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Change 1: Redefining Resilience: Bend, Don’t Break

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What if resilience was less about armouring up and more about softening your step so you can spring back faster?

This episode shows you how to build real-world resilience you can use today, at work and at home.

You will learn:

  • What resilience really is. Flexibility, not rigidity
  • How to spot when you slip out of your window of tolerance into hyper or hypo states
  • A simple recovery routine to get back to calm
  • How to prioritise your internal state before the task
  • The CIA check. What to Control, what to Influence, what to Adapt to

Picture the moment you wobble. You pause, breathe out longer than you breathe in, change location for ten minutes, write the next three doable actions, and call a supportive colleague. You return regulated, clearer, and kinder. Over time your recovery time shrinks from days to minutes.

Listen today and choose one move. Name your early warning signs, plan your recovery routine, become self aware of it, and put it into practice this week.

Already feeling ready to bounce back? 

SPEAKER_00:

Hello, my name's Philip Walla. My name is Penelope Walla, and we are two of the directors at 4D Human Being. And welcome to the 4D Human Being podcast. What's it all about, Pen? It's all about your personal and professional relationships, it's about your communication skills, how you lead, how you work and build teams, how you are looking after yourself and your well-being, and how you are much more at choice. What do we mean by that? Well, sometimes we can get a little caught in patterns in life, and we can all be a little bit on our automatic pilot. So 40 human being is all about helping us get back to choice and being a four-dimensional human being, and your fourth dimension, of course, is intention. So whether it's about your impact, your leadership style, your team dynamics, whether it's about your well-being, whether it's about your communication or your presentation skills, anything that involves human beings interacting with other human beings, 4D Human Being are here to help. We're gonna take a deep dive and look at some tools, insights, theories that are gonna help you go from a 3D human doing to a 4D human being so that you can happen to the world rather than the world simply happening to you. Good afternoon. Well, hello for we're back together. We are very in the red. Yes, we're all in the red. Are we going to talk about resilience today? So red resilience. Maybe that was sort of subconscious. We're like, come on with the red. Yeah. Action. Yeah. Nice to be back. I loved your podcast on anxiety. What the old solo flying? It was really good. Sort of biggles. Well, yeah, it was biggles. Do you know what I thought as I was listening to it? I mean, I really liked it. I really enjoy our podcast. And I I think, you know, better together, but ways, Panda. But what I noticed was that you were really able to structure and stay on track without me sort of dipping in. Yes, it's interesting. You said it felt structured. Yes. It's interesting, isn't it? The difference, I mean, that's a whole other podcast for us to talk about. The difference between one's own internal experience of thinking and what it can actually sound like. Because it clearly landed, you know, there was enough of a structure, but of course, my head's going Yeah, you always felt always going from one thing to another. I'm not January's not terrible. Well, this is what I want to talk about. I mean, I'm not saying it's been my favourite month, yeah, but I think it's the story that people say about January that makes us feel like Ben, this is what I want to talk about. So no one's come out with so I've been trying to organise drinks with girlfriends. Yeah. And I have to say, it has been a bit, it's genuine. I don't I don't mind when there's a story that gives us an excuse to do what we really want to do. It's a bit like for some people, COVID was a bit that oh well I'm I can't go out because it's January. I think that's useful. We can call it a cheat, but sometimes we need to take the cheats to set the boundaries. But what more what I'm curious, and I'm there's a whole thing about cheating. You know, that we all you know, I've sort of sort of I'm cheating really because you know it's it got cancelled. Yeah, take the cheat. Yeah, totally. That's a whole other topic. Yeah. But the January narrative, yeah. Where I can't re I cannot think of anybody I've met who've said, well, you know, it's a time for rejuvenation. January! January, let's kind of, you know, really kind of get our ducks in a row, cannot wait for what the year brings. It's all been, oh, well, it's January. So long, such a January. My sister celebrates her birthday in January. I have to say it's a bit of a rubbish month. Yeah, it's a bit of a rubbish month because you're sort of like, oh, you know, just get it done. It's a people say it's a long month, it's a poor month. Yeah. It's a tired month. Yes, all of the all of those things. And I'm like, poor January. Yeah. What about it's a it's a sort of get it's like it's almost like a collecting month. It's a gearing month. It could be a restart month, it could be a sort of a rest and healing month. Yeah, it could be a kind of like, oh, pondering month. We need to, we've got to rebrand January for you. Yeah, rebrand January. Definitely. So but more importantly, for anybody, for listeners out there, while we're talking about January, this is a what the wider topic, isn't it? Of just be careful the narrative you're given. Narrative, narrative. Narrative, narrative. It might not be your you might be thinking, oh, it's so cozy. Well, people who are not in the sort of advertising PR comms world, but Alistair Campbell of the Rest is Politics podcast says this a lot. People who are not really in that world, you know, they sort of roll their eyes at the at the you know, you've got to control the narrative, you've got to change the narrative. I'm telling you, if we could rebrand January, I mean, who who knows what we'd do to the mental health of the nation, page? Do you remember those wooden, wooden launch things in the gym in the sort of 70s and 80s? They were like springboards to jump over the boxes. I mean, that age is more like the trampettes. They they they they didn't have much given them though, did they, Phil? I mean, health and safety. How we got over those boxes of horses or whatever they were called. Exactly. But I think we should sort of rebrand January as more like a sort of potentially a trampet for a springboard. Anyway, anyway, that's not what we're talking about. Although it does help with the what we are going to talk about. Yes, but anyway, good thing about, I mean, it's been a slow start to the year, hence why um you had to fly solo last time. But um, I'm fully back. Can I just rebrand what you just said? A slow start. Well it's a good way. Well, I think what you mean is busy elsewhere. No, I tell you what, I don't mean a slow start to the year, I mean a delayed start to the year because and then like an absolute hurricane of activity. But in a in a really exciting way, we've got some really interesting pieces of work coming up where people are really looking into models that we absolutely love. If you have never put your organisational team through Spiral Dynamics, this is the moment to do it. With everything you see going on in the world, you want yellow second-tier leaders in your organisation. You will change the we will definitely come back to Spiral Dynamics later this year. We have got three episodes. So if you search Spiral Dynamics under our podcast, you will find three episodes on it. We will definitely come back to it later in this year and and next year because things that are happening geopolitically are absolutely perfect. Yeah, and business-wise. Perfect to understand through the lens of spiral dynamics. But we're not looking at that today. We are looking at another topic that we get asked about an enormous amount from our clients, which is change. Dealing with change, understanding change, um how we behave in change, and leading others through change. So we are going to do the plan is to do four episodes, although you know me and Phil, we can we can chat to the cows, come home. So I think we'll do so much in the we're gonna do four episodes talking about change. And the topics are gonna be the topics are going to be first of all, we're gonna look at resilience. That's today. Then we're going to look at the switch model. There's a book by Chip and Dan Heath. Dan Heath on the switch model, which is really leading through change, that sort of thinking about the process, how we get motivated, how we get motivated, and what often gets missed out and why it doesn't work, including communication, of course. We're then going to look at edge behaviours. This is work from systems thinking, uh, what kind of gets in the way, what shows up when we're on the edge of change, but we're maybe resisting it, and also that mindset shift, so how we can get over the edge. I had a really good example of edge, didn't I, the other day in the gym where I had extra weights on the on the stat and you thought I couldn't. And I literally couldn't move my legs. And then you did it, and I thought, oh, it is possible. Yeah. And then you did it. And then I did it. And we don't really realise these, the what we call these edge behaviours that are the things that can get us to change and do things. Yeah. Well, edge behaviours is both the thick, the behaviour that shows up to resist, like asking questions and you know, or making jokes, or blaming, or saying it's never gonna work. And also within edge edge work is also what helps you get over it. Sometimes it's exactly that. It's the buddy at the bottom of the mountain. Yeah, which is also about mindset, and we know this from loads of uh research. So we'll talk about that on the thing. Mountains look much shorter and easier when you've got a buddy next to the weirdest reason. So we'll talk about that on episode three of this. And then the fourth one is adaptability, uh, that kind of improv improvisation mindset and action. Doing is our friend when it comes to the quickest way to uh think our way into paralysis when it comes to boy, are we good at it? So resilience, Phil. So the first thing I want to say on resilience, and you are an absolute expert on this being a being a psychotherapist, but the word resilience often I've had to I've had to work on we've all had to work on our resilience. But the word resilience comes up a lot, I'm sure, with your clients, but also in the corporate world, very linked to change, but generally it comes up an awful amount. I want a programme on resilience. We get asked that a lot. And I think perhaps we should rechange what we think that word means because if we talk about resilience, so let's let's imagine in manufacturing. I remember I remember this from my sort of chemistry and physics days, Phil, back at school. If we talk about resilience in materials and metals, we think about the materials being really, really tough, rigid, strong, resistant. That's I think that's often what we think of when we hear the word resilience. So we need to reframe it. There's such a paradox here, and so much of vertical development, because this is what we're talking, partly what we're talking about here. We're all sort of looking at horizontal development, which is sort of different ways of doing things or communicating, but there's also the vertical development, which is shifts in our growth, if you like. And what can be challenging is that when we can't, because we're so used to doing things in the way that we're doing them, it's very difficult to imagine that a new way will work. Now, resilience is such a good example of this. So, first of all, what is it? Well, actually, it isn't the ability to armour up, be tough, and fight exactly. Brace, brace, I always think of the aeroplanes, you know, braise, brace. It's the ability to be flexible and adapt and bounce back. And one of the big things that I have experienced myself and see it in clients is we can start by thinking, I just want all, I just want to feel good all the time. Yeah, I don't really want things to change, probably the first thing, which is impossible because life is change, and then I just want to be able to deal with it perfectly every time and not feel anything difficult. And then there's the frustration when we're caught in the same patterns. Where we actually start to notice the growth is when where it would have taken us a week to rebalance, it takes us five days, and then it's three days, and then it and it genuinely gets shorter and shorter until you find yourself within five minutes of something impact, you know, suddenly the news comes in, or you get an email that really pushes your buttons, you've got the tools to within five minutes not change that, but to get yourself back. And just just to finish that, when I hear people have said it to me, I've had clients say it that I'm very resilient. What they'll usually then add is a synonym of strong. Yes. And actually, these are usually people who are braced and spinning a lot of plates, incredibly stressed, and very frustrated that they keep finding themselves in this pattern. But they would identify as resilient. Yes. And in therapy, of course, we talk about the difference between a tree that's alive and able to blow in the wind, and the storm comes and it can move and it's flexible, and a tree that is dry or dead and it just breaks. Yeah. And so that's probably the analogy we're looking for. And just to say on this, what's going back to my kind of vertical growth model, what's so difficult about this is we've learnt to armour, and that feels like that's what's getting us through. And the idea of softening feels so paradoxical. It feels too risky. Feels too risky, and like it's not gonna see you through, it's gonna be weak, yeah. And everything you're describing, what's so interesting about this, everything you're describing is about the self. Yeah, that the what's going on with us, and and and I think often with resilience, we can think a couple of things. We can think that we don't want the stuff that's happening out there, that's the stuff that has to change, or the other person, yeah. And and I mean the first thing to say is that that change is constant, change is constant, and the second thing is that we will work quite hard to stop the things coming at us or complain about it, or or whatever it might be. And exactly as you said, sort of think think about that wall between us and the world as it's happening. And I I really understand it because you you want the the other thing to do. It's the fortress, yes. You want you want the the workload or whatever is or the speed, you want that to stop. Yeah, and you can't you can't, yeah. Mainly, very occasionally maybe you can, but you can't really stop it. So you have You can't stop the world. You can't stop the world. So you have to put it back. You have to pull it back here to the cell. That's right. And I think that's the first thing to think about when we think about resilience. It's not bracing against something and trying to stop it. It's okay, it's happening. How can I? That's right. It goes back to the Frankel quote, doesn't it? Between, I'm gonna totally paraphrase it now, but between you know, event and response, there's a gap, and in that gap is our ability to our freedom and our choice. Which really is the core of 4D human beings. So, one of the first things to think about is that self-awareness. Now, we'll touch on the nervous system. Yeah, but I did talk about this in the last podcast I did my flying solo, anxiety, which has such strong links to this. So, definitely worth listening to that in terms of how we can get caught in anxiety, which will often be part of change and also part of resilience, ability to become more resilient. But in terms of self-awareness, is of course what your level of tolerance is, isn't it? Really, exactly. So we're sort of going to bring together self-awareness in the window of the code. Do you know what I remember from when I first led teams way back in my early corporate career? And I'll mention this just if it resonates with anybody in terms of resilience. And I remember some team members, we were very busy. I remember some team members, you know, having real difficulty and the work, you know, different work had to get moved around. And the word fairness used to come up a lot in the team around it. And you know, they're not, they should, I am, you know. And at the time, I guess because of my lens at the time, and you know, I'm managing the workload and trying to get everything done. I kind of got caught in that and thinking, yeah, no, no, no, that's right. Come on, you need to, and actually, of course, now with my lens on the world, it's an understanding that it is madness, yeah, madness to think that every single person on this planet at every single moment in time has exactly and has exactly the same level of resilience, tolerance, ability to do things. And I I think we can get caught in that in terms of that idea of it's not it's not fair, and this is just something we we have to get rid of because if otherwise we are almost doubling down on the exact same thing. Would you know what? Would you know what really importantly, and you and I can really talk to this with historically very different windows of tolerance, and let's just explain that quickly because then I'll I'll respond to what you said. So the window of tolerance is really, if you think about a window, it's the space in which ah, I can cope. Yeah, it's the coping space. And if we if if we if we're impacted by a lot of change, we'll have two responses. We'll go up and out of the window into hyper It's too much, overwhelm, stress, it's not fair, get bogged today, yeah, reactivity, uh, defense, blame, all of that work, which ties in with our ego work. And if we, if it's if even that's too much, and this of course is the nervous system, when even that that's too, it's too overwhelming, it's it's beyond even having a reaction to it, we can drop down out of the wind. So think of it, think of it of going out the bottom of the window of tolerance or at the top of the tolerance. So at the top, we're going hot red reactivity, stress, stress, stress, stress, stress. Think about what that does to your body, to your relationships, etc. Does it and then your brain is full of cortisol? When we drop out, because we are so overwhelmed, the nervous system is going to shut down, we go into hypo reactivity, and that's when we go numb, shut down, shut down. We'll we won't answer the phone, we'll we'll I don't want to talk to anybody. So we can think of that as cool, and we can think of the top as hot. Now, what Penn, you've just talked about exactly that is we have different sized windows. And at different times. And at different times, exactly. So it's moving anyway and for different um events. So some things, I was always much better at dealing with the big things, like you know, a pandemic bring you know, bring me a pandemic, right? Let's sort it out. Yeah. But finding finding uh the way to an unknown place when you're under time pressure, your window of tolerance might go in that way. Or or even, you know, the sort of um irritation with an estate agent, recently, you know, whereas a pandemic feels more manageable. I mean, you know, so so we'll different responses to different things at different times. And that's the size of our window of the colour. And this is self-self-awareness. This is the self-awareness. Now, what Penn just mentioned, of course, is it can be very difficult if you in one, let's say you've got an organizational change going on, or there's redundancies, and you seem to be coping with it fairly well. You've had a bit of a worb with yourself, you've regulated. You're meeting your deadlines, you're meeting your deadlines, you're cracking on, even though there's uncertainty and you're managing fine. And you've got one or two colleagues who are completely all over the place, they're breaking down, they're talking about it all the time, they can't really function, they're not doing their work. And you might look at them and think, well, hang on a minute, I seem to be dealing with this, why aren't you? And I'm not talking necessarily about being someone's boss and team member, even just peer-to-peer. And also because, just to say, because it may well not be manifesting externally as I'm feeling really stressed, I can't do it. I'm gonna it may be manifesting as gossiping or just sort of pulling away from the desk and not doing stuff or not communicating with people. So it looks irritating. It looks irritating, it doesn't look like stress. And and actually, just to add to that, I mean, there's so many pieces to this. Of course, I've worked with clients who look cool as a cucumber on the outside. Inside, they are absolutely overwhelmed with stress. So we never know what's going on with someone else. And the other side, the full other side of that coin, which is also super interesting, which I come across a lot, is people who recognise that they're completely overwhelmed and they're terrified or can't cope, but they see Bob managing very well and they feel huge shame about the fact that they are feeling what they feel, so then they armour and try to cope with it even though they're overwhelmed. And the real you know, you look at the colours. So much. And the really sad thing about that, I mean, there's so many things about it, but the sad thing about it is that, of course, this is all going on in the cognitive part of our brain where we're trying to understand I'm not able to do this. Look, Bob's doing that over there, I should be able to do that. And you're trying to sort of rationalise yourself into feeling more resilient, yeah, and yet it's the body. That's what we talk about in the anxiety podcast. That's right. Is in overwhelm. That's right. And you're and you're sort of doubling down on it. Yeah. So first thing on resilience is if you have been moved out of your window of tolerance, the first thing to do is not the PowerPoint or presentation that you feel you should be. Well, it's it's recognizing you're out of it. It's recognising you're out of your window of tolerance and to help yourself back in it. Because all the time that we're trying to operate from outside our window of tolerance, we are quite literally making the situation worse. And we cannot, we cannot be resilient to the to the incoming traffic. We cannot. In fact, we are becoming less and less resilient because our capacity bucket is just absolutely full in the background, and now we're trying to so you know. So you think, well, I should go on this off-site or I should do this work project, and then one person says something to you quite innocuous, but your capacity bucket is so full, you snap at them, and now you've got a whole other problem. And you're not, you're not really doing yourself any favours by continuing to operate outside of your window of tolerance because you're probably not going to do the best in terms of your relationships, you're probably not going to be able to do the workload, and you're not going to be able to make good decisions. All of these things. So the first thing is to recognise it, and probably, possibly, some of those first singles are probably in the physical dimension. Yeah, I don't know. And I really want to, I really want to double down on your fairness, Pen, because I don't think we can bang that drum enough that it can feel so unfair that let's say we have we have got more resilience for whatever reason, the culture we were brought up in, the way we were brought up, what we learned along the way, the amount of self-development we've done, luck of our genes, who knows, or the context we live in, that you've got more resilience. We really get it that it can feel very unfair that you're doing twice as much as you know, Bob or whoever over there, because for whatever reason their window of tolerance isn't as big in this context. That's part of the self-awareness raise. You can, you know, I'm judge and fight it all you like, but you are quite literally talking about biology here. And if their window of tolerance cannot take as much as you, that is just how it is at this point. And it's you know, it's like saying to a toddler, Well, you know, I'm carrying the big backpack, why don't you? And I'm there's and it's not to denigrate someone as being a toddler, it's it's just the ridiculousness of asking somebody else to hold as much as you who literally can't do it. Yeah. So and and people are not generally poorly intentional. No. And particularly through change. No. And what this also means is you taking responsibility for what you're able to put in your backpack. Just because Bob can't carry as much in his backpack, that doesn't mean you carry three times the amount that you're able to cope. It's interesting, you taking responsibility for what you've got. It really makes me think of the military. I've been reading lots of stories recently about the military and sort of heroic acts. And I can imagine that obviously I'm sure they are taught huge amounts of ownership and responsibility in terms of their own actions and what they're carrying and all that kind of stuff. But I can also imagine a really deep understanding of exactly this. One of your colleagues is injured or whatever it might be, you gotta pick up the slag. You know, I can really imagine that being really strong. And of course, we're not in those kind of critical situations in the office, but the the concept is not dissimilar in terms of how we're working in a system, it's recognising what people can and can't do. And you know, I'd add to that, which is what I said at the beginning, you know, it's sort of I can find that in a crisis I can deal with a lot more. But but of course, what happens in a crisis is you're not thinking about, oh, you know, I must get that puff pastry from you know, that you're dropping a lot of other things as well. So, you know, that's true. That's yeah, okay. So first thing is recognizing when you're out of your window of tolerance because in order to increase your resilience, which is which is the question we are asked all the time, how can I and my team increase our resilience? If you want to increase your resilience, the very, very first thing you need to do is get back in your window of tolerance. Yeah, so so there's a couple of things I would say on that. One is to make a list of all the change that's going on in your life because often we don't recognise how many other things are going on. So you'll think, well, why am I so stressed at work? Yeah. And then you go, well, oh well, we've we've we're redecorating the house, my one of my parents is unwell, my child's not happy at school. When you start listing what's going on, your resilience has already been absolutely bashed through a number of other things that you've probably normalised. So the first thing is to sort of actually look at outside of yourself and list what's going on. And then the second thing is you say Penelope is to come right back to the self and ask yourself, what is going on here? Physically, emotionally, mentally. Am I outside of my window of tolerance? Am I outside of my window of tolerance and what does that mean physically? You know, my heart race is up, I'm feeling like I'm going at high speed, emotionally, I'm irritated, and cognitively I'm trying to, I don't know, squeeze my calendar into an ever-increasingly smaller space, or whatever it is. One way I was taught about this when I first learned about this model is unless you are somebody who, for whatever reason, is sort of consistently operating outside of your window of tolerance. So you've you you've for whatever reason you've ended up in that hypo or hyper state more than you are in your window of tolerance. And some people do find themselves there at periods of time. If I'm gonna park those people for a moment, if generally speaking, you're working within your window of tolerance, which is most of us, and then you dip in and out of it, the way that I was taught to think about this was stop, take a breath, and ask yourself Am I behaving in the way that is most familiar to me in this moment? Yeah. And if the answer to that is no, there's a very good chance you've dipped, you've dipped out. Yeah, yeah. Okay, okay, good, love it. So now you've you've become aware, notice the behaviours, notice that you're outside of your window of tolerance, find your recovery routine. So this is the this is this is the main thing around. This is the main thing around, isn't it? So it's an interesting point. It's not bracing. It's not bracing, it's not knowing it's recovering, it's not having more certainty in the outside world, it's not getting other people to work. It's coming to your internal system and finding your recovery mode. Close your email down, change environment, move location, take those calming breaths, breathing out for longer than in. Call the friend, whatever it might be. What is your recovery routine? This is an absolute game changer on so many levels. Firstly, you're doing those things that's calming your nervous system. Secondly, getting your brain back online. Yeah, you're signalling to yourself, we've got a plan. And this is a huge thing in the military. I love that thing in the military. I read this recently. When something terrible happens out there in the field, they don't just let their body react, they have to speak out loud, they have to say what's happening. So, you know, man down, shot in the leg, radioing in to call, you know, for help, backpack down. So they're talking to themselves, which is engaging their prefrontal cortex and telling themselves that they have a plan. Now, the nervous system will be going like absolute billio, but what those few seconds do, what this is how they're trained, is to very, very quickly signal to the body we have a plan, don't worry. We're in control, we're so fascinating, Pen. So it's the equivalent of that. If you've got your recovery team, you stop, you stop, you have to stop what you're doing and say, right, I'm gonna take 10 minutes, I'm gonna go for a walk, and I make myself a cup of tea, I'm gonna write down the three things that I can do immediately, and then I'm gonna call Penelope and I'm just gonna check in with her if there's anything that she might be able to pick up or you know she can support me with. Well, I'm gonna double down on, I'm gonna double down on that, Phil, because you know I've been a bit obsessed with like uh a series called Black Doves on TV, where I think I'm gonna be like, I told my gym instructor. Then your resilience is gonna be fine because you're because you're a you're you're you're a secret spa. I'm like a sort of ninja. I've I told I told my gym instructor that my goal is to be some sort of ninja. They must be so resilient though. Well, no, so this is what the CI agent said. So it was so interesting. It was this little clip I saw, and he said, Do you think they recruit women in their 50s? Well, you never know. So what he said was, you know, there's kind of myths around what you want top of your list as a CI agent. So you're in a room, you know, stuff's going down. He said, it's not about being the most intelligent person in the room, and it's not about being sort of primed and you know, except he said, the question you always, always ask yourself is this Am I the calmest person in the room? That's it. I know, that's what I thought. That's what I thought, Phil. So actually, all of this work around resilience is to get you to a place where CIA. I mean, nothing you're working for the United States, not for it. Sounds more dramatic. Some hidden benefits. But yes, so absolutely we want to we want to really, really think about that recovery back to, I think you call it sort of homeostasis. Yeah, we're always trying to get back to homeostasis. So what so the reason your body is sending you these signals, thirsty, hungry, is because it wants you to drink or have something to eat. It's the same with overactivation. It was it was signalling to you do something. Yeah, get us back to stasis, there's some danger. And I think when you understand this, I'm not saying it's easy because it's not easy, but I think when you understand this conceptually, you realise that your resilience is within your power, which I think is you know hugely exciting when you recognise that. And the other thing I'll tell you, which I know you're gonna go on to, is don't kind of beat yourself up, don't criticize yourself that you know perhaps you didn't show up brilliantly at work because you were in that sort of heightened state and you weren't feeling resilient when somebody asked you to do an extra report. You know, don't beat yourself up about it. Because the idea of building our resilience is all about over time reducing, reducing, gently reducing the length of that recovery time. Absolutely. That is what resilience is about. That's absolutely right. It's just it's quite simply how quickly can you get back on the horse? That really is what it's about. And if you gain five seconds each time, you're doing it. And it's never too late. And you know what one of your double-down wins can be is to go back to that person and say, I want to check in with you. I felt overwhelmed in that moment, there was a lot going on. That wasn't how I wanted to show up, and I wanted to let you know that you get double, double points for that. It's never too late to go back. The word that I just wrote down as you were talking was prioritize, and I think that was one of the big breakthroughs to become more resilient is to almost gamify what you prioritize, and that you stop prioritising the pieces of work or the list or the even cooking the dinner, you prioritize your internal state. So even if you're you've rushed in, you've got to get your kids some food, and and you're in a heightened state, that becomes the priority. You take four minutes at that point to get that back, and you can cook the baked beans in four minutes time. That has to become the priority. And sometimes the priority feels counterintuitive. Sometimes the priority has to be laptop down, walk out the room for five minutes. And for for any of you out there who've had moments when let's let's take an example of having to prepare a PowerPoint at the last minute. Any of you out there who have just found that so stressful, so difficult, just couldn't quite get the pieces to all fit. It's taken you hours. We talk about this a lot, and then a week later you're asked the same thing, and it takes you like 10 minutes. We talk about being in flow when you're when it just it's it's just it just feels easy, whereas sometimes it feels like wading through much. This is all about your resilience and your window of tolerance and recognising when you're out. And it's such a waste of our time. You'd be much better off pulling out for 10 minutes, resetting and coming back rather than fighting PowerPoint. Do you know what that reminds me of? It reminds me of um acting rehearsals. That when either as an actor, when I was in rehearsals or when I was coaching actors, if you start a speech and you're totally off and you're not in it, and you're you're you're just making loads of errors and it's not real and not authority, you're just not in it. Yeah. When I first used to start coaching people, they would just want to keep going. And actually, the learning is you have to stop. Yeah. Because you don't want to keep practicing the way of being that you don't want. You're much better off walking away and coming back to it. And it's the same. That's not the that's not the muscle that you want to be practicing. You want to stop, walk away, come back to another. So we would offer, in terms of resilience through change, your, you know, probably your number one thing to focus on is your own internal window of tolerance, recognizing it, recognising when you're out of it, strategies to get back into it. That I mean, that really is your number one. I guess our number two, going back to what you said about prioritizing, is thinking about sort of control versus what we can't control. I don't know how much time we waste on things we can't control, but that's definitely something sort of more cognitive to think about. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, part of this is of course is about letting go. I mean, that really is interestingly, we touched on spirals, and and this is something that we'll talk about definitely in other podcasts because the the shift that we're looking at, while we've got people at all levels of development, the shift that we're looking at at the moment from what we would call green to yellow is the frustration when everything, everything doesn't fit, yeah, everything's not right, everyone isn't happy, or everyone hasn't got equal, you know, whatever it might be, resources. And part of this is that leap to being okay with it not being okay. Yeah, and that's a huge thing whether Living in the ambiguity. Living in the ambiguity, living in the grey, being okay with that uncertainty. I mean, it's a huge part of resilience, and actually, it's a much more realistic way to live. Yeah. Because of course we can't control everything. It's actually a I think I talked about this in the anxiety podcast last two weeks ago. It's a trick of that part of our brain that is convinced if it works hard enough and does enough, it will know. We can lock it down, lock it down and control it and know everything. And it's a total trap, it's an absolute myth. We're much better off with control, as you say, taking a moment and really looking at what we can and and can't do. And you know, we know this from the sort of spheres of influence models of what we can influence, what we can't. But actually, part of this to really map it into the window of tolerance is all very well knowing this. Most leaders will have done some kind of model on your can your sphere of control or influence. In terms of your own personal yes, in terms of well, in terms of strategic. Oh, yeah, what you can influence in the organization. What I can influence in projects or organisation or not. Like you'll all know a map, but what you what we aren't taught is okay, well, now I know that I can't control the check, the redundancies being made at the organisation. I'm still left with this feeling. I'm feeling this feeling. And what we're not taught is how to tolerate the window of tolerance of how how do I learn to sit with this and soften into it. I know it intellectually. I think everybody knows it intellectually. But emotionally and physically. But emotionally and physically, we don't know what to do with ourselves, and then we're just in anxiety and stress. Yeah. So part of this resilience is turning back, as you say again and again, Penn, turning back to the body and saying, I'm at, okay, I know that I can't control that. I'm outside of my window of tolerance. I need to regulate. And then, of course, what you and I would say is now go to what can I do? Exactly. So a really nice model in that space is the CIA model. I'm all about CIA today, Phil. Control, influence, adapt. So what can I control? So, like you said, you know, well, I can control cooking some beans for my kids. Like, I can control that. Exactly. What can I control when I choose to do that? What can I influence? So, what what are useful conversations to have? And then adapt, which I think sometimes is the hard one, is the what do I what do I simply have to adapt to because it's outside of my control. Yeah. So really And I think often we don't always get things in the right buckets. Absolutely. So really notice, and we've all been there, we can get caught on this for weeks and months and sometimes years. Catch yourself if you think or say, I've got to, I've got no choice. They should, I've got no choice, I can't, I have to. And that is your nervous system absolutely in overwhelm and going to rigidity. That the only way through this is to keep going in the state that I'm in, I've got no choice. I have to cook these baked beans right now, my children will starve. That's where it takes us, though, isn't it? That I've got no choice. Of course, what you do have a choice about is turning that hob off, taking two minutes, regulating, regulating, breathing slightly differently, giving your kids a you know piece of bread or a whatever carrot, and say, just give me, you know, give me give me two minutes. What can you do? So, in that control, influence, adapt, and I would also say that A is also action, what is possible here? And of course, action is is really your friend in the world. Well, particularly, particularly, I think, if you've gone into the hypo state out of the window of tolerance, which we don't often recognise as a stress state because it you can confuse it with calmness because it's that sort of shutdown. And when we've gone there, everything kind of freezes, and then we're probably trying to think our way into decision making or whatever it might be. And actually, action can often be our best friend. Just get just get up and do something. Do literally anything. Yeah, I mean, just do something to completion, you know, whether it's sort of tidy up that cutlery drawer or fix something, or or you know, clean your car, or something that has a completion. Um, in gestalt therapy, um, psychotherapy or psychology, we we talk about that that the gestalt is the circle, that completion, and that can be very, very calming for our nervous system to go to a completion, you know, finish a creative project, whatever it might be. And probably one of the last things to say on this is how we can really almost there's a couple of things on it. One is how do we really come back to tolerating the uncertainty and the unknown? And the other one that I think can be incredibly useful, it goes back to our conversations around stoicism, is all the time that we are bracing against change, there's a lot of fear in there, and it can be quite an interesting exercise to come back to something really foundational around okay, what if it was me and the people I loved sort of sat on the ground and everything's gone yeah crazy, everything's kind of broken down, or yeah, everything has gone wrong, let's say. What's gonna be important? What's gonna be important there? And it sounds sort of slightly sort of apocalyptic, but it can be very grounding to come back to some core values. Because what's really interesting about resilience and change and anxiety is we can get so caught in the spiral and spinning of need to achieve, need to be good enough, need to you know hold on to my job or need the promotion or need to make everything you know amazing in the company or grow the company, whatever it is. And yet, if you were asked really what's important to you, it would be your friends, your family, your integrity. Totally. So we disconnect from our values, don't we? Yeah, so something about the softening back into what's really important to you, who you want to be that can really help in resilience. Yeah. Of I'm not my job title, yeah, but I'm a human being who's right here, right now, and I care about how people feel, and I care about how I feel. And that's so grounded. Yeah. So I think for me, the some of the key messages to think about with resilience, and it is a really, really big topic, is first of all, to think about it more as a softening and a flex rather than a control and a rigidity. And even that, as a concept and a mindset, is probably something we all need to do a bit more of. The second one is to really think about resilience in terms of your own personal window of tolerance, and you can also think about resilience in terms of managing others by recognising that their windows of tolerance are different. And then the third one is those strategies to reduce our recovery time so that we can get back to feeling resilient. So that might be, as we've said, you know, taking time out, breathing, it might be reprioritizing, using the control influence adapter. Lots of lots of different ways that we can get regulated and get back into the window of tolerance. So understanding what resilience is, it's flex, not rigidity. Secondly, understanding that concept of the window of tolerance, and thirdly, getting yourself back into that state and not trying to do too much when you're out of that state, I would say. Yeah. And I, as you talk, I can really feel my body is really softened. And it makes me think of the Andrex toilet paper advert. Well, with a puff. Soft and strong and very long. Very long. That is the best mantra for resilience. Soft, strong, and very, very long. Well, probably an important word when we're thinking about toilet paper, though. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the 40 Human Being Podcast. We hope you enjoyed the show. Do take on board some of the insights, tools, and tips because every time that you try something new to get back to choice, you are making a vote for the you that you want to become. And I I love that phrase, Pen. I do too. And please do share this episode with somebody that you know would really benefit from the lessons and learnings we've been chatting about today. And of course, if you're interested in more from 4D Human Being, do get in touch. We run workshops, trainings online, in person, conference events and keynotes. We've got the 4D on-demand platform for your whole organization, and we do have a free essentials membership where anybody can sign up for absolutely free to access some of our insights, tools, and tips. So do get in touch with us if you'd like to hear more. We cannot wait to hear from you and to carry on the conversation.