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.