that their anger with people and situations probably has a deeper root cause, spend some time reflecting on these situations.
3. Emotionally intelligent people respond but don't react. "Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you respond to it."
4. Emotionally intelligent people take a 'six second pause' to dissipate strong emotions.
5. Emotionally intelligent people are the first to reach out after an argument.
6. Emotionally intelligent people shift to the positive.

Click to read the article referenced in this episode.

Download your free copy of 'The Resilient Professional'  by clicking here to dig deeper on subjects like these and others like sleep, exercise and time management to name a few.

Thanks for listening! Please reach out if you have any questions or would like a customized training program designed to improve the productivity of your team or employees.

In today's episode of The Resilient Professional, we will discuss how to increase your attention span from an article written by a neuroscientist. Our attention spans are evaporating and focus is becoming a lost art. 

Here are the key takeaways: 

1. Stop multi-tasking, none of us are good at it especially those who think they are!
2. Exercise! When you strengthen your body, you strengthen your mind. Get good sleep. 
3. Meditate. 
4. Spend time in nature. 
5. Reduce interference. 

Thanks for tuning in to this episode. 

To download your free copy of The Resilient Professional eBook click the link below. 

http://takechargeofchange.com/buy-the-book/