Take action: Develop your own ordinary magic
Now you know that resilience is a set of ordinary skills that you can improve, how do you get better at them?
Last time I unpacked and unpicked what resilience is. I also included a suggestion to do your own ‘Ordinary Magic’ audit, to check your levels and see if there is an area you want to grow.
Here’s a reminder of how to do your ‘ordinary magic’ audit:
This isn’t a scientific or psychological assessment, just a rough guide. Give yourself a score out of ten on each of these:
Your communication skills.
How you respond to and navigate your own feelings.
How you respond to and navigate others’ feelings.
Problem solving.
Your ability to make and execute realistic plans.
Your confidence in your strengths and abilities (not just resilience skills - all of your skills).
Having a positive view of yourself.
For each one, write a couple of notes about why you have chosen that score.
Then you might pick one or two that you’d like to work more on. These don’t have to be the ones that you score the least. It could be ones that you have some skills in and want to grow more, or others that you feel you are stronger in and want to consolidate.
Now you have your baseline, here’s some ways to grow your skills:
Pick one, and have a go. No pressure! Experiment. Leave what doesn’t work for you. Capture some notes on what went well and what didn’t work out.
1) Improving your communication skills.
Explore a new communication framework like:
The Radical Candour framework from Kim Scott - based on Caring Personally while Challenging Directly at work. Also helpful at home, I’m sure.
Non-Violent Communication - a way of communicating that aims to get everyone’s needs met.
Both of these frameworks can become a lifelong practice. But don’t let that put you off getting started, if they look complex. There are some smaller pieces you can play with to begin - see the Naming suggestion to try out the non-violent communication list of feelings and needs (below).
Follow The Hum for upcoming courses. Previous topics have included exploring care in collaborating with others, mediation skills for collaborative teams, navigating group decisions and navigating conflict at work. Whilst these are all work-related, I’m sure there’s takeaways for the rest of life too!
2) and 3) How to get better at responding to your feelings (and others’).
Start with using these approaches on smaller feelings. Noticing feelings when they’re still quite small can also help you to manage bigger ones.
Naming Use the list of feelings from the NVC Academy to help you to identify your feelings. You can start by doing this retrospectively and build up to being able to do it in the moment. Over time you’ll get more confident and build up your vocabulary of words for different feelings. I used to carry a print out of this list around in my notebook.
Drawing You don’t have to name all of your emotions in order to navigate them in a healthy way. You can also draw your feelings. Peter Draws has a great youtube video to walk you through it; all you need are some small pieces of paper or sticky notes and a pen. Peter uses a Sharpie. Give it a go!
Because we often have an emotional response to others’ feelings, working on this area can also help you to get better at responding to others’ feelings. You might also want to explore some active listening tools and programmes, like this one from the Samaritans. It’s based on the approaches they use in their call service for people having suicidal thoughts, and it’s useful across a whole host of different situations in life and work.
4) Getting better at problem solving.
Learn some design techniques for approaching problems.
The IDEO design kit includes mindsets, methods, and case studies for problem solving.
Check out the Gamestorming resource. There’s a book and a website. I use the website for quick reference but I got the most out of reading the book - especially the introductory chapters. I love the diverge, explore, converge approach (I’m going to write a separate post on that).
5) Making realistic plans and carrying them out.
Gosh. This is a big one. It make it sound like I’m asking you to be a project manager. But that’s not it.
When I first learned about project management, I made a Gantt chart on paper. I had to use tape to stick it all together, and it folded neatly away to sit at the back of my assignment. I never did that again. It wasn’t a realistic approach to planning the kinds of projects I worked on.
Making realistic plans and carrying them out is about:
Breaking big tasks down, without planning every single detail up front.
Starting small.
Celebrating small wins (and then big ones).
I have a bunch of tools I use with clients to help them with this part. These include tools from a field called support planning. I particularly like the Wave Tool, the MAPS approach, and the PATH approach. These are all complex enough to need their own post.
6) Growing confidence in your strengths and abilities.
Get to know your strengths and skills better:
Assessment Consider taking a strengths assessment like CliftonStrengths. Once you have these, make a practice of adding stories and examples of where you are using any one of your top five skills in your day to day life and work.
Evidence Ask your current and recent colleagues to tell you what you’re good at, and what you can do that no one else can. You can also check or ask for recommendations through linkedin. What other people write can give you really good source material to tell you more about your strengths.
Reference Start a ‘Confidence File’ of positive feedback you’ve received. Keep it all in one place so you can refer to it when you need to and add to it when you get some positive feedback.
Learn about asking for and receiving feedback.
7) Developing a positive view of yourself.
Praise your effort. Your strategies. Your ideas. And check out my post on unconditional positive regard.
Over to you
Let me know which ones you check out? And what you learn along the way?
Are there any you want to know more about?
And of course, if you have any suggestions, pop them below so we can all learn from them?
