Rules of Resilience with Valorie Burton (Part 1)

Perry Holley:
Welcome to the Maxwell Leadership Executive Podcast, where our goal is to help you increase your reputation as a leader, increase your ability to influence others, and increase your ability to fully engage your team to deliver remarkable results. Hi, I’m Perry Holley, a Maxwell Leadership facilitator and coach.

Chris Goede:
And I’m Chris Goede, executive vice president with Maxwell Leadership. Welcome and thank you for joining. As we get started today, I just want to remind you, go to MaxwellLeadership.com/ExecutivePodcast. There you can download the learner guide for today’s session. You’ll see a button for that, or it even says, explore some options, which that’s going to come in handy as we get to the back end of our podcast today, because there are some of you out there as a leader, but also that are leading teams that you’re going to want to click that button because you’re going to want us to help you. Not us. Our guest today, which I’m super excited about. We’ve been getting a lot of complaints from YouTube, saying, YouTube.

Chris Goede:
There should be no, no video of YouTube. Well, if we bring Valerie in, then maybe people watch on YouTube. So if you’re listening to.

Perry Holley:
You have a face for radio.

Chris Goede:
That’s exactly right. That’s right. We are super excited to have Valerie with us in studio today. We’re actually going to do a couple of sessions on her new book, Resilience. And this is a. Yeah, Perry’s holding it up. This is a project that she’s been thinking about. Actually kind of get goosebumps saying it because you and I have had a lot of conversations about when is the right time and what does this look like and how do we roll that out.

Chris Goede:
We think about her as our executive coach. She coaches Fortune 500 leaders and teams all the way down to nonprofits. She’s also part of our faculty, as part of our John Maxwell Team. She is part of our family. And then also I hear about at home all the time because she’s my. My wife’s one of my wife’s mentors and absolutely loves Valerie. And if I say Valerie anything, she’s like, yes, like what? Yeah, like, that’s correct.

Perry Holley:
And here today with us, 100.

Chris Goede:
I didn’t tell her. Yeah, but now she’s gonna listen to this. I didn’t tell her. But, man, when you think about leadership content and you think about a practitioner, that’s what I think about you, like, and that’s what you’ve done with this content. We were just talking about. We’re having a great conversation. Before we started Recording about, man, this is so practical. And then you help us walk through how do we apply it and what does it mean to us? And so we’re going to dive into the rules of resilience.

Chris Goede:
We’re going to talk a little bit about what does this look like for you as a leader, maybe for your team, and even how do we notice lack of resilience in our team members? Because I think that’s huge when it comes to what we talk about all the time in regards to engagement. So before I get ahead of myself, Valerie, take us back and talk to us about why this content, why this word? Why has it been in you and on your heart for so long? And then now’s the time to bring it out.

Valorie Burton:
Well, you know, success is what we all want, and we define it in different ways, but at the end of the day, success requires resilience, whether we identify it or not. And so, you know, my background in coaching, I’ve been coaching for over 20 years, and I really, as I started, started coaching way back in 2002, and then I got a coach. I watched how coaching really works to transform lives. And I got curious, like, why does coaching work? And more than 20 years ago, it was, you know, even more so than now. Like, what is that? What’s coaching? It’s just having your own personal cheerleader.

Chris Goede:
It’s like, right, right, this works.

Valorie Burton:
So when I started really delving into why it worked, I discovered this field of positive psychology and decided to go back to grad school to study it. And while I was there, had the opportunity to learn from a researcher in Resilience, Dr. Karen Rajavich. And I also had the opportunity to work on a resilience training team with the University of Pennsylvania, where I’d gone to grad school and the military. And it was right at a time when I needed resilience. It all came together, right? And so I realized at that point, like, this isn’t just what I’m studying and what I’m helping others with as a coach. This is what everybody needs. I feel really strongly that resilience is a skill.

Valorie Burton:
And we know from the research and really, even from personal experience, it can be learned. But how do you make it practical? A lot of times we think of resilience, and it’s like those inspiring stories, but what was it that the person did that was different from someone who’s not as successful? So that was my goal. Pulling the research, but making it really practical, sharing those personal stories, and then people being able to walk away with oh, there’s rules and I wanted them to be easy to remember and once you learn them, you can apply them in any situation.

Chris Goede:
Well, thank you for that. That helped me. Easy to remember. It does remind me even just how John Maxwell has thought about things like that. How do you put it on the bottom shelf? Like, I joke around all the time. I’m only working with John Heft for a long time because he puts it at the bottom shelf. I can’t comprehend a lot of the philosophical thoughts and that’ love about this content is that at the end of it it’s like, hey, we all need this in life, let’s be honest, right? Like we all go through different times and whether it’s family issues or whether it’s marriage issues, whether it’s leading a team and what we’re going to talk about today and the fact that I can remember, hey, there’s a couple rules in here. I need to remember this.

Chris Goede:
We’re going to talk about this a little bit today and how we kind of live that out. But I love how you’ve done that because you’ve taken it from a scholar thought and made it extremely practical for us, especially in today’s times. Everything’s getting faster. There’s more AI, there’s more this, there’s more that, like our schedules, like. And it just becomes so overwhelming that you, if you, if you don’t watch it, you won’t be resilient to anything.

Perry Holley:
So I’ve noticed about that. Anything we do that we teach, we want it to be sticky and we want it to be portable. And this is sticky and portable. This is something you, can you see it? You go, oh, yes, I see that. What I love about what you said though, it’s a skill. I don’t think I ever, until I started working with you on this thinking that is resilience, a skill that can be developed. It absolutely. There are some people that just rebound from stuff better than others.

Perry Holley:
Are they just natural? No, you can learn this stuff. And so I wonder, you’ve been teaching this a long way before the book was published. But what is the response in the audiences and what are you seeing as you’re teaching this from the stage from people?

Valorie Burton:
Well, what I love is the response after it’s been taught of people giving specific examples of, oh, I was on the phone with, you know, my son and I realized immediately as we were talking through a problem they just needed and they would, they’ll plug in, you know, part of the framework adaptive skill or a preventive Measure, but also that teams are realizing and recognizing in each other, in team members. Oh, this is an opportunity for us to practice resilience so that when, let’s say the project is coming up, the deadline is coming up, some unexpected thing is coming in that’s kind of messing up the game plan. Rather than let’s just all be stressed and overwhelmed and start complaining together. There’s an opportunity here for us to grow in resilience. How do we apply, whether it’s one rule or three rules in this situation, and seeing immediately it creates a mental shift and an ability to collaborate together, to actually succeed in the face of whatever that particular challenge is. So the feedback has been. It just makes me smile because the feedback has been very practical. And hearing people use the language that was a part of what I was doing with the book is let’s give practical language to resilience so that whether it’s within a team or within a family or a friend group, everybody that has read it and understands it is using the language, the common language together.

Perry Holley:
I’m laughing because at my house now, my wife said, I guess you’re gonna tell me to know when to grit. Know when to grit. Well, if expect the unexpected and let’s choose thoughts to strengthen us.

Chris Goede:
How’s that going for you? No, I’m just kidding.

Perry Holley:
Keep it outside now. But. But we’re very resilient. I’m overcoming.

Chris Goede:
No, I love it. I wanna go back to what you talked about with common language. Our listeners and those that are here know we talk about common language around leadership. And it’s so important to have that consistency for a culture. And I hadn’t thought about this till just now as you were talking about it. And I go, man, the common language for teams as we push to deadlines, as we deal with outside noise or things that are personally weighing on us, that we’re bringing to work or whatever it might be in an organization. The common language for resilience is the framework and the 10 +1. I call it 10 your bonus rules of resilience.

Chris Goede:
And I love that because we say common language leads to the common belief that leads to a common behavior. So I’m imagining right now leading a team, and let’s say this team is doing well, they’re treading water, they’re succeeding. Maybe another team on the organization is not. And we’re getting a lot of pressure, right? And I’m coming in saying, hey, we’re going to. We’re going to control what we can control. Keep. Keep focused like and that’s how it becomes a rallying cry, this common language of what you’re saying. So I love that.

Chris Goede:
And as you were smiling, I was smiling. Go, man, this. That is so practical. Now, I want to talk about the other side of that real quick, though. Those that aren’t using the common language, what are signs? So leaders that are listening right now, what are signs when you look out or that you have seen from your study and your research? And by the way, that’s the other thing about this book. There’s a lot of data and research and stuff in here. Right. This is not just Valerie saying, hey, here’s what I think about that.

Chris Goede:
That’s in there from all of her work, but. But also she brings so much into the content that makes it so credible that you can lean on. When you’ve worked with teams where you go, you just know right away, man, they’re not resilient. What does that team look like? What does it feel like? What’s happening inside that organization when we haven’t done a really good job of developing our leaders or our teams to be resilient?

Valorie Burton:
So one of the things you see is the morale is different. So people are not only frustrated, but they’re talking around everything that is wrong without the discussion around. And what is the solution for this?

Chris Goede:
Yes, right.

Perry Holley:
You, the sacred cow, you just brought her somebody’s name, didn’t you?

Chris Goede:
Well, and a couple situations that I thought about, but we will not be talking about that here today on the Maxwell Leadership Executive Podcast. Yeah, but we’ve all seen that 100%, so.

Valorie Burton:
And they’re is kind of this attitude of the challenges are a burden, as opposed to the challenges are presenting a message, an opportunity for a lesson, and, oh, maybe we haven’t dealt with this before, but we can rally together and find the way forward. So that’s a big mental shift. And a big part of what I talk about this in the very beginning of the book is the difference between those organizations that are successful in the face of change or the unexpected. And all the. All the dynamics, the uncertainty is they have more psychological capital. And so we always talk about the financial cap. You got to have enough money to. To deal with and weather storms.

Valorie Burton:
You also need to have the human capital right, the right people and the right seats, all of that. But at the end of the day, if your people aren’t thinking in the right direction, they aren’t thinking resiliently, then everything falls apart and you start to wonder, why can’t we. Why can’t we make it through that. We’re just making it. It was just the merger. We didn’t think it was going to be that big of a deal. Well, it is. But if you’ve got the psychological capital built up, people don’t feel beaten down by the fact that there’s been multiple changes.

Valorie Burton:
They may feel the stress, but they also have the confidence.

Chris Goede:
Yeah, they’re ready to go with you.

Valorie Burton:
Yeah, this is hard, but we can deal with it. That’s very different.

Chris Goede:
Much different.

Valorie Burton:
And so you’ll see that. And you’ll see that it actually is contagious. We know leadership is contagious. So if you’ve got resilient leaders. Right. They will notice when this is happening with their teams. And even just the small shift in how they speak about the challenges will shift the whole team.

Perry Holley:
Well, I thought that concept of psychological capital, I never heard that before. And we were working through building a course for this and that came up and I thought, what does it mean? And as Valerie’s explaining like she just did, you have human capital. They’re our most important asset. But do you have their minds or are they stressed? And stress is. I appreciate she uses the word stressor in the content and in the book. And so you think I’m not stressed, but you have stressors. There are things that are challenging you every day. And so I’m thinking about it from the leader perspective.

Perry Holley:
So you’re a leader of a team. And is it all. I’m thinking, why is it important for leaders to get on this right away? Is it. I think you just kind of hit it with. The team can run off the edges if they’re freaking out about things. And so how would you coach a leader? As you said, my team tends to get wrapped around the axle when things go a little bit sideways. What do they do? Is it just getting used to the system that we talk about and the rules, or is there more? How do they. How did they get the buy in the leaders? I’ve got to get this.

Valorie Burton:
Well, I think it’s really important when we talk about stress and stressors, there’s a lot of talk around, you know, not trying to eliminate stress. We won’t eliminate stress. You don’t want to eliminate stress.

Perry Holley:
We write that book. Let me know.

Valorie Burton:
You eliminate stress, you’re probably dead, right?

Chris Goede:
Yeah, that’s right.

Valorie Burton:
But also, any goal is going to produce stress. So it is unrealistic to aim to have no stress. The key is understanding how to approach that stress when it happens. Obviously, you don’t Want so much that it just crushes people. But the expectation that, oh, I’m stress, oh, there’s deadlines, of course there are. Right. We’ve got a vision, we’ve got goals, we’ve got challenges, there’s going to be stress. So for that leader, understanding these rules I think is really important.

Valorie Burton:
One of the first things you want to notice as a leader is how your people are talking about whatever the challenge is, how people are talking about it indicates what they’re thinking. Right. And so one of the rules is choose thoughts that strengthen you. But a really good leader is listening even in that team meeting, even in a simple one on one, what are they saying about it? Because that indicates the mindset that they have. Do they have a growth mindset or do they have a fixed mindset? Are they really believing? Well, I’ve never done this before, so I don’t have what it takes to do it now as opposed to, well, I haven’t done this before, but I’ve overcome some challenges before. A growth mindset says where I am right now is just a starting place. I’m going to learn, I’m going to grow from here. And so they are not so intimidated because they haven’t overcome something similar before.

Valorie Burton:
Instead they’re going, oh, I’m going to expand who I am. I’m actually going to grow from this. So it starts with really listening. And we know that’s a leadership skill.

Chris Goede:
Right?

Valorie Burton:
But in resilience, you’re saying, what am I listening for? I’m listening for what they’re saying, what they’re thinking, because that ultimately leads to what they’re doing.

Perry Holley:
I use that all the time. I think, I know we both have done it a lot with our teams here that we label things, something happened and I label it so. And I’ve said many times, go, let’s choose a different thought about that. How could you label that differently? And I’m not really realizing that this is a key piece of overcoming stressors is it’s just data. But how do you label it? How are you seeing it? So when you see a leader, like I love that you’re listening for how your people are thinking, how they’re talking, which will lead out of the thinking and how do you want them to act? And so how can we change how they think to do that?

Valorie Burton:
So Perry, as you’re talking about that, I can give you a thought that I’m having. So for example, we have a project happening right now that’s really, it’s exciting. It’s Good. But the client that we’re working with has. I won’t say they had. They didn’t have everything all together. They had the idea of what they wanted, and so we started running with the idea, and then they started throwing in other things. Like, you never.

Valorie Burton:
You didn’t say that before, Right? That’s exactly right. Right. So the team was starting to get very, very worked up about this, very stressed about, you know, deadlines and timelines. And I said, well, this is a really wonderful opportunity. This actually is an opportunity to actually go deeper in what we’re able to do with this client, the impact that we’re able to make, like. And they started kind of seeing that now. I know typically we’ve got. This is how we do it, and they’re not fitting into the box we’d like for them to fit into.

Chris Goede:
That’s right.

Valorie Burton:
Right. But helping them see the bigger vision. Right. One of the rules is focus on the vision, not the obstacle. They were so focused in on the obstacle and getting worked up and said, you’re in. Our energy has got to be focused on the thing that matters most. Let’s not get caught up in. They’re not doing this according to plan.

Valorie Burton:
But how do we then redirect? How do we guide? How do we show up and lead so that we are resilient through this? No need to keep focusing on. That’s not what they said. But instead, okay, so here’s the reality now. How could we handle this and manage this in a way that they get what they need, we get what we need, and a year from now, this is an even bigger opportunity. And that shift happened almost immediately because I said, let’s stop putting energy towards what’s wrong and start noticing.

Perry Holley:
Find the opportunity.

Valorie Burton:
Yeah, there’s a big opportunity.

Perry Holley:
Seven or eight, but it’s a good one. Yeah.

Chris Goede:
The culture, then, of your team, no matter what was coming in from the partner, that didn’t affect how the culture of the team was acting. And so we’re going to dive into some practical stuff in just a minute as we’re kind of talking about this. The three of us could talk about this for a long time. Before we do, there’s one thing you said that I want to follow back up on, the psychological capital thing. I can remember talking to Perry after he’d heard that from you, and he’s like, man, listen, I just got to talk to you about this. I heard this from Valerie and spending a lot of time thinking about, you know, our human capital, which is so important. To organizations is absolutely worthless unless we understand where their psychological capital is. Right.

Chris Goede:
Because that is what feeds whether our human capital is going to be able to be at their best, which is why we hired them to be there. And so I started thinking about that as you guys were just talking, and I was like, that’s so important to be listening to your team or to redirect the thinking of how you think about a problem with the team and to talk through that. What if we had team members that were actually beating the leader to the punch and saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, Before Valerie comes back in, let’s think about this a little bit differently. Let’s. Right. And they began having that conversation and shifting the psychological capital of the team so that they can do what they’re there to do, the human capital side of things. And so, man, it goes deeper, much deeper than that. But we’re gonna get into some practical stuff.

Chris Goede:
So, Perry, walk us through the beginning.

Perry Holley:
Well, what I took away, not even thinking about resilience as a skill. So I’m reading. I got the idea of resilience. I can learn this. But then you did a beautiful thing. You kind of built this idea of, each of us can have a personal resilience plan. My plan and that, composed of three components that kind of go into that. And I think this is really worth spending time in the book, when you get the book to see what are these three components.

Perry Holley:
But adaptive skills is number one. Protective resources is the second part of that of your personal plan. And then preventive measures is number three. Talk more about the whole idea of building your plan.

Valorie Burton:
Yeah. So all of us have a personal system of resilience. And, you know, a system is what enables us to move through a particular process to make something work towards a specific end. We don’t tend to think of resilience that way. We think, oh, it’s bouncing back. It is that. Right? It’s. It’s overcoming challenges.

Valorie Burton:
It is that. But the way that you do it is through the system that you’ve created, Whether you’ve done that on purpose or not.

Chris Goede:
Right, Right.

Perry Holley:
So you’ve got one. It may not be working for you.

Valorie Burton:
You’ve got a system. Okay. There may be some cracks in your system. It may not be a great holes in the bottom.

Chris Goede:
It’s leaking.

Valorie Burton:
It’s got some problems. But if you understand these three pillars of that system, you can be very intentional about strengthening that system.

Perry Holley:
Yes.

Valorie Burton:
And so that was super important to me to start the book off, start this whole process with this is the system. Now, how is yours going? Those adaptive skills, what’s going on inside? When you’re faced with a stressor, right? Those protective resources, the external stuff, all the stuff outside of you that you pull on, whether that’s your connections, your friendships, money that you might have access to all of those things. Training, experience. And then the preventive measures was the piece that I got really excited about. I mean, I’m a geek for the research, right? And the research I found a lot initially, a lot around the protective resources and the adaptive skills. But the piece that I discovered, it was almost like inspiration. And obviously the research can back it up. But I didn’t hear a lot of research talking about preventive measures.

Valorie Burton:
This is about you making the kind of proactive choices that lessen the likelihood of needing resilience in the first place. So it doesn’t change a current situation. It hopefully lessens the likelihood that future situations happen. We can’t eliminate completely, but sometimes we’re doing stuff that if we stop doing it, we stop having these problems over.

Chris Goede:
Yeah, it’s similar to boundaries, right? Like, it’s the preventive getting there. It’s like, hey, if you do this work on the front end, then it’s going to help you a whole lot more on the back end.

Perry Holley:
She said, like in the book said, what could you do today that your future self will thank you for?

Valorie Burton:
Like, say no to that. The request that, you know, you don’t actually have time to do, but you’re feeling guilty and you say no. And, you know, two months from now, you’re going to be beating yourself up because you already knew there wasn’t time or energy.

Perry Holley:
A lot of people are stressed. They’re stressed about their weight or their physical health. You think, what could my past self have done as a preventive measure to make me avoid those challenges in the future? And, you know, like, I’m stressing over finances. What could your past self have done? So the preventive thing was really rich on that. All right, gosh, we’re late. We got to wrap up. But I’m not gonna let you off without a tap.

Chris Goede:
No, no, no. Yeah, we got it.

Perry Holley:
Yeah, we’re gonna go long.

Chris Goede:
Yeah, listen, this is a little bit longer than what we usually. It’s because we have a subject matter expert with us. We’re not having to make this stuff up as we go. So we’re gonna dive in. Yeah, let’s do this.

Perry Holley:
So next week, we’re gonna cover more on the 10 rules. I’ll do that. I promise. But I want to just let you apply all this brilliance that’s in this, your head and in this book to a little scenario that Chris and I personally experienced separately. Separately, but yeah, that’s right.

Chris Goede:
Yeah, but similarly.

Perry Holley:
So most people are aware the government shut down in the United States for some number of weeks. But we travel a lot for our work. And we’re at the airport and the announcement is made. I’m at the gate and it says, your flight’s been canceled. No, there’s just not enough people working in the tower, whatever the reasons were. And we are told that we can wait six hours for the next flight, which will be after midnight. Then I said, and that one’s going. Well, we can’t promise.

Perry Holley:
I’m not sure that one’s going to go. You could go and go away and come back tomorrow morning and catch the 9am I said that one going, because I’m going to have to get a hotel room now to pay. There goes another. Whatever numbers, $100 and. And the widow can’t guarantee that. And so a number. And I actually started. Didn’t have my copy with me, but it’s in my heart and head and I started pulling out.

Perry Holley:
And I’m watching people around me, they are freaking out. They are yelling at some young lady whose entire responsibility was to hold the microphone to say, your flight is canceled. She didn’t have no control. So you’re in this. Put yourself. And Chris had a similar one. He ended up having to make some hard decisions about how to get back to where he needed to be because it wasn’t going to fly. It was not.

Perry Holley:
Flights were disappearing off the board. Red flashing cancels all over the place. People are mad, people are losing it. Stressors are hitting. Walk me through a personal resilience plan that we might could apply. You don’t have to go through all 10 rules, but maybe there’s a handful. You would say, yeah, this is what I think about adaptive skills or protective resources or preventive measures and maybe a rule or two. What would you do?

Valorie Burton:
So the first is going to be those adaptive skills. I said, that’s what’s going on inside in your head. What are your thoughts thinking about that? Are you strategizing all of those things? And one of the things that’s really important to understand for resilience is it can look really messy. Like your initial response could be completely unresilient. Right. I said in the back, I think.

Chris Goede:
We see some of you travel as well. We see some of those, especially in.

Valorie Burton:
Hartsfield I’ve decided is a word, okay? And we all, when you look at what our first response, sometimes even the second one, that reaction can be very unresilient. You could have said some things you shouldn’t have said to the poor gate agent. You could have broken down in tears. You could have called your spouse and you’re yelling and ah. And none of that changes anything.

Chris Goede:
None of it does.

Valorie Burton:
The exciting thing about resilience is with thoughts and reactions, you get to choose again, right? You can go. This is not productive. What would be a more empowering way to think about this? That’s where strategizing comes in. That’s where you go, okay, one of my favorite rules, control the controllable. Accept the rest. You do not have to like the rest. You don’t have to approve of the rest. But it is what it is, right? So if this flight is canceled and my options are six hours from now or tomorrow morning, and those are not guaranteed, my strategy is, would it be worth it if I sit here for six hours on the chance that maybe, just maybe, I’ll get the flight? And you may decide, depending on what it is that you know is coming up, what the obligation is the next day.

Valorie Burton:
Oh, it’s going to be worth it for me to go ahead and stay.

Perry Holley:
Here, involve grandchildren in Texas. Go ahead, maybe.

Valorie Burton:
So what am I saying to myself? Is it moving me forward or is it getting me stuck? Very important question.

Chris Goede:
That’s a great question.

Valorie Burton:
But those protective resources are also really important. What do you have at your disposal? Do I have several hundred dollars that I am willing to part with for a hotel room that can help me deal with this particular challenge? If you do go, you know what? I’m gonna be grateful for that. If you don’t have that protective resource, what else do you have? Do you have some airline points? What else did you do? Do you. You could call and say, hey, I need to stay here.

Chris Goede:
Do you know a pilot that could. We could hire Valerie.

Valorie Burton:
My husband is a pilot. And it could even be, you know, you know what, there’s chairs here at the airport. It depends on what your situation is. But you’re saying, who can I call that can help me? You know what? Past. What does past experience tell me?

Chris Goede:
Yeah, that’s good.

Valorie Burton:
You’re taking a pause to choose to be resilient. And you are also not beating yourself up if your first reaction wasn’t ideal.

Perry Holley:
Yeah, I hadn’t thought about that. And I do, you know, try to stay calm and try to read the moment and it’s not her fault and what’s going on here. But I do have. My wife is with me. There’s emotion flowing because we are now viewing. Not going to see grandchildren in Texas. We’ve been waiting diligently to go and see. So there’s some dynamics that are happening.

Perry Holley:
But I also thought, I’m a seasoned flyer. I have privilege and I have a. I don’t have to go stand in a line. I have a phone number. And so there’s. I’m rallying my resources. That is one of the rules that I think, what are my resources? I have a diamond line I can call. I have, you know, hotel points I could go use.

Perry Holley:
I have what I have at my expense.

Valorie Burton:
And then that’s putting things into perspective because you just said, oh, I’ve got some privileges I need to tap into. Those are protective resources. But it also helps you realize as you look around. Right. Everybody else might not be diamond medallion. And so you go, oh, this is a hard situation, but I’ve got some resources that can help me take care of it. And so we talk in the protective resources about sometimes you have the resources, sometimes you might be able to get access to the resource. Maybe somebody else has it, they can help you.

Valorie Burton:
But your thinking piece is a huge one because that helps you strategize and get you out of feeling sorry for yourself, being angry and not having a game plan and say, look, it is what it is. Let me control what I can control.

Perry Holley:
That’s big.

Valorie Burton:
Yeah. And let me. The rest I can’t do anything about. Yeah, yeah.

Perry Holley:
I thought controlling the controllables and choosing thoughts that strengthen me don’t weaken me, and then sharing those with my wife and with others around. And he and I were on the phone with his situation. I was in a. I actually was taking a later flight. He had. He had to catch it. And then he missed. It just got ugly all the way around.

Perry Holley:
But then we started talking about, these are the rules. This is how we overcome these challenges. And while that’s one instance, and it was caused by things that are completely out of control, these are the kind of things that happen every day. Every day happen every day in your life.

Valorie Burton:
And here’s the thing. You might look at this scenario and say, well, I mean, it’s just one flight. And look, like you said, it could be grandkids, it could be a wedding, it could be a client and a lot of money on the line because you’re going to a training or a speaking engagement. But also, sometimes it’s just about your energy.

Chris Goede:
Right.

Valorie Burton:
And close your energy gap is that last rule. Right. And so sometimes we put a lot of energy into being frustrated, anxious, nervous about like just rehashing things. And that energy makes you less resilient for a lot of other things it may show affect how you show up in a meeting or how you show up with your kids. What if you were able to get control of that energy and now you show up calm, now you haven’t yelled at the person that you know with the microphone. Exactly. So it’s also about understanding how powerful your energy is in helping you be resilient and successful every single day. Because I mean, if you’ve got a commute, right, you can ride in that commute stewing and angry about things and being stressed out.

Chris Goede:
Don’t change one thing, it won’t change anything.

Valorie Burton:
Or you can say, hey, this commute might be an opportunity for me to have a nice transition between a stressful workday and the time I get home. It’s all about our choices and the thoughts that we’re choosing.

Chris Goede:
So all three of us live in Atlanta and I think what I’m going to do now on my commute is I’m calling Valerie every time because it happens quite often. You know, I was thinking about as we were just talking about the story and reliving that experience you talked about as leaders, listening to the conversations and the words that are coming out of our team members mouth. So then I had this visual of in that situation specifically for you, could you imagine if we had a microphone at every couple, every individual, every such family that was had the same situation you did. What were those conversations being talked about? Yours was much different because you had developed some training around the rules. Everybody else, they’re losing it. They’re all this kind of stuff and that language is back to what you’re telling, like what are we hearing to know how resilient they really are. And they just don’t have a system. They have a system, they just don’t know how to use it.

Chris Goede:
They’ve never been taught of what the common language is that they’re telling themselves to be able to do that. And there is so much wasted energy. And we’re going to talk about that on the next session because that’s one of the things that you’re talking about is being able to mine that gap of the energy. So we’re going to pause this conversation. The good news is that we’ve asked her to come back for another one. And so she’s going to be joining us again next week for the second part of this where as Perry promised, we’re going to go through the rules of resilience. But I’m sitting here going, okay, that example of listening to my team and I’m thinking about my team, I’m thinking about our organization. For us right now, we’ve just come out of the new year.

Chris Goede:
A lot of people have a lot of energy, a lot of ideas. I work with, with a high energy leader that comes out of a year end review that I got to control what I can control what I’m hearing, right? And then I think, how do I give that to my team? And so there’s two thoughts that I want to leave you guys with. When Valerie decided to write the book, she’s had this in her heart and in her mind for a long time. You heard that in the beginning she also wanted to think about those that are leading teams and leading organizations and how do we create a language of resilience inside our organization as we go forward. And I was thinking about this, I was thinking about organizations or teams that are resilient aren’t the ones you mentioned this aren’t the ones that just recover faster. They’re the ones like you gave an example of your team that through a little bit of chaos, we don’t lose momentum at what we’re doing. They stay true, they hear the noise, the noise is impacting. But you guys at your team specifically in that example have a leader that understands the content and you were able to deploy that and begin to kind of move through that.

Chris Goede:
Right. The other thing I think a lot about is the engagement levels of our team. I think people are made for hard, right? Like we don’t mind hard things. We know we sign up for a job at times. Sometimes it’s a calling or a career. So we don’t mind hard. I think what ends up happening is that emotional connection of when things become hard. What’s the environment that they’re working in? My wife is a labor and delivery nurse or was in a previous life.

Chris Goede:
She’s glad that that life is over. And in situations like that, the environment was extremely toxic. And so that didn’t allow then those nurses to be resilient. And so I think that the engagement level of team members have a lot to do with what is the environment and how resilient is the organization. So just some thoughts as I was listening and thinking about our conversation that I wanted to share and the reason I did that is because we did put together with Valerie. Valerie was a big part of this. She was on every call. Perry, obviously is playing point for us from an instructional design.

Chris Goede:
And we created a training course. We created a course that we can not only coach on, but we can also come in and spend the day with your team and go through these scenarios and roll this out and ask the tough questions. And so I mentioned in the beginning that you’re going to need to remember that button at MaxwellLeadership.com/ExecutivePodcast where it says explore more options if you’re interested in learning more about that. If you’ll just click on that button, fill out that short form and just in the box put Resilience, we will follow back up with you and make sure we have a conversation about how we best conserve and add value to you. So I just wanted to share that. I’m going to let you kind of close and wrap us up. But Valerie, I can’t wait till next week till we dive into the rules of resilience.

Valorie Burton:
I’m so excited. There’s so much to talk about.

Perry Holley:
This has been fantastic. Thank you, Valerie. Thank you, Chris. As Chris said, MaxwellLeadership.com/ExecutivePodcast if you’d like to learn more about that offering for resilience, build your own personal resilience plan and for everybody on your team, I think you’ll find that very valuable. You can also leave us a question or a comment there. We love hearing from you. So grateful you spend this time with us today. That’s all from the Maxwell Leadership Executive Podcast.

Transcript created by Castmagic.