The critical skill to developing your resilience and happiness? An innovative mindset.
Learn techniques to become aware of how you can turn challenges into opportunities, obstacles into interesting detours and keep yourself energised, inspired and engaged, regardless of external factors.
Mindset shift to see challenges as opportunities to grow
An innovative mindset is the ability to see challenges as opportunities. Having this mindset enables us to live our best lives and succeed at work through self-leadership, emotional regulation and better communication. It helps us remove the fear of failure, drives our individual successes, team dynamics and organisational culture.
We need to have an approach to innovation because 50% of our revenue, in 5 years time, will come from sources that do not exist yet. And the formula for an innovative mindset is made up of creativity + learning + resilience.
Use creativity and learning to take control of your career and life
Creativity is the most important tool for leveraging your innovative mindset to take control and navigate an ever-changing and fast-paced world. Having creativity helps us see different possibilities, patterns and connections, in order to turn challenges into opportunities.
This can be applied at both home and work to help when projects go awry, client expectations are not met, or there’s miscommunication.
Another important tool is learning. Learning means thriving in our learning zone in order to gain new understandings, and move out of our comfort zone. By thinking creatively and thriving in your learning zone you can be a better problem solver.
Keep your cup full during an evolving work dynamic with resilience
Using resilience can help keep the ‘cup full’ during uncertain times. There are four critical elements that influence our wellbeing during change:
1. Our network and relationships
2. Looking after our needs
3. Focusing on what we can control
4. Keeping the mindset of ‘I’m not failing’, I’m just asking for help
5. Resilience helps achieve success by managing the way we respond to difficulty and changes.
The way to build resilience is through, what Hatherly calls, flearning - learning through failure.
As a physically demanding sport, AFL players need to cultivate both physical and mental fitness for optimal performance.
As the AFL season finally restarts in June, get insights from Kate Hall, the Head of Health & Wellbeing at the AFL to help you prepare for mental fitness like an elite athlete.
Mental fitness is being purposeful in what your mind learns
Being mentally fit is premised on the fundamental understanding of our minds, and being deliberate in what the mind learns. This contributes to our overall fitness of the mind.
“Cultivating mental fitness helps prevent long term impacts on our wellbeing and mental health. We can be mindless when we go about our lives and lack a deep understanding of our thinking. Mental fitness isn’t an endorphin rush or immediate reward.”
If you’re deliberate on what you learn and understand your strengths and vulnerabilities, then you can optimise your function and offset tendencies you’ve acquired that aren’t helpful.
Mental fitness is essential to high performance
Mental fitness requires six things. First is flexibility, which is about neuroplasticity, and the need to remain present to sustain meaningful actions through periods of stress. Second is active empathy, with which we can enact in short periods of time, actively cultivate, practice and grow. Third is mindfulness, which is to understand and investigate the mind, and what kind of mental skills best serve you.
Fourth is practice - deliberately practising to acquire a new skill to overcome or learn areas of improvement. Fifth is non-avoidance - we are wired to avoid things that are uncomfortable. Be aware of this when deciding to, or not to, practice a new skill. Last is self-care, which is knowing how to comfort yourself and build a micro skill in down-regulation, rather than seeking short-term distractions.
Use super skills to balance mental fitness and wellbeing
“We can’t understand the true whole of something unless we’re able to balance the opposites that appear to work against each other. But together, they form a sense of equilibrium.”
This balance is critical for awareness of how we operate our mind. Strengthen them equally, know their function, and practice mental fitness skills. These are skills you need in order to maintain balance and thrive in a high-performance environment. Here are five: self-compassion, perspective, sleep hygiene, emotional literacy and knowing your social capital.
Further reading and resources recommended by Kate
Sleep Hygiene - healthy habits for a good night's sleep
Resilience - what is it and how to build it?
Perspective Taking - what is it and how can it improve wellbeing?
Mindfulness - what is it and how to learn it?
We’ve had a massive shift to the way we work, connect, and relate to one another. Our return to the workplace will require us to adjust once again.
Learn ways to manage these ongoing shifts to maximise your energy levels, build new rituals and focus on what is important to you, inside and outside of work.
Watch your thoughts, they become your words; watch your words, they become your actions; watch your actions, they become your habits; watch your habits, they become your character; watch your character, it becomes your destiny. - Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu
Take the time and opportunity to re-set
There are several distinct phases we go through when a crisis like the coronavirus pandemic hits. What’s most important is understanding these and using the experience to evolve and grow.
“We have an opportunity to reset - to take a pause and reassess what is working and what is not, and start to rebuild our boundaries and restore our energy. Never let a crisis go by without seizing the opportunity to learn and grow from it,” says Morrison.
One thing a crisis can help us to see is nothing is ever secure. “Uncertainty is the new normal. And to thrive in an uncertain world, you need to have certainty of who you are and start to understand through all of these changes, what’s actually important to you.”
Fit your own oxygen mask first
People commonly fall into playing four roles in life and in the workplace - the perfectionist, the pleaser, the performer and the procrastinator.
“It’s important to recognise when you're starting to play these sort of roles in your life, and that they have an impact on your boundaries.”
To combat this, we should try to understand our own values better. “Values are really like holding out a compass for your life. They direct you, keep you on course and guide the choices that you make.
“So, a bit like on airlines when you're going through the safety checks, fit your own oxygen mask first. If you can start to realise what's really important to you and strengthen boundaries around your energy, time and focus, it's going to really shift what your life looks like.”
Don’t be afraid to show vulnerability (and have brave conversations)
Morrison likes to invoke Brené Brown, who says vulnerability is not necessarily about winning or losing, being right or wrong, or strength or weakness.
“Vulnerability is really about the courage to show up when you can't predict or control the outcome. And often, that's what a brave conversation is all about. It's showing up with your integrity and your authenticity, knowing what's important to you and your values.
Further reading and resources recommended by Leigh
Brene Brown: The gifts of imperfection, Dare to lead
Stephen Covey: Circles of Influence and Control
Daniel Goleman: Emotional Intelligence
Brave conversations:
More blogs from be Coaching for references on
Productive conversations
Maz Farrelly,
Reality TV mastermind behind Big Brother UK & AU,
The Celebrity Apprentice and The X Factor
Wouldn’t it be great to have your own producer?
Now you do.
Maz has made the biggest shows in the world with the biggest budgets, teams, audiences and stars - if you’ve watched it she probably made it and won an international award for it.
Now she's helping corporates and individuals deliver Killer, Kick Ass Communications that slice through, sharper than a samurai sword through soft butter.
Maz gives you and your business the X Factor and she knows how - she produced the show
and won a Logie for it.
• “Hope is not a strategy - you have zero control over how people behave (unless you’re a producer).”
• “You have to make it interesting. It is not my job to be interested, it is your job to be interesting.”
• “Think about you and your business in a different way. What is your unique selling point? We all have one, we just have to find it.”
• “If your content is amazing and interesting, I will read it and take action. When we entertain people, we get their engagement. When people are engaged, they’ll take the action that we want.”
• “There are three elements to being a great storyteller and communicator:
Make me laugh - comedy trumps everything; make me cry - i.e. make me care; and surprise me.”
• “What are you in one sentence? Lose all the white noise. Give your “sticky” information - this is the information that sticks in my brain. If it doesn’t stick, it’s white noise and I won’t remember you.”
And a bonus tip for all you introverts to help break you out of your shell: Do something every day that scares you a little bit. The more times you embarrass yourself, the better. Because eventually you won’t care. Failing is something you should be doing. When we fail, we get smarter.
Catch Atlassian's Work Futurist Dominic Price in conversation with our Head of Data, Dan Richardson. The pair took the stage at last year's Verizon Media Academy to discuss the evolution of human productivity and teamwork and shared ways you can keep ahead in your career.
While our world may have changed due to COVID-19, the insight from Dominic
around productivity and the future of work is still relevant.
The entire workforce working from home is posing new challenges, in particular how we build and maintain crucial relationships with our colleagues and clients without any face-to-face interaction.
Discover how successful managers and teams are overcoming these challenges and building stronger ways of working using online tools.
Managing teams remotely calls for a new approach from the top.
Without the face-to-face interactions we’re used to across a standard workday it’s imperative to use other strategies to maintain a strong working culture.
Regular one-on-ones, via phone or video to check in and ensure staff are ok, are essential. Resetting work-related expectations for employees is another important consideration.
Helping people prioritise, and offering new learning and business opportunities, such as encouraging people to look for unconventional growth avenues, can also be beneficial.
“Leadership is really important. If you are a leader, you are the strongest predictor of how confident people feel that their organisation will get through. So be visible,” says Hamman.
The Holy Trinity for Effective Teams: Roles, goals and soul
A focus on maintaining well defined roles, committing to business goals and looking after the individual’s needs is the perfect workplace combination for effective teams. Of these, the ‘soul’ factor is potentially the hardest to maintain remotely, so here are a few tips:
• Create ‘remote norms’ that take people’s preferred working hours into account
• Take time to have good non-work related chats amongst your team
• Don’t stop the regular office ‘social collisions’, just take them remotely - it could be a virtual team lunch or a shared event, like enjoying a drink over a trivia quiz
Moving into the right headspace: Discovery over defence
This period of self-isolation and working remotely is an ongoing challenge and there can be a tendency to develop defensive habits like internalising stress, zoning out and snapping at partners and colleagues. To avoid this, focus on four areas of discovery instead: finding humour in our everyday lives, broadening our knowledge base, focusing on our mental wellbeing and helping others out.
Resources
Team Collaboration (with free version/trial):
Mural.co
Team Connection:
Donut
Drawasaurus
General Remote work and resilience resources:
Culture First
We all experience stress. And in these global pandemic times, for many of us, stress is sharply rising. Yet so can our resilience. Exploring the correlated relationship of stress and resilience; we’ll show you how to channel anxiousness into a positive force to improve decision-making, productivity and collaboration.
This workshop will arm individuals with a number of neuroscience-based tools and hacks to thrive in today’s unprecedented world.
The strong relationship between stress and resilience
“We can’t have resilience without stress, we cannot have triumph without adversity. For us to be resilient versus resistant at these times, it’s simply how we think about stress.” - Shelley Laslett
Stress isn’t negative by default, it’s hugely context dependent. How we think about stress and respond determines whether or not that stress will be positive or negative. Resilience is the active process of adapting to adverse stimuli, aka stress.
Neurohack acute stress so it doesn’t become chronic
Neuroscience-based tools, referred to as neurohacks, allow you to use your own internal resources to hack what we experience throughout our life. These four neurohacks used in the moment when you experience acute stress can turn that stress into positive fuel to help boost resilience and decrease negativity: Think, Move, Talk and Mindful.
Our brains are designed to change
The brain is plastic and highly malleable; it is designed to change and adapt at any time in response to experiences throughout our lifetime. But our brain automatically takes the path of least resistance, so in order to change, you have to use a lot of neurological energy.
Using neuroplasticity, our ability to think about things differently, we can target cognitive appraisals (the way we interpret and think about external happenings) and reframe our own thoughts and the situation. Ultimately, changing the way we behave and respond.
To perform neuroplastic surgery on ourselves and reframe the situation, we need to start by asking 4 really simple questions… you can find these questions, along with the other neurotools discussed in this session, in the attached workbook. (Note: These workbooks are for your internal use only and not to be externally distributed.)
