Building Resilience for a New Year with Amanda Crowell | UYGW050

Welcome, everybody to unleashing your great work on this special 10 episode series, we are focused on resilience. What is it? How do we get it? And if we've lost it, how do we get it back. So listen in, because we know that great work is so much more dependent on your resilience than it is on your hustle.

Welcome, everybody to unleashing your great work. Over the last several weeks, we have had seven wonderful guests. And this Thursday, we're going to be having our keynote guest, Melissa Monty from the mind love podcast. But before we go out with a bang, I would like to take a few minutes and reflect on what I've learned over the last few weeks. These are recorded during the holidays. And part of the reason I wanted to record these at this time of year is because the holidays provide the opportunity to be with the people we love in ways that are unusual. During the rest of the year, sometimes we get the opportunity to spend a few days together with people we live far away from. Even if it's your own little family or your own roommates, you're spending an amount of time together that you don't usually get. I know for me what I want during that time is to be able to be present to that experience. To not be stressed about work, I didn't get done before I took some time off or that I didn't do as much in the year before that I had hoped to do or, you know stressed about what I'm walking back into when I go back to the office. I don't want those things interrupting this unique opportunity to spend time with my family and friends. Also, sometimes during the holidays, we have an opportunity if we take it to do some of the things we like to do simply because we like to do them. I really like to paint, I like to paint and draw. And I don't do it very often because I'm caught up in doing other things. But as I tried to build a resilience practice, I noticed that sitting down and doing something entirely visual is a big relief. I live a very verbal life, I talk a lot all day. And sitting down and just looking at something to draw it or just messing with the colors and seeing what mixes together and what I can do with these opaque paints or these water pick colors on this white paper or this thicker paper. Like there's something so unusual about that. And I like having the opportunity to do that. And of course, I have the opportunity to do that because I took the opportunity to do that. I do that not just because I want to feel good. Although that is enough. I want to enjoy my life. There's no question about that. And in order for me to enjoy my life, I need to be a little calmer. I need to not be always time traveling into the past and worrying about what I didn't get done or time traveling into the future and worrying about how I'm going to do all that. Instead, I need to practice getting into this moment. We all do. It's really easy to spend our time looking back looking forward and not realizing the opportunity of the moment we're in. That feels so much better. But that's not the only reason why we want to keep track of our resilience. There are other benefits to it. We started this series in the episode How to Get Your bounce back, talking about improvement fatigue, which is a phenomenon that I discovered when I was working with school teams that were doing these improvements sprints where like each week, they would do something to try to improve a process in their classroom. And by the end of the six or eight weeks of these little tweaks, people were really tired, they were utterly fatigued by the notion of improvement. They're like, I don't want to improve, I'm happy with where I'm at. Or if I'm not happy with where I'm at. I'm still going to stay here because I am done. I need a minute. And when we focus for a little while on resilience in our lives, it allows us to find our way back to enthusiasm for improvement. And when you're building a business or doing a creative work, or any kind of great work, work that requires innovation and creativity and problem solving, we need to find our way back to enthusiasm for trying new things for enthusiasm for failure for enthusiasm for trying to find empathy for people we don't understand like those are really the sort of linchpins are the bedrocks of great work and they take a lot of resilience to do them. And that is why I have spent the last nine episodes this one being the 10th really talking to people and trying to learn? What can we do? What can we do to rebuild our resilience? Or, as I've you tell speedback, in the second episode of the series told us, how can we prevent losing our energy in the first place. And we've heard lots of interesting ideas from the people that we had on the podcast in the last five weeks. So I wanted to just review some of them, because I think it's important for us each individually to have a list, I literally have a list on my phone and the Notes app, that are things I like to do. Because one of the interesting sort of unfortunate aspects of this is that when you're really low on resilience, when you're just kind of worn down and worn out, it can take too much resilience to remember what you like to do. What do I find fun? What do I find relieving what? You know, the the things that work for me, sometimes it just takes too much to even remember what they are. So I go into that list, and I pick something, and I do it. And so if you don't have a list like that, it might be a good idea to make one. So one of the big pieces of advice that came out over and over again, and it makes sense, because it's the obvious advice. And yet, I think it's probably the advice, it's the hardest to take sometimes is very simply to take a break, to fully disengage from the work from the worry from the expectations, just unplug. Once you've disconnected from all of that then find, as Mary Scott said, Go inside and discover what makes you feel better. So I love that she said this because it reminds us that what makes other people feel better, may very well make you feel worse, like it isn't about the things that make humans feel better. That's when you get into trouble when people are like it's not about massages and manicures. Well it. It's not about massages and manicures unless those make you feel great. And you've got the money for them and you want to do them then it is about massages and manicures. But that may not work for you. It might be more important for you. As Katie colver helped us to remember to go outside to go find that what she called a sit spot where you become familiar with a place that is somewhat wild. So you go out into the woods, you find a particular tree stump, you sit on it, and you spend some time there every day or as often as you can. The sit spot is a place where you become familiar with animals and the plants and the trees. And actually, Abby tell speedback said something similar where she was talking about, you know, she becomes familiar with a place where she has a hike. And then she notices when a tree that she knew when the tree was alive. And that tree has fallen. And then she notices the life that springs up out of the decay of the tree that she knew when it was alive. That is having a set spot that is allowing yourself to become familiar with a place that is wild and allowing yourself to feel a part of that place. Both Katie Culver and Abby tell speedback talked about that. Sometimes people call that forest bathing, which often they're what they're talking about is the the abundance of oxygen in a forest, which is very helpful and very calming. But there's also something about the wildness that lives in nature. And if you can become familiar with it and get to know it and feel a part of it. That's very grounding and very calming as well. Another person talking about taking a real break is Consuela Munoz who talks about shiny object syndrome. And I think during the holidays, shiny object syndrome can be a real problem. Because there's always something else you could do some other sale to peruse on your phone, another store to go to another party to go to more cookies to bake whatever it is you're doing. So this is classic, really great goal setting advice. In fact, guy go on and on and on about it in my book, great work, when you know what you want. You know, if you're being distracted from it, often I find when people are feeling kind of rudderless. Like they don't know where they're going, they don't know what they want. They haven't really stopped and thought like, what do I want from my life? What do I want from this week? What do I want from, you know, my career? What