PRACTICING AND CASCADING THE FOUR STEPS

The first step, waking up, is challenging. The practice is to stay awake for as long as you can each time, but you have to wake up first. What can you do to maximize it when it happens? It’s best to keep it as simple as possible: complex, multistage strategies are the least likely to be sustained. Most companies have a generic screen saver on work computers, but if you’re able to change it, make it into this simple message: WAKE UP. Or create a poster you can pin up at your workstation, reminding you to do the same thing. For the first few weeks, you’ll really notice the reminders, but be prepared for the poster eventually to become just part of the furniture. That’s why the first step we established needs to be pursued as diligently as possible once you’ve realized how much time you might spend in waking sleep or rumination.

Once you have woken up, the second step has in fact been taken—attention is immediately available for you to control. The simplest way to establish attention control is to connect with the present, and the most direct way to do so is to connect with your senses: self-evidently, they only function in the present. It is all too easy at this point to slip back into the dreamworld, so you need to follow through with the last two steps. Another poster might be helpful. Draw a picture of someone sitting up in the loft of a barn with the flood flowing through the open doors below. Or draw a picture of a monkey that is trapped because it’s holding on to the peanut. You might prefer to generate a phrase that captures the essence of the program: “Let go of the peanut,” or “Shit happens. Misery is optional.” (Make sure no one will be offended!) There are many such quotes scattered throughout the book, so pick one that really appeals to you.

Because these reminders will become part of the furniture, the best way to establish the practice is to do it collaboratively. Get colleagues interested in the approach. Although changing any habitual behavior takes dedication, the principles are so simple that they can be cascaded easily. Take time at a team retreat day to outline what the process is. You can then involve everyone by reminding each other to take the steps, especially if you notice that someone’s attention has wandered. If you do so, make sure you have sensitivity firmly in place: if a colleague is really upset and ruminating, it might not be such a good idea at that point to tell him or her it’s all just peanuts! Broach it carefully, and the collaborative approach can have a transformative effect on team culture.

In practice, most companies we work with endeavor to create a happy workforce. If you work for a large company, changing the culture of the whole organization just won’t happen unless you’re the CEO and have significant control over the way the organization’s run. Rather than a macro approach, focus your energy where you can have an influence, which is your team.

Again, retreat days or team meetings can present ideal opportunities to introduce these ideas, and you could use our model of being above the line or below the line to illustrate them. The model was described in Chapter 3, and it has a line to represent the threshold. Adaptive, positive behavior can be placed above the line, and maladaptive, negative behavior below the line. Integrating our four steps and the eight profile measures into the model, it would look like the diagram in Figure 7.1. The listed behaviors are not exhaustive. You could limit them to just the key ones, or you could add behaviors from the program that you feel are particularly relevant for your team, and use them to develop a resilient team culture.

Presented in this way, the question of where people would prefer the team to be is a no-brainer. So many are unhappy at work. We’re far more likely to be happy if we get our behavior above the line. Happiness can sound like an oversimplified generalization, and there is often a sneaking suspicion among some managers that if everyone’s happy, people won’t be working hard enough! There do seem to be those who aren’t happy unless they have something to be miserable about, but they’re the exception. The fact is that happy people work best, and although it would be difficult to say which comes first, resilient people are not only more effective and efficient but they’re also happier. And why not introduce your colleagues to meditation? It would be a good idea to practice yourself first, so you can speak from experience. Meditation is far less associated with mysticism than it used to be, and we described an approach to it in Chapter 5 that is both simple and practical.

LEADING THROUGH CHANGE

We devoted part of each chapter to the implications for leaders in particular. As we’ve emphasized, resilience is a skill that everyone benefits from. These benefits are felt individually as well as in the social context of people’s families and the organizations they work for. Personal resilience involves initiating and persisting with the practice of the four steps, but leaders are in a position of much greater influence than their team members. For example, when it comes to introducing new well-being practices such as meditation, leaders are in a much better position to do so than other employees. Leadership carries with it not just more authority but also much greater responsibility, and resilient leaders know this. Go back to our diagram: effective leaders are above the line, and they use their influence to benefit everyone.

The key message from our approach is that stress is not an inherent part of life.

The Challenge of Change Resilience Training program offers a new way to think about stress and resilience. The focus is on changing habitual attitudes and behavior that compromise resilience. Here’s the most important message: they are just habits. They can be changed, and we have a wealth of evidence showing that change is achievable by anyone, provided that he or she is prepared to practice. What this means is that you have a choice—but the choice is obscured by habit and not being able to let go. We all know how easy it is to slip back into the old way of doing things, which is why we’ve shown as clearly as possible what the costs of choosing stress are: a more miserable and possibly shorter life. What’s required is understanding what resilience really means, which is what we’ve covered in this book. Armed with this knowledge, all that’s needed to acquire resilience skills and be free of the tyranny of stress is diligent practice. Nobody can become resilient for you. What better time to start than now?