INSIGHTS (on leadership/self-leadership)
Resilience gets harder to muster the more negativity and setbacks that pile up in life. Practice these six proven, power strategies to strengthen your resilience:
1. Drop the victim mentality. You play the victim when you believe you have no control over outcomes, that you’ve been irreparably wronged, and when you’re stuck in “It’s not fair.” The underlying belief is “I’m powerless,” which leads to debilitating learned helplessness and inaction. Regarding the impacts of adversity, ask yourself: “Do I just want the impact to change, or will I work to change the impact?”
2. Find the agreeable adversity. Not all adversity is disagreeable. To find the agreeable adversity in times of challenge, ask yourself: “Where’s the good in this?”, “What possibilities does this present?”, “How might learning and growth happen?”
3. Don’t fly solo. Resilience is a group activity. Lean on your support network. List who’s on it and ask yourself, “How might they help me manage stress, solve challenges, diffuse tensions, or identify opportunities?”
4. Let your anchor steady you. A challenging period in your life often comes with change and drains your sense of control. You regain some control when you re-anchor by considering what WON’T change – your values. Ask yourself, “What are my three most closely held, non-negotiable values? How might I live these every day?”
5. Remember the Attitude Anthem.“Life is 10% what happens to you, 90% how you react to it.” When lamenting the impacts of adversity, ask yourself, “Will this setback weaken me to the point of ruin or make me stronger in some ways? Will it cause irreparable damage, or is it a setback I can recover from? Will it cause others to truly doubt me or just me to doubt myself? Am I just in a tunnel, and the light at the end of it will eventually appear?”
6. Remember the Gratitude Anthem. “I am enough.” Period. Whatever is holding you back during a tough time is not because you’re a deficient human being. You’re simply being held down in some ways, with many things to be grateful for that you can rely on to lift you up.
IMPERFECTIONS (a mistake many make)
It’s hard enough to show up as genuinely confident, so why add to the challenge with bad habits that make you appear less confident (even in cases when you’re actually feeling confident)? The good news is that if you’re aware of the most damaging bad habits, you can avoid them. Here are three of the biggest ones:
1) Shrinking your physical space. A landmark psychology study, brought back into the light by a recent Forbes article, explained the idea of collapsing your physical space in this way:
“Imagine someone walking into a room and immediately folding inward, shoulders rolled forward, arms pulled close to the torso, chin angled slightly down. Now imagine someone who enters the same room and takes up space: shoulders back and open, arms slightly away from the body, head level. You probably formed an impression of each person within seconds.”
That snap judgment you make was the subject of the famous study, which found that “low-power” poses (crossing your arms, physically contracting, self-touching) were seen as signals of low confidence.
The point is, being aware of when you’re contracting your physical space and doing the opposite can significantly change how confident you appear to others.
2) Too much hedging. In other words, conviction conveys confidence. When you fall into a pattern of giving disclaimers or qualifiers that precede your statements, it doesn’t help. For example, who do you believe is more confident, the person who says, “I’m not sure about this, but…,” or “I could be wrong, but I think that….” or the person who says, “I’d recommend we do X and here’s why.”
Take it from psychologist Mark Travers, who says, “Practice declarative delivery, that is, state your point and then support it. ‘I think we should move the deadline’ is stronger than ‘I was kind of wondering if maybe the deadline could potentially be moved.’ You can still express nuance and uncertainty, just do it explicitly and purposefully.”
3) Anxious fidgeting. The micro-movements you engage in as a calming force (continually twirling your ring, playing with your hair, picking at your fingernails) may seem like subtle pacifiers to you, but they scream lack of confidence.
Psychologist Travers has good advice on this as well:
“Confidence is often found in the stillness between movements. To build this confidence, you can try the three-second rule: before you speak, or after you finish a sentence, practice being completely still for three seconds. It feels unnatural at first, but observers read stillness as composure rather than rigidity.”
IMPLEMENTATION (one research-backed strategy, tip, or tool)
Trying to solve a very difficult challenge? Try the Buddhist philosopher trick of remembrance.
Instead of forcing your mind to find a solution to a seemingly impossible problem, ask your mind to simply remember the solution. The assumption that one once knew the answer fosters the belief that the answer must exist, thereby eliminating the overwhelming feeling of hopelessness. The mind can then think more clearly with greater intensity.
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