Resilience does not = nailing it

Sometimes when I talk with high performing business leaders about wellbeing, mindset and resilience it can become just another area to ‘perfect’.  Which ultimately means… another thing on the list to feel not good enough at!

When we value high performance, we can sometimes get stuck in a series of competency beliefs.  That is, beliefs that drive us to meet sometimes ambiguous ‘targets’ before we can feel we have achieved competency.  And even then we usually find more evidence that we are incompetent!

Do any of these resonate?

✔ Perfectionist - “everything must be exactly perfect and even a minor flaw would render this a failure”.

✔ Super human - “I need to flawlessly juggle ALL of my roles, tasks.  Any small misstep would show my incompetence”.

✔ Natural genius - “I should be able to nail these tasks with ease and speed first go”.

✔ Expert - “I should know everything about this already.  In fact, I should have known this before I came here to learn about it”.

✔ Soloist - “I need to figure everything out and carry everything out on my own.  Any need to ask for help is a sign of my incompetence”.

I have been lucky enough to have some awesome guidance in this area lately. And in doing this work, I have discovered that I tick all five competency beliefs!  Lol.

That really irks me.  BUT.  I have to say, it also really helps me understand the high performers I work with.

So when I work with business leaders on sustained high performance here are my non-negotiables:

Self-awareness is key.  Here are some useful questions we cover:

• what do I notice I’m telling myself right now?  

• what competency belief/s might that be?

• what do I notice about the way that feels (emotions, physical sensations)?

Take the power out of the incompetency thoughts

• Take a breath, any form of calming breath will do

• Use mindfulness to ground back into the here and now

• Use defusion techniques to unhook from the powerful thoughts

Attend to your competence

• Humans are hard wired for the negative!  Rick Handson says we are teflon for the positive and velcro for the negative.  

• Practice attending to what is going well.  Take a moment to notice what you are proud of this week, no matter how big or small.

• Take regular opportunities to check in with what you are doing well.

What could you take from this list to manage your own competency beliefs more effectively?

~ Laura