What do you do when your child or teen has a meltdown? How do you help your kids bounce back after suffering a bitter disappointment or worse, trauma and grief? Teaching your kids resilience is so key to their success as an adult, that I’ve asked a resilience coach to join us so we can master resilience for both ourselves and our kids.

Russell Harvey's mission is giving others the tools and techniques to create the right conditions to apply “transformation” to their roles as parents and leaders.

To learn more about Russell Harvey, receive coaching find resources or listen to his podcast visit: https://www.theresiliencecoach.co.uk/

Special thanks to InGenius Prep for sponsoring The Fatherhood Challenge. To learn more about InGenius Prep or to claim your free consultation, visit: https://ingeniusprep.com/get-a-free-consultation/?utm_campaign=2024+Podcast+Email+Marketing&utm_content=Fatherhood+Podcast&utm_medium=Fatherhood+Podcast&utm_source=Fatherhood+Podcast&utm_term=Fatherhood+Podcast

Special thanks to Zencastr for sponsoring The Fatherhood Challenge. Use my special link https://zen.ai/CWHIjopqUnnp9xKhbWqscGp-61ATMClwZ1R8J5rm824WHQIJesasjKDm-vGxYtYJ to save 30% off your first month of any Zencastr paid plan.

Transcription - Teaching Resiliency to Your Child

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What do you do when your child or your teen has a meltdown?

How do you help your kids bounce back after suffering a bitter disappointment or worse, trauma or grief?

Teaching your kids resilience is so key to their success as an adult

that I've asked a resilience coach to join us here if this will help us master resilience for both

ourselves and our kids. So don't go anywhere. Before we begin, I'd like to thank our proud sponsor

of this episode and the Fatherhood Challenge in Genius Prep. In Genius Prep is the world's

premier admissions consulting firm proud to be officially recognized as the country's top college

admissions consultants, helping students prepare for admissions to top schools through individualized

educational programs that increase chances of admission by up to 10 times. In Genius Prep

students work with former admission officers to differentiate themselves from other competitive

students in three areas colleges evaluate students in academics, extra curricular activities

and personal characteristics. Just this past admission cycle,

Genius Prep students have secured 110 offers from Ivy League schools, 268 offers from top 20 schools

and 904 offers from top 50 schools. Genius Prep student success lies within the fact that

Genius Prep is an all-in-one consulting firm offering every service of family needs,

whether it be test prep, tailored candidacy, building mentorship, academic mentorships,

the leadership and innovation lab, soft skills courses, writing courses, and other

customized programs to develop their application persona to the most effective and authentic

extent to share with colleges. Just click on the link in the episode description to book a free

strategy call with one of Genius Prep's college experts or you can visit ingeniousprep.com

that's ingeniousprep.com and let them know you came from the Fatherhood Challenge.

Welcome to the Fatherhood Challenge, a movement to awaken and inspire fathers everywhere to take

great pride in their role and a challenge society to understand how important fathers are to the

stability and culture of their family's environment. Now here's your host, Jonathan Guerrero.

Greetings everyone, thank you so much for joining me. Also joining us is Russell Harvey.

Russell's passion and mission is giving others the tools and techniques to create the right

conditions to apply transformation to their roles as parents and leaders. Russell, thank you so

much for being on the Fatherhood Challenge. Thank you so much for asking me, Jonathan, it's an

absolute pleasure to be here and to have all of their listeners tuning in. Hello to you all.

One of my favorite questions to start out with is a dad joke. So Russell, what is your favorite

dad joke? I'm in Leeds UK and there is in Scotland there's the Edinburgh festival,

comedy festival coming up again. So I actually had a look for last year's top 10 jokes for last year.

So for me a dad joke has to have this real mixture of like grown and laughter to it at the same time.

So the number one joke which I think sort of fits this bill from the last year's Edinburgh

Fringe Festival was as follows. I started dating a zookeeper but it turned out they were a cheetah.

So that should, yeah, do the laugh and the groan of the same problem. Thank you for being

with me. And that's actually from a Lorna Rose train that we need to have tripped that too.

And then I saw another one that caught me eye in the top 10. I thought this is number four or five.

So this one is when women gossip they get called too faced but when men gossip it's called a podcast.

So those ones tickled me and I hope they tickle everybody else as well. So those yes,

those are two for you there are two for one. The Russell, they were true dad jokes.

All right, well let's dive right in. Russell you have an impressive career. What is your story and

journey that led you to become a resilience coach? I'm being cheeky now because it's not a

resilience coach. Jonathan, I am the resilience coach. If you want to farm you anywhere it's not

any old resilience coach. It's the resilience coach. I managed to snaffle that one for a website

domain so I'm sticking to it. So my journey I've always really been interested in human behavior.

I think I've been fascinated since a really early age about how come people do the things that they do?

How can we do behavior this particular way or we don't behave in this particular way?

And the vast majority of my career has been in learning and development and leadership

development but it started 1996 in Hong Kong. So I was travelling around the world for a year

with my lovely girlfriend who later became my wife and I was teaching in Hong Kong.

I was teaching English language lessons so essentially just local Hong Kong Chinese.

And in the room some form of magic was happening. I didn't know what it was but I just thought

you know what I think I want to do this for a living. But I knew I didn't want to be a teacher

teaching a school. I just knew that wasn't me and then I came back to the UK and thought you know

what I think I want to do training because the magic that was happening in the room

it turns out later was people learning people having light bulb moments. People going from

confused face to a heart I understand the face. That did something to me. That did something to my

heart and my gut and my head and it actually just sort of gave me a zap of a wonderful feeling.

And that goes into my purpose. So one of the dimensions of being resilient is having a purpose

and we may talk about this later but by the year 2025 I want to positively affect 100,000 people

and right now I'm up to about 72,312ish essentially. And so when I mean by positively affect is there

anybody that I support to have their realization, their light bulb moments, their learning moments.

And so when I came back from Hong Kong in 1997 essentially had a career in learning and development

and today I call myself a facilitator and a coach. And the fact that the resilience coach came about

is that my last permanent role was a business called the co-op and their co-operatives worldwide

and not long after I joined he got itself into a real pickle as a business.

And I was just there supporting all of the leaders, the top 300 leaders around actually this

business is in trouble. What do we do? How do we resolve this? And I said well this is word resilience

and there's this an acronym called VUCA which people may or may not be familiar with. And I went

all of our approaches, our solutions, our answers are in there. So my specialism is how to lead

yourself and others really well in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world. And that is

the resilience coach. In what ways can dad's model resiliency for their kids? What are the long term

impacts of such modeling? I think the really important thing right now is how I describe and define

resilience. So I would love, you know, yourself, do you know the thing? And everybody's listening now

to get their heads and hearts around how I define resilience, which is as follows. So resilience is

about springing forward with learning, springing forward with learning. So I'm personally not a fan of

the term bounce back because we can't actually go backwards. Sometimes there's a risk that when a

challenging event happens to us, yes, we do need to recover from it. But then we are quite often

said to ourselves, right, our now bounce back. And it's can there's a risk. It's a subconscious

instruction to the brain to go back to how you were and you can't do that. Resilient people are

perpetually learning, springing forward with learning. So to answer your question, how leaders,

parents, dads can actually cultivate resilience in their children and in their team is to cultivate

optimism and the growth mindset. That's what they can do. And then so explain what they are and then

the long term benefits. So optimism is the fact that we're trying to move away from toxic positivity.

So how you get to feelings of hope and feeling positive is to actually think about optimism first.

Now if you look up the dictionary definition of optimism, it's got the word positivity

is gripe it. So they're heavily intertwined. And the starting point of optimism is the fact that

it is grounded in reality. So one of the things that we have to find a way throughout life to

accept with good grace is that life is unfair. It's just really horrible things happen to wonderful,

amazing, gorgeous people. Life is unfair. So cultivating that attitude and that understanding

in your children and in the team that you lead is really helpful. So optimism is grounded in reality.

So you do need to understand that if there's a size and scale of a problem or something's not

working in the way that you would like it to, we have to be open and honest about that. We have to be

really clear about what the size of the challenge is, of what the problem is and find a way to talk

about it without going into a negative spiral, but just talking about it openly and honestly,

then the next thing to do is to immediately think about, so what are my strengths, what are my skills,

what are my capabilities, what are my attitudes, what's my current level of resilience that I've

got. Actually, that can face into this challenge. And when you focus on that for yourself and the people

around you, then you can start to get genuine feelings of hope. And then you start to feel positive

to go, do you know what, there is a real challenge we've got, but actually if I think about myself,

the strength skills capabilities, attitude, mindset, behaviors, experiences I've got,

and there is a round me you've got, then actually you start to get genuine feelings of hope

and face into it. And part of that is cultivating a growth mindset. So actually, somebody from the US,

a lady called Carol S. Dweck, specialized in fixed and growth mindset. So she's got some

some great TED talks around this, if people listening now want to find out more. But a growth mindset

is absolutely cultivating it in your children and your team, people around you, getting them to actually

really get into the place that they are perpetually learning. They can always grow, they can always

improve. And how you do that is about giving feedback and I praising people on the effort that they

are putting into things. Less about the outcome, the end result, the achievement, you absolutely

acknowledge that. So if a child comes home and brings the drawing and a painting from kindergarten

or certificate from school, you don't suddenly put that to one side and go, tell us about the effort

you put in. You absolutely praise this brilliance of the masterpiece of art that you're going to put

on the fridge. And they've got a certificate, you're going to praise that. But also start to ask some

questions about actually what was the effort they put in? Where did they persevere when they found

it challenging? How did they overcome that? And so it's about asking some open coaching questions

around that. So the long term benefits of doing optimism and growth mindset is you enable the people

around you and your children to understand what their strengths are. And I will talk about this a

lot, taking a strengths-based approach. Because when you identify what naturally energises you,

then that builds natural resilience and natural confidence. And there's many studies that show

that if a child has had a really difficult background, a bit difficult upbringing, when someone,

a parent, a guardian or a mentor or a teacher, you know, or a guidance counselor,

clicks at the something that they enjoy doing and they actually find a way to just find

opportunities for this particular child to do these things that they enjoy doing. And just find

multiple opportunities for them to do them week by week. Then actually they come out the other

side of their difficult challenging experiences far more resilient than those children that didn't

have that experience. So optimism, growth mindset, those will cultivate the springing forward

with learning and they will cultivate natural resilience. I absolutely love that. My wife and I have

had fascinating discussions. It started out as a disagreement over the whole strength-based approach

mindset because the way I grew up and the way I was taught in my main thing, I do many, I feel like

I wear many hats, but one of the main hats I wear is music. I'm a musician and a teacher.

Perfect, great.

Yeah, I grew up with this whole mindset of, and the way I was taught, was not strength-based.

It was focused on your weaknesses. Find all of your weaknesses. Let's figure out what they are.

Let's bring them to the surface and let's do drills, exercises, everything, and let's turn every

single weakness into a strength to where you don't have any weaknesses. That was the focus.

My wife and I have had quite a few discussions over that in the past. I have to tell you,

she's right. No surprise there.

I think it's because it's about this word, energy. When I come from a strength-based approach,

there's a particular psychometric called strength-cope that I utilize in my clients.

And clever people and I have come up with 24 strengths. You do a psychometric and you come up

with your significant seven. So you can't be naturally equally energized by all 24 of these strengths.

There's seven of them that you are your significant seven things that you're energized by.

And everybody's psychometric is different. So it's about harnessing those.

And with so many of my leadership clients, when we do their psychometric, their eyes will naturally

go to their low score and they go, "Okay, so I presume my homework Russell is for me to work upon

my weaknesses." And they go, "No, no, it isn't. We're going to look at those. Those things that you've

got less energy for. They're not a weakness, less energy for them." But what your homework is is to

look at these significant seven, these things that you love doing and will be naturally good at,

your homework is to do more of those as much as you're possible. And for so many of my clients,

it's like a light bulb. Wow, oh my god, what? I don't have to spend all these time on my weaknesses.

But it's also being really clear that we find a different way to and put strategies in place

to think about, "Okay, so there's something that you have to do as part of your job role.

It is genuinely yours to do, but you don't have natural energy for it." So there's multiple strategies

that we can put in place to actually support you in those moments. So, you know, your parents,

nothing would have been, you know, wonderful and great. We will do these things about,

"I'm not very good at this. I'd like to get better at it." That's fine, but it's understanding,

if you spend all of your time focusing on the things that naturally de-energize you,

it's going to batter you because you're spending all your time doing something that de-energizes you.

So it'll just make you feel even more de-energized. So we're trying to make sure we don't get into that

place. Thank you for explaining that a little bit more in depth because I've been curious as to why,

I mean, experientially, I've seen the strength-based approach achieve and do more, but I've never

understood the mechanics of why. So your explanation was very, very helpful in that regard. I appreciate

that. One of my favorite quotes that I've heard my father-in-law say a lot is that there are no,

there's no such thing as failure, only new data. And it's become a favorite of mine. So when a child

suffers better disappointment, what is the boundary and difference between coddling and helping them

helping them become resilient and recovered? Yes, so for me, this goes to, I'm going to back to

the strength-based approach. So two of these 24 strengths are compassion and empathy.

We're all, you know, energize differently. Some of us are going to have little natural energy

for either, and that's okay. Some of us are going to have lots of energy for both. And some of us

are going to have lots of energy for one or the other. By sheer coincidence, two of my seven

significant seven are compassion and empathy. But these play out in, I want everybody that's

listening now to think about as well about what's the difference between help and support?

So the definition around the compassion strength is that we've got varying levels of energy,

some of us highs, some of mediums, some of low, the compassion descriptor is that you deeply

care about the well-being of the person or the people in front of you. You genuinely want to do

things for them. You want to help them. You want to look after them. You want to take care of them.

And that's great. It's lovely. And I do an awful lot of work in the UK with the National Health Service

that we have. And that's the caring profession. So I support them around coaching skills, and we

have lots of conversations around, is the likelihood that you've got a compassion driver because of

the job role that you do. But it's actually how much are you helping your clients and patients?

And how much are you supporting them to do things for themselves? So if your compassion

driver energises it is too much, then you will be coddling. Feed union, your phrasology, your question

that you asked. There is a risk that you're going to coddling, and it'll be too much in the space of

the person not learning from the experience. So empathy, the empathy descriptor is about you have

lots of energy to actually discover what is making this person tick in front of you. How are they

thinking and feeling? How are they processing their thoughts, their feelings, their experiences?

You know, you will ask open coaching questions. You'll empathise with them. You'll be understanding

their point of view, and you won't necessarily be wanting to slip into fix it for them.

Okay, so it is understanding that people's emotions belong to them. We cannot use our emotions to fix

somebody else's emotions, even though we desperately try, and I've still fallen to that trap on a

regular basis. And when love comes into play, you know, loved ones, then absolutely, you know, the

compassion is going to come to the fore. So it's about tapping into your empathy driver. And even if

you've got little energy for it, how you role model that is essentially being curious and asking

questions about how they're thinking and feeling, how they want to process it, what they want to do

with their thoughts and feelings, how it's impacting their behaviours, they'll feel heard,

they'll feel understood. And then it is then an appropriate point shifting into that mantra

mind of springing forward learning to go, okay, so what are you going to learn from this experience?

What are you going to keep doing? That's worked well for you. What are you going to do differently next time?

Is anything that you're going to stop doing? And if you can tap more into your empathy side of things,

then that will be more supportive and learning, rather than too much helping and sort of just doing

things for people without them learning. You work a lot with adults who are often stuck. And I'm one

of those. There was a time in my life when I felt exactly that way. I felt stuck. I felt like I was

lacking purpose in life. It can also be career related. How do you help them find their purpose and

gain their courage? Courage is actually one of the specific 24 strengths as well. So I'll come back to

that in a minute. So purpose is one of the dimensions of being resilient. And I know you'll ask

at the end how people get in touch with us. But on my website, I have the resilience wheel, which is

got seven aspects to it. So if anybody asked me, okay, so how do I build my resilience, Russell? I go,

look, there's this wheel and there's seven aspects to it. Engage with your wheel in varying ways,

all seven aspects of it. And that's how you'll build your resilience. One of them is the purpose,

which I mentioned at the start, what my purpose is. So and it's not a question that you can immediately

just walk into a room and ask a lot of people, so what's your purpose? There's a route into it.

One of the routes into it is is a different question about, so talk to me about the times in your life

when you felt proud. That's a starting point to enable others to discover what their purpose might be.

So and sometimes that takes a little while. Some people need to think of some examples. So you do need

to do some reflection. You might need to chat to some people, you know, you might need to go for, you know,

a walk, get some pen and paper and school about when's the times where life that felt proud? Once you've

started, you'll, you know, the floodgates will open and you'll get some experiences. Once you've got

these an example of what made you feel proud, then I want you to think of the an acronym of a car,

C-A-R, and that stands for Challenge Action Result. So when you think, when you thought of one

particular example, it makes you feel proud, then you need to break it down to go, okay, so what was

the challenge at the start? What was the starting point? What was the example? Was it like, you know,

a really difficult time? Was it a project? Well, was I asked to build something? Was I involved in

something? So what was the challenge at the start? And the letter A is action, which is, what did you

do in this, in this example? How did you behave? Were you a leader or a follower? Were you a team member?

What were your skills? What were your capabilities? What were your behaviors? What were your strengths?

When were you energized? So put lots of things down around the actions and the behaviors and the

strengths and the skills, and then what was the result of what you did? And when you do that for

a few of them, the letter A is where all the great stuff is, because that letter A will be telling you

and telling yourself, actually, what's important to you, what your value system is, actually, what your

purpose was in each of those examples, and then it will be demonstrating to yourself actually who

you are as a human. And then you can translate that into, okay, for me to do more of that, that's my

purpose. And so it also goes into, you know, I ask a lot of my clients, you know, have you got a purpose?

Have you got a leadership purpose? So I'm also curious as well around, actually, everybody's listening now,

what's your parenting, your fatherhood purpose? You know, what's people's answers to that? Now, I'm not

about the fact that you have to have lots of purposes. That's not what I mean. You know, there'll be one

over arching one and they can all be interconnected. But sometimes when you ask people what's your

life purpose? And they say, so how does that translate into your leadership purpose? You know, they have

to do a little bit more thinking reflection around it. So the routine to rediscovering your purpose is

to think about this question of when is the times in my life when I felt proud? What was the challenge?

What were the actions that I did and what was the result? And spend lots of time in the actions,

because that will be explaining to you who you are as a person, what your value system

and then you can translate that into a purpose? I want to go into an area that might be a little

uncomfortable for some, but I think very much essential. Talk about numbing through addictions for

reasons. Maybe it could be a divorce, it could be job loss or it could be any traumatic event.

Are there healthier or more constructive ways to seek this dopamine rush that we're after

to overcome the emotional lows and the force of a loss? Yeah, so if anybody is in that place or has

been in that place now, hopefully we've shown some empathy now, I'm just really sorry that that's

happening for you. The simple answer to the question is like, yeah, there are better ways of

facing into the emotions that you're having, then doing unhelpful behaviors around alcohol or

drugs or something else. Now, the way forward from this is once again, you know, think about

the seven aspects of the resilience wheel. So working or engaging with any aspect of that wheel

has knock on impacts on all of the other areas. And one other one's, one people to think about is

one of the aspects of the resilience wheel is your support network. So the other thing that when I

was reflecting on this sort of this question is for everybody to listen in now, it's how currently

good are they at both asking for help and accepting help? Because when we go through really difficult times

and unfortunately my wife has been very ill the last couple of years and I've become her carer.

And so I've been going through difficult times and I have been querying myself on

how have I? I've been offered a lot of help. And I've been thinking about when have I accepted it

and when have I not accepted it? So we do fall into the trap of believing that we can sort things

out for herself and fix ourselves. And so right now, everybody's listening now, it's just think

about how do you answer the question and Jonathan, that was a really good, when I said it,

of like, how good are you asking for help and then therefore accepting the help?

So you really do need to go to your support network and if there isn't one there, you have to cultivate

one. That's absolutely what you have to do at this moment in time. And as a result of that,

you need to be open and curious. But it's also a state of readiness for this as well. So there

isn't necessarily a simple answer, but it's a case of if you're feeling alone, it is absolutely about

making the choice to literally put one point in front of the other to walk into a room and ask for

some help. That's a really significant starting point for people around this. And then it's about

allowing yourself to be open and curious about the help that you're going to accept. That's

the best answer I have right now. There is a better way, which is what we turn to because it feels

easier. But yeah, it's like how good are you asking and accepting help? I'm listening to how you're

answering these questions and how you're just diving into the topic. And it is clearly evident to me

that what really drives you, what really gets you going is seeing people succeed. You feed, I can tell,

you literally feed off of your clients, getting unstuck and improving their lives and getting better.

This is what gets you out of bed in the morning. I don't even have to ask that question. I know

what gets you out of bed in the morning. And you make that very obvious to me. Thank you.

So that might be asking, maybe I'm already answering the next question for you, but why would you

recommend that a dad work with a resiliency coach instead of trying to tackle some of these

strategies on their own? We can't do everything by ourselves. When you work with a coach,

you will then actually be equipped with more tips, tools and techniques to do things for yourself.

The point of purpose of the coach is to set you up to actually face into life's challenges and

spring fall learning when the coach isn't there. So I will be by your side, physically

virtually and metaphorically. It's really interesting. Some of the feedback that I've had over

the decades is, 'Do you know, Russell, I was just about to do something the other day with one of my

team and your voice was in my head. I was remembering back to one of the conversations that we'd

had. I was just about to behave in a particular way and suddenly your voice was in my head and I

changed my behaviours and I got a better outcome.' So that's lovely for you back to get. I suppose it's

that question about why would it, what's the benefits of working with a coach, essentially? So it's

that whole thing of like a coach is there to support you, to discover whatever it is that you want

to be different better in your life and enable you to get there and then part ways, essentially,

but it has long lasting impacts. So working with the resilience coach will actually set you up with

the resiliency skills for life and who wouldn't want that, Jonathan? Who wouldn't want that?

Absolutely. There is a, there is a pride in getting to that point where you feel like you can master

life no matter what it throws at you. You can't change what happens to you but you can change

what you do about what happens to you and having those skills always with you. I can't think of anyone

who would not want that. No, absolutely, absolutely. And it's like this one, was one client recently,

if people want to look at most socials, it's, I've got permission, it's a testimonial that's out there

but they really shifted from. They were in a, you know, they had the, you know, our deal client is

somebody's got, you know, a job title of head off or director of, and they were in a director of

position and they were taking lots of things out of the earth to build stuff and they weren't happy

and, you know, they weren't personal and work life wasn't great. And they completely and

actually shifted. They changed jobs and, you know, last time I spoke to them, relationships with

family are so much better as well and they're in a completely different place doing conservation.

You know, the protection of birds. So they've shifted from taking stuff out of the earth to actually

conserving the earth. And I mean, that's the significant transformational difference and not all of my

clients is quite as significant as that but that's the recent one and it is. It's definitely something

that I'm very proud for them that they've managed to achieve. Russell, how can dads learn more about

what you're doing or get in touch with you with questions or to get coaching? Also, how can they find

your podcast? So literally everything is on the website. So all the w's dot v resilience coach dot

co dot UK, the podcast that I have is on the homepage that's there. There's a form of contact

Russell, which is on there. There's umpteen, umpteen blogs that are on there as well that people can

read through. So that's the easiest way to get hold of us. I'm on, you know, uh, linked in and Facebook

and Instagram. So the resilience coach, there's there's multiple ways about how you can get in touch

with us and just literally I'm open to a, you know, virtual cup of coffee, physical cup of coffee in a

chat, you know, we, um, that individual that I just talked about the example that transformed that 99%

of all of that coaching was virtual. Uh, so it doesn't necessarily have to be face to face.

And just to make things easier, if you go to the fatherhood challenge dot com, that's the fatherhood

challenge dot com. If you go to this episode, look right below the episode description, I'll have the

link that Russell mentioned posted there for your convenience. And Russell, as we close, what is your

challenge to dad's listening now? My challenge is how, how, not what, how are you going to enable and

empower your children? Russell, I've learned so much from you in this episode. That's what makes this

so much fun. And I know the audience did too. Just this conversation alone, I'm already feeling

better about my day. So there's something, there's something to listen to. So I thank you so much for

being with me with us on the father challenge. I really enjoyed it. My absolute pleasure. Thank you so

much. Thank you for listening to this episode of the fatherhood challenge. If you would like to contact us,

listen to other episodes, find any resource mentioned in this program or find out more information

about the fatherhood challenge, please visit the fatherhoodchallenge.com. That's the fatherhoodchallenge.com.

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