Resilience Unravelled

The First Africa Family Business Summit (AFBS) will be held at the Kempinski Hotel in Accra on June 24th 2022.

The aim of the AFBS is to bring together family business practioners and help them to build a network that will allow them to share information and insights amongst themselves. The audience will be made up of family business owners and senior management, the next generations of their families and other key stakeholders in family businesses.

The AFBS is a hybrid conference with virtual and face to face attendance. Dr Russell Thackeray will be leading a workshop on building personal resilience and the toolkits needed to facilitate this in the afternoon session. The evening Session will allow wider networking and focus more on organisational resilience with key speakers on the theme of  “Building Resilience in Family Businesses for Continuity”.

Like most people, successful executive, life strategist, and author Rob Swymer has gone through his share of adversity. Rob married his first wife Bonnie at the age of 21 during the summer of his college junior year and together, they had 3 children. In 2013, Rob lost Bonnie to a massive brain aneurysm and he learned that all the adversity in his life prior had given him the strength to endure the loss of a loved one.

Rob believes our internal voice influences our every thought, belief, and action. He used this model to move forward. In reality our internal voice is louder than any external voice we can hear. Rob thinks you need to start with mindset. If you get your mindset right on a daily basis and with the inner voice in check there is nothing you can't achieve.

Often people attend time management courses and come back very enthusiastic about what they've learned. They start of with good intentions but after a short period slip back. Perhaps time management is bigger and broader and the question we should be asking ourselves is how are we managing ourselves.

In the bigger context it's apparent that more people are asking themselves this question now than three years ago. Post pandemic people are perhaps struggling to reset the boundaries of what’s acceptable, how they work, what productivity looks like and how it gets measured, how they compare themselves to others and their productivity and how they can still establish credibility with their bosses when there has been less presence around.

A clinical depression in her 20s, and later, a bipolar I diagnosis, caused Michele Capots to lose all self-confidence, self-esteem, and self-worth. She felt defined by her illness and was unsure what it meant for the rest of her life. She no longer believed in herself, and lost the confidence to achieve her goals.

Michelle knew nothing about bipolar and was in and out of psychiatric wards for three years. The self-stigma she felt was difficult to overcome and made her fight against. her diagnosis. Someone told Michele that she should to run towards the sound of the cannon and she took this as meaning she should run towards the problem rather than away from it. When she accepted that the disorder was only a part of her not all of her she found freedom and achieved mental wellness.

Kevin Roth began to play the dulcimer in 1972 at the old age of thirteen, and at sixteen recorded his first album which immediately launched him into international fame. His career took him to a concert and symphony stages around the world, to festivals, radio, television shows, and two appearances at the White House. Then came a sudden diagnosis of Melanoma which changed his life.

He was given around two years to live and had the choice to accept the diagnosis or live. He chose life. Through adapting and combining techniques from his music and performance practice with others that he researched, he found a simple and powerful method to change how he lived and discovered how to not just survive but to become truly happy and thrive. 

Kevin feels we create stories every day. When we wake up it can be a good day or a bad day. For example, if you’re in a really bad mood and the phone rings and it's a friend you haven’t heard from a while then suddenly you’re in a whole other dimension. All the drama that was ruining your life is gone. When you look at mindful awareness and take the time to contemplate it you realise that you really shouldn't get upset about very much. The story is the story.

We also need to recreate our life on a daily basis and retune ourselves through the day. Many people don't know how to sit in silence or be comfortable with themselves any more. We have an inner voice that will talk to us if we are quiet enough to listen so we can replace what doesn't work with what does.

Lara Sabanosh and her husband had been marrried for twenty years and had been based at Guantanamo Bay in a civilian capacity for four years. On January 9th 2015 after an evening event he went missing and his body was found later in the bay. In telling the story of his disappearance, the media portrayed him as a war hero and a wonderful husband and father but this did not tell the full story of their relationship.

The evening her husband went missing he had assaulted her three times verbally and physically. The attack had been reported but the people who were questioning her about his disappearance were the same people he socialised with. Nobody was listening to her and the reports she had made against him ignored.

Since then Lara has often been asked why people stay abusers. Lara feels that she became a military wife at a very young age. She was nineteen years old when she met her husband and was a college student with big plans for the future. She came from a close-knit family unit with no background in violence but she now realises that the stronger the ties between them came the more she lost herself. At the start of the relationship it was not abusive but she now realises that there were some red flags before they got married. There were incidents that happened which she now feels should have given her an indication about how he handled situations and that he was lying to her. After they got married these things became her problem.

Pre-pandemic in the US there was a notion that if you did all the right things, happiness would just happen to you. That's not actually the way happiness works. In the pandemic there was a paradigm shift where millions of people started asking themselves were they happy in their life or was their life ending up how they imagined it. Lots of people said no its not and resigned in mass numbers.

A second paradigm shift happened when people asked themselves questions about their dissatisfaction at work. The HR department had always known the answer was more money and better benefits but now that people were asking if they were happy in life, the HR departments were at a loss. In the old world we knew that more money would make us happy. In the new world no one knows the answer because few people know how to make themselves happy.

 Paola Knecht is a certified leadership, transformational, and self-development coach with fifteen years of experience working in leading-edge global corporations, including Viatris and Syngenta. In her recently published book The Success Mindset: Take Back the Leadership of Your Mind she challenges the mainstream view of success and asks her readers to redefine success so it is truly meaningful to them.

Paola looks at the difference between people who are extraordinary and reach things no one thinks are possible and people who don't achieve the things they want to. She feels that many people are living against an externalised idea of what success looks like rather than what matters to them and that they are following a definition of success that was not really defined by them but comes from external sources.

Clint Davis is an entrepreneur with a passion for storytelling and preserving the past.

A cancer survivor who lost two siblings at a young age, Clint has always had a keen awareness of the importance of remembering the past, while also making the most of the present moment.

He now empowers others to save their histories and pass on their legacies. In this podcast:

• Clint talks about how moving gives you the opportunity to reinvent yourself
• Why failure needs to be factored in
• Why holding on to your past is important.

Rosie Mankes is a life coach, motivational speaker, and author of Find Your Joy and Run With It, a memoir about overcoming her second battle with cancer, the transitioning of her mother into an assisted living facility, and the unexpected loss of her brother, all within one year.

Rosie talks to Dr Russell Thackeray about how her identity as a secret comedian helped her come out of adversity happier and stronger and how humour was one of the healthiest coping mechanisms for her. In this podcast:

• Rosie explains how she managed to find joy in everyday living again
• How making a number a small changes can work better than ‘big picture’ thinking
• Why you need to define what makes you happy