Dr. Taryn Marie Stejskal

FORMER HEAD, NIKE’S GLOBAL EXECUTIVE LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT

  • Author of the highly anticipated book Flourish or Fold: The Five Practices of Particularly Resilient People (Release date: Spring 2023). 
  • Lead, Nike’s Global Executive Leadership Development Strategy
  • Former Head, Cigna’s Leadership Development & Executive Programs
  • Doctorate degree, University of Maryland, College Park
  • Neuropsychology Fellow with the National Institute of Disability and Rehabilitation Research (NIDRR), Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center

Dr. Taryn Stejskal is one of the leading authorities on Resilience Leadership.  Nike named her the head of their global leadership training and her work is resonating throughout the Fortune 500.  As she describes it, “We are a world in which our human experience is defined by facing challenge, change, and complexity on an order of magnitude to which prior generations have not been exposed. The concept of resilience is built on the very ideology that we have the capacity to face hard things: trauma, loss, misfortune, and the like, and come out on the other side; not diminished, but instead, enhanced.”

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BIOGRAPHY

Dr. Taryn (pronounced Tair-Ran) Marie Stejskal (pronounced Stay-Skull) is the #1 international expert on resilience, in both leadership and life, whose mission is to positively impact the lives of 1 billion people, by enhancing hope, healing, and health through the concepts of resilience. She is recognized as a leading global authority on resilience, wellbeing, and mental health, and her work has been featured by news outlets and publications such as Fox and NBC News, Worldwide Business and Modern Living with Kathy Ireland, Bloomberg Business, Thrive Global, and Forbes. LA Progressive calls her “the go-to person” and “a secret weapon” for people who want to find and maintain their edge as well as rise above the competition.

Dr. Taryn Marie is the Founder and Chief Resilience Officer (CRO) of Resilience Leadership Institute (RLI); By leveraging over a decade and a half of original research on resilience, she developed the empirically based framework, The Five Practices of Particularly Resilient People and believes that resilience is the key to individual, teams, and organizational growth and acceleration across the globe. Prior to founding RLI, she served as the Head of Executive Leadership Development & Talent Strategy at Nike, as well as Head of Global Leadership Development at Cigna. Dr. Taryn Marie earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan and master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Maryland and completed pre- and postdoctoral fellowships in neuropsychology at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) Medical Center. She is recognized as a Marshall Goldsmith Top 100 Coach Globally (MG100), and the author of The Fives Practices of Highly Resilient People: Why Some Flourish and Others Fold to be published in 2023.

She is honored to serve as a sought-after trusted advisor for executives, public figures, and individuals from all industries who are looking for an edge by way of understanding and harnessing their inherent resilience. She is married to the love to her life, and together, they have a family of five children, two biological and three bonus children, who are always teaching her about resilience!

SPEECH TOPICS

Flourish or Fold: The Five Practices of Particularly Resilient People

What are the attributes that determine whether a leader, team, or organization will flourish or fold? After conducting over a decade of research to understand how people harness resilience in leadership and life, resilience is emerging as the key differentiator that sustains people in moments of difficulty, ambiguity, and adversity. Put simply, our ability to be resilient is the active ingredient that determines whether we flourish or fold. At a time when business is facing challenge, change, and complexity, enhancing resilience has never been more important. World renowned resilience expert and former head of executive development at Nike, Dr. Taryn Marie Stejskal, shares with audiences The Five Practices of Particularly Resilient People; the five behaviors we can all access to increase our resilience. Resilience, is fundamentally at the core of what it means to be human and to be a leader and has been the element of leadership development that has been both overlooked and largely misunderstood. Dr. Taryn Marie inspires and engages audiences with a practical, tangible, and relevant approaches to enhancing resilience.

The (Not-So-Surprising) Link Between Resilience, Innovation, and Creativity

How do we foster cultures that support innovation and creativity? While organizations have sought to understand the secret sauce that allows their people to effectively address challenge and pursue innovation, they have often overlooked a key ingredient that fosters innovation: resilience.

From Burnout to Balance

We’re all feeling exhausted, overwhelmed, and navigating high levels of stress and uncertainty. The volume of challenge, change, and complexity has left so many people feeling charred and frayed at the seams. Fortunately, to beat back burnout and find more balance, there is hope. As the #1 International Expert on Resilience, Dr. Taryn Marie provides practical, actionable, and research-based solutions for individuals, teams, and organizations to find greater balance, peace, and well-being enhance and resilience through her characteristic inspiration, story-telling, and empirical work, drawing on her unique background heading global leadership development for Fortune 50 organizations. Many of the strategies and skills we’ve used to create balance and maintain mental health from the past are no longer accessible in our hybrid and virtual environments. In our new world of work, what got us here is no-longer relevant for the present, let alone for the future. This keynote provides a new roadmap for how to navigate balance for today and beyond.

How We Harness Resilience to Advance the Future of Work

Before we go rushing back to work, let’s look at what we’re rushing back for. While we don’t get to choose our experiences, we can choose the meaning we make of our circumstances as well as how we respond, rather than simply react. In order to continue to develop resilience, we get to focus on cultivating courage, curiosity, and creativity as the antidote to the immense challenge, change, and complexity that exists today. Rather than bouncing back, we get to enhance our resilience to bounce forward, drawing on the wisdom and growth of our recent experiences.

Resilience and Mental Health

Can we flourish in the workplace and effectively address mental health? How can individuals and teams, as well as organizational cultures, promote mental health for all employees? Dr. Taryn Marie reveals the answers to these questions by exploring the advances in behavioral health, social psychology, and the dynamics associated with the most effective teams.

The New Rules of Resilience: Thriving in an Uncertain and Virtual World

Transformational and resilient leaders are critical for every organization, now more than ever, in our ever-changing global landscape. Yet, what does it mean to be a truly transformational and resilient leader? Dr. Taryn Marie reveals how to harness and enhance resilience, through the research-based model, The Five Practices of Particularly Resilient People, that promotes leadership resilience for individuals, teams, and organizations when facing challenge, change, and complexity.

Women, Wellness, and Worthiness

Since COVID-19 became a global health pandemic, the trying, tumultuous, and transformative elements have been nothing short of difficult for all of us, especially for the millions of women that have left the workforce in the last year. The detrimental impact of the pandemic on women is becoming more widely recognized, and even referred to as a “she-cession”, discover how resilience can be leveraged to create greater sustainability for women in the workforce.

The Five Practices of Particularly Resilient People (pre 2020 version…)

If you have a heart and a mind, you have the capacity to be a leader. Leadership isn’t a title or a team or a scope of responsibility, it is recognizing that all of us have the capacity to be a role model for at least one other person.

Taryn explores her research on what makes people resilient, providing a framework to guide our behavior during times of challenge, change, and complexity. We know quite a bit about resilient thinking through work by Carol Dweck on Growth Mindset and Positive Psychology, but we know significantly less about resilient doing, the actions we can take on to behave in a resilient manner. The Five Practices of Particularly Resilient People expands our understanding of resilient behavior in order to prepare us for stress during times of challenge.

  1. Vulnerability: The ability to holistically integrate our internal and external selves. To allow what we think, feel, and believe on the inside to be congruent with the person we show the world on the outside. Vulnerability is the cornerstone of authenticity and requires overcoming the Shame Bias.
  2. Productive Perseverance: The intelligent pursuit of a goal; knowing when to maintain the mission, despite challenge, and when, in the face of diminishing returns, to pivot in a new direction. How to engage in single-minded pursuit of a goal and knowing when to have a plan B.
  3. Connection: The ability to find, rely on, and gain encouragement from existing or created communities; to draw strength from the support of others. Connection is about creating and deepening connection with ourselves, as well as connections with other people, including developing our intuitive abilities to listen to and know ourselves.
  4. Grati-osity: A compilation of the words for gratitude and generosity: this practice is the ability to, looking back, have gratitude for challenge, change, and complexity you experienced, and to appreciate how you changed for the better. Then, to share of these experiences, generously, for the benefit of others.
  5. Possibility: The ability to see possibilities and potential for progress, even in the face of obstacles. An enhanced “Adversity Quotient” AQ that allows all of us to better tolerate environments riddled with the potential for fear and failure. This practice is both resilient and cultivated by resilience in the sense that more resilient people are better able to resist perfection and focus on progress and possibility.

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