Workshop Personal Leadership – Building resilience

Another Off-Site is planned for early March 2020. For this edition we choose Re-Boot, a beautifully renovated barge on the canal in Wilsele near Leuven.

This edition is about "Personal Leadership". More specifically around "Help, I am a perfectionist, but everything changes so quickly, I have stress, how can I cope? How do I strengthen my resilience?".

We hired Professor Erik Franck for inspiration and professional insights. Professor Franck has worked as a lector, researcher and trainer for decades on mental well-being and wants to empower people, based on the most recent, evidence-based insights.

One week before the workshop, Erik invites us to answer a short questionnaire. That is part of flipped learning, involving your audience in advance. It arouses interest and strengthens the learning experience. 50 short questions that will give us insight into our personal drivers.

At the start of the workshop, Erik conducts a short survey into the meaning of Personal Leadership. Julie is bang on it. The art is to live and work from your personal strength (your drivers) and to become aware of your pitfalls through self-insight. The trick is to make choices that suit who you are and what drives you. Because conscious choice makes you physically and mentally healthier, more successful and happier in the long run. This workshop is clearly more than worth the investment.

Professor Franck continues. Personal Leadership has four levers: self-knowledge, self-awareness, self-control and self-compassion:

Self-knowledge is about who you are, what drives you, your talents, passions, goals, your "inner why", your personal North Star;
Self-awareness goes a step further. It is reflecting on what is happening to us here and now. Do we manage to control our inner why? What happens if we lose control? Your awareness of your thoughts and feelings makes it easier not to get into automatic reactions that only yield quick results in the short term;
Self-control is the ability to change exactly those automatic responses (thoughts and behavior) for responses that produce slower, but desired, long-term outcomes. There is a lot of research that shows that making choices from self-control makes people happier and more balanced in the long term;

Self-compassion means being gentle with yourself, an important buffer against the challenges in our complex world.

Time to take our answers to the 50 questions, as they will provide insight into our personal drivers and pitfalls. The model that the professor uses (and is very enthusiastic about) is Kahler's (scientifically substantiated) model: five drivers (or working styles), behavior patterns so to speak, in which each of us can subscribe:

1. Be perfect: driven by their own standard of correctness; they can help themselves by wondering if their standard of correctness is the only correct standard?

2. Hurry up: driven by speed and priorities; they can help themselves by wondering if their perception of progress is also reality?

3. Please others: driven by respect from others for the care they give; they can help themselves by wondering if the effort they make for others is what those others really need?

4. Be Strong: driven by a sense of responsibility; they can help themselves by delegating more and asking for help;

5. Try hard: driven by appreciation and recognition; they can help themselves by asking themselves "what do I really want"? Am I also prepared to take the long-term consequences into account?

The discussions that follow show that all Work Styles are well represented in the Mentor Team. We are definitely a divers team. By the way, did you know that NASA uses Kahler's model to assemble the teams for space explorations?

Investing in personal leadership is without doubt important and valuable: from self-knowledge you develop self-awareness to train your self-control so that you can make decisions that are not only emotion or short-term driven, but that lead to positive effects and balance in the long term.

Finally, Professor Franck gives a few more tips and tricks to get you started today and that increase your mental resilience:

Abdominal breathing: occasionally take time to pay attention to your (belly) breathing
Move! Successful people move physically and mentally
Take a quiet look at the situation and (together with someone) make a plan of action
Focus on what you CAN change
Invest in your mental capital

Look for connection: invest in family and friends
Get out into nature: go for a walk and focus on the here and now
Avoid worrying; Find distraction by doing something, start a worry diary

By the way, did you know that the WHO predicts that depression will be the most debilitating condition by 2030?! Well, not if it depends on us!

Interesting article? Let us know.

Any comments on building resilience? Please share!

Regards

The MentorTeam