Resilience Unravelled

This week on the Resilience Unravelled podcast, Dr Russell Thackeray talks to Craig Archibald who is an acting coach in California who works with actors at all levels in their careers.

He became involved in the theatre when he was 11 years old and progressed to a professional actor when he was 15. He worked at the Royal National Theatre in London and New York’s Neighbourhood Playhouse studying the Stanislavski method of acting and then had a twenty-year acting career before realising he also had another set of skills, those of writing, producing and coaching.

In his mid 40s he moved from Manhattan to Malibu and set up a west coast version of his New York coaching operation where over the last 12 -15 years he has worked with young artists to get their careers on the road as well as working with people higher in the industry. In this podcast:

• Craig explains why perfection is not needed - 95% is good enough
• How actors create roles and ‘live truthfully under imaginary circumstances’
• Why actors need resilience, integrity and authenticity.

Growth and resilience go hand in hand. We can think about our growth in two ways - by accident or on purpose. If we want to be resilient we need to take life by the horns and maximise our wellbeing by embracing both.

Most people focus on growth on purpose because that's what’s wanted – its the things we planned for, were hoping for and were willing to get uncomfortable for but it's the growth by accident that we need. This type of growth is often related to shame, disappointment or embarrassment - the stuff of failures, mistakes and setbacks - but if we have tools to harness both categories then we can live on purpose.

When we can choose to be on purpose, we choose to harness our choice and respond rather than react to life.  Doing things with a sense of purpose knowing where you are growing and doing it purposefully.

Robert Vershelst or 'Fireman Rob" was 23 years old with only a year in the fire service when he was part of the search and rescue operation after 9/11. Rob found the situation very surreal and didn't understand how to process it. He had these feelings for many years and used alcohol to quell the darkness. There were a lot of things going on in his life during those years that dragged him down before he started going forward. To get out of the hole was hard and it was not until he was older that he started to look at his mental health.

Rob tried to find all the positives he could find from what had happened. One of the biggest was that for that time after 9/11 everyone was working together regardless of religion, gender, colour or political beliefs – they were working together for a common purpose. He now looks at that as one of the most impactful things in his life, that its possible for us to work together and have a bigger purpose than just having our point heard and being right.

Jennifer Fraser is a best-selling author and award-winning educator on bullying and the impact neuroscience has on personal development and culture change.

Our culture is so seeped in bullying and abuse - from children’s playgrounds to the upper echelons of leadership - that we’ve come to normalise the behavior. The bullying paradigm has parents, teachers and coaches believing they must be tough to the point of emotional abuse in order for children to acquire the grit and resilience needed to attain excellence in a competitive world. Setting high expectations in an atmosphere of safety, trust and empathy is light years away from using threats, humiliation and cruelty if the goal is high achievement.

Neuroscientists have found visual evidence in brain scans of the damage that occurs when subjected to bullying and abuse. The bullied brain correlates with failure to perform, substance abuse, aggressive behavior, chronic disease and mental illness.

Sam Syed is co-founder, CFO and COO at Capsll, an app that enables users to gather their once-scattered memories into digital time capsules. Sam was born in London and is one of six brothers with a Portuguese and Pakistani heritage. He became aware of racism at a young age but feels this helped him build his resilience.

His working class background meant he grew up not always getting everything he wanted and he quickly realised he would have to 'break the mould' so he could get things for himself. Sam says he had a fantastic childhood and upbringing but is also thankful that it wasn't ‘silver spooned’ so that what he accomplished from his finance career in London, Dubai and New York he gained himself. He thinks his biggest success is that he never settles and that he’s always looked for the ‘what if’ and that has led him to being part of the team setting up Capsll.

Matthew Fox is a spiritual theologian, an Episcopal priest and an activist for gender, racial and eco-justice. He has written more than 39 books that have been translated into over 60 languages. In 1993 he was expelled from the Dominican order of the Catholic church after 34 years, by Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI). His mistake was reviving Creation Spirituality which blends teachings from the Christian mystics with science, the arts, social justice, environmentalism, and ideas from other spiritual traditions worldwide (including those of indigenous cultures).

Matthew feels the difference between spirituality and religion is that religion has evolved to become mostly about social structures. Religion comes and goes in different eras or moments in time and at certain points, particularly in the west, has become linked to empire building and politics wheras spirituality is the essence.

Belonging is an archetypal experience that we all seek. In the workplace, a sense of belonging will only happen if you have both diversity and inclusion. When you facilitate diversity in hiring practices and instill inclusive policies, procedures and behaviors, your organisation has its best chance of creating a culture that supports a sense of belonging for everyone. 

Diversity is a fact. Inclusion is a behavior. Belonging is an experience. Diversity is a fact in that you can look around you and note that there are people like yourself alongside people who aren’t like you. Inclusion, meanwhile, is a set of behaviors, frameworks or approaches that promote psychological safety and connectedness among team members.

There are a lot of things that happen to us in life, events, injuries, trauma or divorce. With any type of life event happens we try to protect ourselves so we cover ourselves to survive and continue living. A life event such as the pandemic makes people withdraw and disassociate to protect themselves and others from things they used to care for. When people do that they go into a victim mindset - things always happen to me and only bad things will happen to me. What we are saying to ourselves, our inner voice or the way we speak to ourselves means the way we create stories in our mind leads to a lot of resistance and fighting that we have to go through. Whether it's a relationship with another or ourselves, the story we are living in and telling ourselves matters. Part of the challenge is to recreate your own narrative.

Dr Stephen Sideroff is an internationally recognised psychologist, executive and medical consultant and expert in resilience, optimal performance, addiction, neurofeedback, and leadership. He has published pioneering research in these fields. He is a professor at UCLA in the Department of Psychiatry & Biobehavioral Sciences and the Department of Rheumatology, and director of the Wallenberg Institute of Ethics. He was the founder & former Clinical Director of the Stress Strategies program of UCLA/Santa Monica Hospital and former Clinical Director of Moonview Treatment and Optimal Performance Center.

Dr Sideroff started his career as a researcher looking at a learning and memory. He then moved into clinical work where he quickly realised stress was a major modulator of how people felt. They could be feeling really good but as soon as the amount off stress in their life increased their coping abilities become strained and they began to develop different kinds of symptoms.

His most recently published book is The Path: Mastering the Nine Pillars of Resilience and Success. Amazon.com – takes model of resilience and lays it out path is a construct that is designed to help people who can get very overwhelmed when they think of all the things they need to do to become resilient – they feel they have to be resilient to work on being resilient.

Sallie Wagner feels resilience is incredibly important and crucial to our life and wellbeing in four major areas – physical, emotional, mental and social - and that there are some very simple ways we can build our resilience. Resilience can also help us to move out of all the regrets we have in life – the ‘what ifs’ and the ‘if only’.  As we build resilience we can move on from those regrets.

She also believes that to create success we need to make a process for everyday. Mindset is not taught and we need the mindset to view the success we have in the future and also what it looks like afterwards. We need to have the right skills to have the right mindset for our careers, businesses and lives and then take action to make it happen. Without action it’s just a philosophy. Without action it’s just hoping and dreaming.