Taryn Stejskal: Founder and Chief Resilience Officer (CRO) of Resilience Leadership Institute (RLI)

In this episode of Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee, Coaching.com CEO Alex Pascal takes a deep dive into the concept of resilience with international resilience expert Taryn Stejskal. 

Through her work as the Founder and Chief Resilience Officer of the Resilience Leadership Institute, Taryn helps leaders integrate vulnerability and emotional strength and connection into their professional life. During this conversation, she shares some of her top tips as well as her most fascinating research findings.

To discuss resilience, you first have to define it, and Taryn begins by explaining what she deems to be “resilience” and how she has come to this conclusion. She also discusses what resilience is not, which includes debunking the harmful myth of “bouncing back.”

Listeners will probably be relieved to discover that resilience isn’t something you need to search for. It’s already inside every person. In this episode, you will find out how resilience can be maximized through the practice of vulnerability.

Taryn acknowledges that vulnerability is a scary concept for many people because our brains naturally fear the unknown. She explains how vulnerability can trigger fears of the three Ls: they won’t like me, they won’t love me, and they might leave me. She also shares strategies for overcoming these irrational anxieties.

If resilience is the ability to address challenge, change, and complexity, and vulnerability is about creating connection and meaning, then the vast majority of us would surely agree that these are good things to develop. Listen in for practical advice on how to cultivate these qualities in our coaching clients and in our everyday lives.

Resources

Taryn Stejskal: https://www.resilience-leadership.com/

Socials:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/taryn-marie-stejskal/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DrTarynMarie/Twitter: https://twitter.com/drtarynmarie
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drtarynmarie/
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWy-FDrXXQnEC7poGI-C1_g?view_as=subscriber

Books
The 5 Practices of Highly Resilient People: Why Some Flourish When Others Fold

Podcast
Flourish or Fold: Stories of Resilience Podcast
https://www.resilience-leadership.com/flourish-or-fold-stories-of-resilience

Blog: https://www.resilience-leadership.com/resilience-blog

Transcript

Coaches on Zoom - Taryn Stejskal

(interview blurb)

Taryn: It’s not about being perfect. It’s about incremental progress and growth as we know as coaches. And so the word “practice” is very intentional because we know we’re already resilient. Resilience isn’t something outside of ourselves that we have to go and find and cultivate, it exists within us.

(intro)

Alex: Hi, I’m Alex Pascal, CEO of coaching.com, and this is Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. My guest today is the author of Flourish or Fold: The Five Practices of Particularly Resilient People. She’s also the former head of executive leadership development at Nike. She’s the founder and chief resilience officer at her company, Resilience Leadership, the co-founder of Resilience Element 75, which focuses on making resilience accessible to the world through film and wearable technology, as well as being a co-founder of Elevated Science, an AI communication platform focused on bringing healing to the planet through plant-based and alternative medicines. 

(interview)

Alex: Please welcome, Taryn Stejskal. Hi, Taryn. How are you? 

Taryn: Hello. I just took a sip of my coffee so I’m feeling fantastic. How are you today? 

Alex: I’m pretty good. I’m pretty good. It’s great to see you. So, as we start all of our episodes, I’m going to ask you what we’re drinking today.

Taryn: Well, as you know, I just had a sip of coffee. It’s mid-afternoon here in the Philadelphia area on the East Coast of the United States so I thought, okay, what can I sort of have midday that will also keep us energized? So I have this beautiful, hello, cheers. 

Alex: Cheers.

Taryn: I have this beautiful coffee martini, which I did not prepare myself. It’s made, it’s a beautiful like premade mix by a company called Zen out of Madrid, so, cheers. 

Alex: Cheers. Mine is not nearly as fancy as yours, it’s just a shot of espresso and whatever I thought would make for an espresso martini, as you requested. I try to be very accommodating with our guests and go with the flow. So it is 10 a.m. here in LA, I typically don’t drink before five, it is the rule, but, hey, if the guest asks for it, it’s part of the fun, so I’m excited to enjoy that with you and I think I probably need a lot of practice to get my espresso martini game up to the level that it should, but thank you for suggesting this. I love it. 

Taryn: Well, pretty soon you’re going to like have — you’re going to do chocolate around the sides and little chocolate-covered coffee beans. I mean, you’re just going to — I see your espresso martini game just skyrocketing. 

Alex: I mean, I never thought about using my espresso machine for that kind of drink so now I think I might just get really into them. I’ll probably start drinking them a little later but this is the beginning of something, Taryn, I think. So it’s so good to see you, so good to have you. We met in person at the Marshall Goldsmith 100 event in Nashville a couple months ago and we were having a great conversation and I thought, well, let’s invite you to the podcast so we can continue that conversation in front of our amazing audience. So thanks for being here. 

Taryn: Thank you so much. Well, I have to say it is such an honor to be here with you, Alex, to be on this incredible podcast, this beautiful community that you have and are building, bringing coaches together, providing resources and guidance and best practices and a place to convene and talk to one another. It’s just such an incredible and such a needed community and I’m so delighted to be a part of it, a part of your podcast, so thank you. 

Alex: Thank you. Thank you for the kind words. Yeah, we love what we do at coaching.com and literally everyone that works at our company just wakes up thinking about how are we going to empower the people that empower other people so it’s really cool and we’ve built a beautiful community and it’s nice to think about that. And then we have the technology side, which is fun so we combine both so we’re all pretty busy and excited. So, it’s so good to have you. You do such cool, interesting work and I know you are just about to release your first book, which we’ll talk about and the title is amazing, as people will know very soon. So, let’s start at the beginning. How did you end up where you are today? Take us through that journey.

Taryn: It’s such a great question and there’s so much to it. So, let me tell you about an aha moment that I had while I was writing the book. So, if you had asked me before I wrote this book sort of how did you get here, how did you and resilience become friends and you really kind of press into this topic, I would have pointed to my graduate education, I would have pointed to working with women in a rural part of Maryland who were also from families that were low income and doing qualitative interviews with them around what amplified or engendered, if you will, a greater sense of resilience, I would have pointed to these tremendously courageous people and their families who had brain injuries and spinal cord injuries that I had the pleasure and the honor of working with on my fellowship in neuropsychology and I would have said, “This is where I learned about resilience.” And what I learned about myself in this process is that, actually, resilience had shown up much earlier in my life and it really changed the way that I thought about how we connect with this concept. Because, so often, when we talk about resilience, we often talk about it as something that’s outside of ourselves, distinct from ourselves, separate from ourselves, something we get to find or cultivate. And from a coaching perspective, many of us as coaches think about coaching as our coachees or clients, they have everything within themselves and it’s about finding it, dusting it off, unlocking it, recognizing the full complement of our potential. And what I realized is resilience is actually very much aligned with that philosophy, that, actually, resilience is the essence of what it means to be human. 

Alex: How do you define resilience? 

Taryn: Right, so if we think about it this way, we made it, like we lived through the pandemic, through every disappointment and loss and rejection, so it’s like we’re already resilient. It’s just like how do we maximally harness this and reach our highest potential? So definition of resilience, amazing question. So, after interviewing hundreds of people, collecting thousands of pieces of data to understand what resilience is and what are the practices that we can put in place to create a more positive and productive outcome, anytime we face challenge, change, and complexity, the definition of resilience that emerged is simple and powerful. Here it is. Are you ready? 

Alex: Ready.

Taryn: Okay. The definition of resilience is the ability to effectively address challenge, change, and complexity in a way that enhances us ultimately and doesn’t diminish us. So, there’s power in that level of simplicity and it’s also worth pointing out the things that are not in that definition, because the things that are not included in the definition can be just as important as what is part of the definition. So here’s a good one. So often, at least in the English language, we talk about resilience as being connected to or synonymous with bouncing back. In fact, bouncing back is part of many people’s definitions of resilience. But it’s categorically untrue. Bouncing back is actually one of the greatest myths of resilience because if you think about any challenge you’ve experienced, I mean, Alex, you can think about this for yourself, our listeners can think about a challenge that you’ve been through or a series of challenges, were you the same person after you faced that challenge? Did you go back to the person that you were before? The answer for almost everyone is no. So we don’t bounce back, we bounce forward. We allow ourselves to be fundamentally and forever changed by our experience and the myth of bouncing back actually keeps us stuck because when we think we have to go back to being that same person, we don’t recognize our resilience. 

Alex: That’s interesting because it really turns the definition that many people have of resilience on its head, which is really like the speed to recovery, and what you’re saying is it’s not really about speed to recovery, it’s about being able to speed up into what you become when you learn through a difficult experience. So you emerge as a person that has learned from that experience a little bit differently. So you’re defining it with that forward looking orientation versus I think very common definition of resilience is really around how quickly you can bounce back from a challenge, which is interesting. How did you come about that definition? 

Taryn: Alex, I’m so glad that you also brought up this piece about speed of recovery or time because that’s another widely held myth and so I love that you surfaced that because the first myth, as we discussed, is you don’t bounce back, you bounce forward, you allow yourself to be fundamentally and forever changed to be enhanced, ultimately, by that experience, as the definition tells us. And so, often, you’re so right that we talk about quickly recovering as being part of resilience. And what we know is actually the people that might attempt to recover quickly, the people that might return to work after a health diagnosis or after a significant loss, not taking enough time can be tremendously detrimental and so resilience is not a foot race, it’s not about who can get back to their life as quickly as possible, it’s about really taking the time to integrate our experiences. So I love that you brought that up. And I forgot the question that you asked me so ask me again.

Alex: It was really about how you came up with that specific definition, but hearing you talk a little bit more about it, resilience, we’re starting to get into this period of time where things look a little bit complex, more than a little bit. Things look like the world, even the whole nature of our world order that has been established since World War Two, it seems to be changing. It’s probably a good time for people to think about resilience and what it means and how you can apply it with yourself and, of course, for coaches, how do you think about resilience in the context of coaching in these changing times. So, let’s explore that a little bit more but perhaps a good place to get started is going back to that question, how did you come up with the definition of resilience that you just explained? Because it is different than most academic resilience definitions that I have seen or the use of resilience, let’s say, on an assessment, it is definitely framed as just time to recovery so I’m very curious to learn more about the genesis of your definition. 

Taryn: I love that you said “genesis,” such a good word. 

Alex: I don’t really use it a lot. For me, that’s kind of like a biblical word almost. I thought about how you think about, oh, I’m about to say that word, I was like that’s an interesting word because I don’t know where it came from. Sometimes you pick up on things with the person that you’re talking to and it’s incredible that that can happen even over video. I’m in California, you’re in the East Coast, and I never really say that word and I said it and you were like, “I like that word,” so that’s interesting. It’s one of those really beautiful things about human communication that we tap into each other’s psyche and you have this shared experience. So, yeah, I don’t really use a lot of kind of biblical language but I was like that seems like the right word for that. So, what about that word do you like, actually? A little side conversation.

Taryn: I think it’s a really nice word for beginning and to point to the origin story of something. And, of course, it’s also the first book in the Old Testament in the Bible. How did it all start? Of course, the second book is Exodus so it’s important to understand our beginning and it’s also important to have an exit strategy.

Alex: I like how you frame it. It’s been a long time since I looked into those books so if you asked me what was the next book, I had no idea so thank you for the refresher. But, yeah, such a good word, new beginnings and resilience like it is really, the way you’re defining it especially is about a reemergence of yourself based on your experience and that was making me think of like the hero’s journey that maybe you’re familiar with, like Joseph Campbell, so that kind of mythological use of language is always so interesting and I think coaches find it very interesting because language is really our primary tool when we’re interacting with our clients. So it’s pretty interesting. So, let’s go back to that question that’s been eluding us for about 10 minutes or so. How did you come up with your definition of resilience? 

Taryn: Yeah, absolutely. So the third book of the Bible, by the way, is Leviticus, and —

Alex: Did you Google that? 

Taryn: No. They made us memorize them in Sunday school so I can give you all the books of the Old Testament, fun fact, off to the side. 

Alex: We’ll do a special podcast, Bible edition, and people can attend if they’re interested. 

Taryn: Absolutely. So, for me, what I did is I engaged in qualitative research, and many of our listeners know qualitative research, conduct qualitative research, are consumers of qualitative research. For those that don’t or for those that would like a reminder, qualitative research is really about understanding how the people that we are interviewing experience their circumstances and make sense of their experience. I’m considered the number one international expert on resilience along with mental health and wellbeing because, to date, this is the most well-researched, empirical model, this framework, the Five Practices of Highly Resilient People, that exists in the world. So it’s informed by hundreds of qualitative interviews, thousands of pieces of data where I’ve read books, articles, listened to podcasts, and coded this information, and what I wanted to understand was, given that the experience of challenge, of change, and complexity is really the fabric of our human existence, it’s inevitable. If these things are going to show up in our lives, it’s when. So knowing that these are inevitability, what are the things that we can do in those moments to be able to create a more positive and productive outcome? Now, as coaches, right here, we might be like, “Well, hold on a second, Dr. Taryn, what about mindset?” and I would say you’re not wrong. We’ve got tremendous information in our field around positive psychology, around growth mindset, and so, as a researcher, as someone with a doctorate degree, what I want to do, what I think a lot of researchers want to do is we want to create a unique contribution to the field that doesn’t exist today. So I thought, you know what, we know a lot about mindset, we know a lot about resilient thinking, but what we don’t know so much about is resilient doing, if you will. What can we do in those moments of challenge that are going to create a more positive and productive outcome? So, based on this qualitative research that I’ve done for two decades, that has given me the understanding of this new definition of resilience, because, as I interviewed people about their experience and I understood their walk, their journey, for them, demonstrating resilience wasn’t about speed of recovery, it wasn’t about going back to the way that they were before, it was about emerging at some point in time enhanced by this experience rather than being diminished by it.

Alex: Love it. And you mentioned basically the name of your book while you were describing that, which I love that title, we were talking about it in the green room, The Five Practices of Highly Resilient People. Love the title and you were showing me how it’s showing up next to Stephen Covey’s Habits of Highly — I think it’s like, what? 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. So, great, love the title. So, tell us a little bit more about those practices and, as you’re going through that, if you can also frame it in terms of how that is valuable information for coaches as they work with their clients, that would be very interesting.

Taryn: 1,000 percent. Yeah, and if it’s okay with you, Alex, I think there may be two dimensions, tell me if you agree. I think there’s a dimension here for us to have a reflective moment for ourselves, as coaches, how we harness and demonstrate our own resilience. And then there’s also, for me, another dimension, which is how we support our clients or coachees in harnessing and understanding and demonstrating their own resilience. So I’ll talk about it from both perspectives, if that’s all right.

Alex: Perfect, let’s do it.

Taryn: Amazing. Okay. So I interviewed lots of people and then one of the fun things that you get to do as a qualitative researcher is you get to sit down, I got to sit down and say, “How does this all makes sense?” In qualitative research, we think about this as like what are the organizing concepts? What’s the similarity between what I said and what you said and what a hundred other people said? And so as I organized this into concepts, what emerged are the five practices of highly resilient people, so these were the five things that people did that created a more positive and productive outcome. And it’s worth noting here that the word “practice” is intentional because it’s not about being perfect. Let me say that again, louder for the people in the back. It’s not about being perfect. It’s about incremental progress and growth, as we know, as coaches. And so the word “practice” is very intentional because we know we’re already resilient. Resilience isn’t something outside of ourselves that we have to go and find and cultivate, it exists within us, and that creates a sense of abundance rather than a sense of scarcity or a lack that I don’t have this and I have to go find it. So we already have resilience within ourselves. Resilience is the essence of what it means to be human. We’ve faced all kinds of disappointments and losses and rejections and hurts and turns of events to get to this moment so, gosh, darn it, we have demonstrated resilience. And then it’s about saying, okay, well, what are the five things that we can do in these moments that are really going to amplify our resilience, that are going to give us the best shot at creating a more positive and productive outcome? The first practice, drumroll…

Alex: We should have some special effects. Maybe as we evolve and grow the podcast, we’ll start having some live effects, but maybe we’ll add some when we edit the episode so that you get your drumroll. So, please, the technicians listening to our podcast as they’re editing it, please add drumroll. So, yes, now, that made the drumroll way longer. So, now, let’s go for it. Please, deliver. Deliver the line. 

Taryn: So vulnerability is the first —

Alex: Yeah, we don’t need special effects, look at that, that’s perfect.

Taryn: I’m like Bobby McFerrin from the 80s, like any sound do you want, I can make it with my mouth. Don’t worry, be happy. So the first practice is vulnerability. And when I understood this, my response was to be like confounded, like, “Huh,” and convicted in the sense that I was like, “Oh, crap, this means that I gotta practice my own vulnerability, or I get to practice my own vulnerability.” 

Alex: People don’t love that, from my experience. What do you think? Being vulnerable, it brings up all these different things in human behavior. And, actually, it’s one of those things that leads to unpredictable behavior as well because people don’t like being vulnerable. So, that’s interesting. 

Taryn: So a couple of things about that. So just as we said there’s like this new definition of resilience, there’s also an opportunity here to have a clear definition of vulnerability. So, for those of us that are familiar with Brené Brown and her work, she talks about vulnerability generally as being part of living a wholehearted life. And, yet, vulnerability is scary because vulnerability is scary. And also because it’s the fear of the unknown, we’re still like, “But I don’t know what this vulnerability thing is.”

Alex: Yeah, why is it scary?

Taryn: Well, I think anytime there’s an unknown for us as humans, that makes something more scary. So let me give you an example, all right? So, if you watch scary movies or horror movies, which I really don’t because I get super scared really easily, but in any super scary movie, you don’t see the monster until like partway through the movie or toward the end. You just see the carnage in its wake. And so the fact that you don’t see this thing makes it scarier because you don’t have a concrete representation of what this thing is lurking in the shadows. So the unknown for us as humans is always scarier than the known because the unknown means we’re going to fill in our own mental questions, our own mental blanks, and so vulnerability, without a definition of what that is, how do we do it, am I doing it right, that’s part of what makes it scary. So the definition of vulnerability that I understood through my work, here it is, is the ability for us to allow our inside self, our thoughts, our feelings, our experience to as closely as possible match the outside self that we share with the world. So that’s the definition of vulnerability. In psychology, this is called congruence, allowing our internal self to match the external self that we share with the world. Now, Alex, you might be thinking, well, how does vulnerability create resilience and why is that important in the midst of challenge. That is a great question. 

Alex: See, you’re doing my job for me. Yeah, that was a great question. That was exactly the question I was going to ask.

Taryn: It’s a great question. And the answer is a couple of things. When we have, I’ll call it two distinct selves, our inside self, we’re feeling bad, we’re hiding things, we don’t want to share with people, and then on the outside, we’re like everything’s fine, I’m okay, everything’s good. We’re burning a lot of emotional capital to run two operating systems, what’s really going on inside and then what we tell people is going on in the outside. So the closer we can bring that into one operating system to create congruence, that gives us more energy, first and foremost, and what do we need when we face difficult times? We need energy. The second thing is, when we allow our inside self, our thoughts, our feelings, and our experience, to match the outside self that we share with the world, all of a sudden, people know what’s going on with us. We get more information, we get more resources, we get more support in what we’re going through because people know what’s going on and they’re able to show up for us. So, now, let me apply this for us as coaches and then how we think about this for our clients or our coachees. Yeah?

Alex: Perfect. 

Taryn: So, for us as coaches, we get to think about how we create experiences for our clients where we’re able to role model vulnerability and we’re able to give our clients tools and resources to access their own vulnerability. Now, why would that be important in a corporate or a nonprofit or a business setting? It’s important because vulnerability is the fertile ground from which authenticity and empathy grows. Not every organization is like, “Hey, we want vulnerable leaders,” but just about every organization is like, “Hey, we want authentic and empathetic leaders.” And, oh, by the way, because we’re virtual, because we’re remote distributed teams, because we’re hybrid, because of the pandemic, because we’re virtual, we need this authenticity and empathy even more than ever before. So, as a coach, we get to think about how do we help our clients access their vulnerability in the first place. The second thing is helping our clients determine what is genuine vulnerability and what’s performative vulnerability. Performative vulnerability is going to be like I’m going to be vulnerable because I want you to think something about me. I want to reputation manage. I want to make a humble brag, like there’s a second motivation, whereas genuine vulnerability is always about creating connection and meaning in relationships. So here’s a great example of how I’ve used this in coaching with a client. So, one of my clients was the head of marketing at her organization, just under the chief marketing officer, very high potential, incredibly thoughtful leader. And as a high potential, the organization did to her what we do to a lot of high potentials, which is like, okay, now we’re going to give you a cross functional rotation and a different part of the business that you know nothing about where you have very few relationships and good luck to you, we’ll see how you do. This is how we give our high potentials these cross-functional assignments. So she goes from marketing to operations and we’re meeting and we’re talking about how she’s going to introduce herself to our new team. And she said, “You know, I’ve been thinking, what I’m gonna say is, I’m just gonna —” here’s a sign that you’re not doing vulnerability well, if you use the word “just,” “I’m just going to…” “I’m just gonna wing it.” Don’t do that. It’s a very bad idea. “Just” comes to your mind, full stop, do not pass go, do not collect $200 in Monopoly. So I was like, okay, so she’s like, “I’m just gonna go in there and I’m gonna tell them that I don’t know anything about operations and I’m excited to learn but I’m not really sure how I got this job,” and these types of things. I’m like, “Yeah, you could do that, but you probably don’t want to,” because one of the things, here’s a myth of vulnerability, vulnerability is not disempowering ourselves, it’s not discrediting ourselves, and it’s not self-effacing. Genuine vulnerability isn’t about pointing out what’s wrong with us first before someone else can, like we’re in middle school.

Alex: Or self-deprecation, which you see a lot, and sometimes it’s funny and, in the right context, it could be an opener but you see the people that leverage that as a tactic for communication typically don’t really get ultimately very good results. 

Taryn: That’s exactly right. And so I said, “Rather than that approach, let’s think about how we can leverage your genuine vulnerability to create a credible and meaningful connection with your new team.” So we decided that she was going to go in and say, “I love this organization, I’ve been here for two decades, I’ve been incredibly successful over in marketing, I’ve been delighted to be a part of these achievements. Now I have an opportunity to come over here to operations and bring my cross-functional expertise and also learn a whole new vertical of the business. I’m excited. I’m also a little scared. I look forward to working with you, to collaborating with you, to learning from you, and I’m so excited about what we’re going to accomplish together.” That was tremendously vulnerable. The difference between the two was, in the first one, she was discrediting herself, and in the second one, she was giving herself the credit and also demonstrating vulnerability to create deeper connection. 

Alex: That’s interesting. And when I think about that relationship between authentic leadership and vulnerability, I mean, it’s right there. I mean, it’s probably a very high correlation. You cannot be authentic unless you’re vulnerable, but a lot of the time, what organizations and what we’re looking for from leaders is, and I think that’s why sometimes we have toxic leadership, is because we are expecting leaders to know everything and act in ways that are very self-assured, which sometimes connects with people thinking that being vulnerable does really not align with that very well. So our whole definition of what we look for in leadership is oftentimes not giving people the opening to feel like they can actually be themselves or be vulnerable. And it comes up with clients sometimes because there is that push to have authentic leadership and, to do that, there’s a lot of things that need to happen for people to understand what that looks like, operationalize the definition in a way that makes sense to them, and actually be able to authentically show up, which is difficult and thorny and thank God we have all these coaches that do great work with people, because this is really at the core, I think, of a lot of what I’ve seen in working with hundreds of people that, yes, authentic leadership seems like the way to do it, but how can I be genuine and, at the same time, look the way I need to look and show up with the executive presence that people are expecting. I think this is an opportunity for, at large, to understand that we’re asking people to do things that may not be very aligned in the way people think about leadership, it’s like vulnerability and leadership seem a little bit opposite. Does that resonate with you and your experience?

Taryn: It does. That’s part of why I think it’s important for us to have a clear, shared understanding of what vulnerability is and I’ve really spent some time operationalizing that in my book. The second part is, to your point, Alex, a lot of people say to me, this is a very common question that I get when I do keynotes within organizations, typically, not in front of the whole room, like someone will pull me aside and they’ll say, “Well, my leader isn’t for vulnerability,” or, “This organization’s culture doesn’t allow me to be a vulnerable, and, therefore, as empathetic and authentic leader as I would like to be so what do I do?” And so my first question is, well, how does your leader think about vulnerability? Because a lot of times we think about it as this like scary, squishy, I’m going to let it all hang out, I’ve got to discredit myself, I’ve got to do something self-effacing or self-deprecating, to your point. Vulnerability, genuine vulnerability, is always about creating a deeper sense of connection and meaning in a relationship or amongst a team or across the culture. And when we frame it with that lens, there’s very few people that are going to say, “No, that’s a bad idea.” The first step is like understanding what this is, like unmasking this scary monster of vulnerability and being like, “Oh, well, that’s not as scary as I thought. That’s a little different than what I was imagining.” The second part is recognizing this notion of genuine and performative vulnerability and when I’m in the zone of being genuine and when I might be being performative. The third piece is recognizing something that I’ve uncovered in my work called the vulnerability bias. And this really speaks to, Alex, why vulnerability feels so hard, feels so scary, because it appears that there’s something hardwired in our brains that when we think about doing something that feels vulnerable, when we think about allowing people to truly see and know us to a greater degree, the vulnerability bias shows up in our heads and it says, “Uh-uh-uh, that’s a terrible idea,” and it goes a step further and it tells us that if we’re vulnerable, the three L’s are going to occur. And the three L’s are people won’t like us, people won’t love us, and they might leave and we’re like, “Whoa, vulnerability bias, you had to go and throw abandonment in there too? I am out.” So this is an irrational fear, and so what do we do with any irrational fear? Well, we get to face that irrational fear bit by bit. So, as coaches, for leaders that are looking to cultivate their vulnerability, we get to help them role model that, we get to help them understand the difference between genuine and performative vulnerability, we get to help them use vulnerability in a way that enhances their credibility, not detract from it, and we help them set up moments where they can take steps to make deposits in their own vulnerability to do things like starting a meeting off by using an exercise that allows everyone to bring themselves to the meeting and create a sense of connection. So, all of the work that we do at the Resilience Leadership Institute isn’t about doing a bunch of extra stuff, like who has time for that? We’re all so busy. But we’re all going to open a meeting and we’re going to ask how people’s weekends are or how people are or what they’re up to or how their kids are, so why not do something meaningful that really ushers in a greater sense of vulnerability and authenticity and empathy? So we can use this exercise called Rose, Bud, and Thorn, that’s used by many of my colleagues, I didn’t create this, and it’s an opportunity for us to say, okay, the rose is a success or a celebration, the thorn is something that feels challenging or is a failure or is a loss, and the bud is something that’s emerging or coming into fruition, coming into bloom at this moment. And putting these types of things in place, nobody’s pushed outside of their comfort zone, nobody feels awkward, no one’s going to have a vulnerability hangover. It’s starting to usher in more of these moments where we get to bring our whole selves into work and we get to create greater connection and meaning with ourselves and amongst our teams and across our organizations.

Alex: It’s clear that you’re so passionate about what you do and about resilience. How did you become so passionate about this topic? And I always find it interesting with people with PhDs, we develop expertise around very specific areas. And when you look at just the vast amount of potential things that you might be interested in when you think about doing research to just end up in a very specific place, I always find it fascinating. So I would love to kind of tap into the source of like what drives you to be so excited about resilience and all the work that you do around it and equipping people to understand it and to operationalize it and do something about it that, ultimately, just hearing you talk about it, improves people’s lives?

Taryn: Yeah. Well, I’ll say a couple things about that. I love that question. And the first one is our mission at the Resilience Leadership Institute is to positively impact the lives of 1 billion people through the practical application of the concepts of the Five Practices of Highly Resilient People that creates greater health and hope and healing, enhanced consciousness, better leadership. So that’s our mission. And for me, one of the ways that I think about the world is what is the thing, technical term, what is the thing or things —

Alex: I love the thing. I use it for things that also are very like — I talked about what was there before there was anything? What was that thing? When I talk about something spiritual like that, I love saying what was that thing that was there before everything. So, I love using the thing for important thing.

Taryn: Yeah. So it’s like I try to think about like what’s the thing, the smallest meaningful thing that I can understand and invest in that’s going to have the maximum amplification, the maximum exposure, the maximum opportunity to uplift and to add value to people’s lives? And so I remember I thought about this when I was choosing my major in college and I was like, okay, music, all right, but I can see lots of places where maybe music wouldn’t apply. Policy and government, yes.

Alex: I can see you as a politician. I mean it as a compliment. 

Taryn: Yeah, I can do a really good Sarah Palin impression but that’s for later. 

Alex: Yeah, maybe we’ll do the after the show, stay with us, and you can listen to some of Taryn’s amazing impressions.

Taryn: Here are the outtakes. So, for me, it really came down to finance and psychology. In business and in life, everything is about having enough resources or the right resources to be able to pay our rent, pay our mortgage, take care of ourselves, take care of our families, so resources, and then the psychology of how we live our lives, and if you think about what is the common thread that exists for all of us as humans besides death and taxes, it’s facing challenge. And so if that’s the common thread, if we have a thing to be able to more effectively address the fabric of what it means to be human, then isn’t that going to make the maximum difference for all of us in our lives if we know how to more effectively face challenge? 

Alex: I mean, when you’re talking about that, I think about resilience is one of the driving forces behind everything, because when you look at biology, you look at nature, I mean, it’s a very resilient system and it bounces back quickly, to the other definition, we say, “Well, if global warming destroys the world, it’s actually destroying it for us and probably most of the animals in the world but the earth will be fine in another 2 million years, kind of regenerates.” When you look at nature, those are very resilient systems that are all about change and they’re also built in ways that, as change happens, there are some ways to fall back and create the space for change to continue to explore its directionality. Like that’s what I love when I look at the history of the universe. It’s just this very resilient system that learns from itself and continues to evolve based on that experience. The way you’re talking about resilience as it applies to people seems very much in line for me so resilience really, it’s beyond just the human experience, it is really one of the core driving forces behind the experience itself, don’t you think? 

Taryn: I agree. And, in fact, sort of the subheader of my book, The Five Practices of Highly Resilient People, the sort of subheader or the part that comes after the colon says why some flourish when others fold. And so, to your point, what my work suggests over the last two decades is that resilience is the sort of fundamental differentiator between when we go through these inevitable moments of facing challenge, why some people or how some people are able to flourish through those hard moments and why other people seemingly fold or aren’t able to rise to the occasion. 

Alex: That’s a great word for that. I’m sure you spent a lot of time thinking about what the right wording for that is. Fold is not one of those things that come immediately to mind but when you think about the use of that word in that context, it’s actually pretty brilliant because just folding, when I think about folding, I think about, well, you didn’t fully give up, there’s a chance that you can come back, but — what was the other word? So it’s folding and…?

Taryn: Flourish.

Alex: Flourishing. And flourishing is so in vogue too these days, we talk about human flourishing in the workplace and how can coaches enable people to flourish versus languaging. So languaging is the word that’s been used a lot throughout the pandemic and post-pandemic years to think about that level of like you’re not completely burned out, you’re not burned out, but you’re not very engaged. How can you go from languaging to not folding and then flourishing? I love the title of your book, I have to be honest. I think it’s not just one of those titles that sounds great, it actually, like when you think about it, it’s very well — we’ve been using the word “operationalized,” I like that word. So, tell us a little bit more about flourishing versus folding. And, again, love that. It has a great ring to it so good job with that, Taryn.

Taryn: Thanks so much. Well, as you can tell, I’m a proponent, if you will, of alliteration. So the five practices of highly resilient people and flourish versus fold, they’re really like alliteration, that’s super fun for me.

Alex: It’s good for clickbait but it’s also good when you have substance behind it so that’s what I like about the way you approached your book and the marketing is it’s total clickbait, like, “Oh, I wanna see the five,” but you actually have so much substance behind it. It’s like that’s the best kind of clickbait because you click and then you actually get something really powerful from it. So I love it. Look, I’m selling your book. We don’t really promote books here at coaching.com. We work with so many great authors, we put them in the stage so they can talk about their ideas but perhaps this is the most I’ve ever advocated for a great title to a book so if that leads to some sales, be happy, but, really, no, I think it’s pretty good stuff. So you’re saying.

Taryn: Thank you. I don’t know if this is a word yet but we’ll call it like a click meal because it’s an enticing thing but when you click on it, you’re not like, “Ah,” it’s like, “Oh, there’s actually a full meal,” like something robust —

Alex: It’s not fast food.

Taryn: That’s right. 

Alex: It’s not fast food. It’s good stuff that you’re interested in. It’s like when moms put like, or stay-at-home dads, put some cheese on the broccoli. You’re eating broccoli, it’s really good, but it has cheese so it makes you want to eat it. So, love it. 

Taryn: That’s right. 

Alex: You’re like, I don’t know about that analogy of my book with the broccoli with cheese, but, yeah, that’s how I learned to eat broccoli. And then, now, I eat it without cheese so maybe you get people to click and then you give them some really good content and we’re completely getting derailed from the very substantive stuff you were talking about so let’s go back to that. But, yeah, I don’t know, maybe it’s what you made me drink today for our podcast.

Taryn: Well, eating your vegetables can be the difference between flourish and folding. I mean, there we go. 

Alex: There you go. So tell us more about — actually, how did you come up with the word “folding”? Which is the question I was going to ask you a little bit earlier.

Taryn: Look, as I mentioned, I really like alliteration, not too much of it but I think some of it, I really like sort of the tempo and how sentences fit together. Something that’s fun to mention about me and my journey at this point is that I’m dyslexic and so people have started to ask me like, “Wait, you’re dyslexic. You have a doctorate degree. You wrote a book. How did you do that?” There’s a lot of different kinds of dyslexia, and my type of dyslexia is really around my brain has trouble sequencing things, so spelling was and still is very difficult for me, I’m not a good speller. Directions, you know, first you turn here then you go here, like I can never see that in my head. Geometry proofs were really difficult for me, like knowing those steps and sequencing like what comes next.

Alex: I think those are difficult for a lot of people. 

Taryn: Yeah. As with anyone that I’ve met or learned from that has dyslexia, like Sir Richard Branson, Daymond John from Shark Tank, they talk about, and I would say the same, that it’s sort of like the best worst thing that’s ever happened to us. Worst in the sense that there’s a struggle in school because schools aren’t really set up to teach kids that are neuroatypical, and so I grew up for a long time struggling with things that appear to be very easy for my peers and so the meaning that I made of that early on was like I just wasn’t very smart. I was in the lowest reading group in like second grade and so, for me, the sort of elements of this is, as a writer, I pay a lot of attention to the tempo and the cadence and the words that are in sentences and the rhythm of it, if you will, and how it all fits together because there’s some elements of that that my brain doesn’t attend to like how things are spelled. I was walking through the airport the other day, just as an illustrative example, and I read, “Wood fried pizza.” Now, I have enough life experience to be like it probably doesn’t say that, let me go back, “Wood fired pizza,” but this is how my brain changes the sequence of things, and so what I really have enjoyed doing is thinking about, with a different lens on words and spelling and how things sound, how it all fits together. And so I wanted this book and all of the work that I do to be a really fresh perspective on resilience. I didn’t want people to read this and be like, “This is the same old crap about bouncing back and quick to recovery and whitewashing our challenge, not pretending like things aren’t tremendously difficult,” and so I didn’t want to use some traditional words that have been associated with resilience in order to signal that this was different. So, for example, a lot of the books that I looked at that had been written about resilience or had a component of resilience in them had the word “thrive” in them, surviving versus thriving, like that’s kind of a typical dichotomy. So I wanted to create my own dichotomy that then signaled that this is a fresh perspective. I really love the word “flourish” and it also, for me and for many others, I think, doesn’t have like an evaluative judgment attached to it, like we should be flourishing or something like that, like it’s very much something that we still I think get to define for ourselves, to own for ourselves, like what does it look like to flourish as a human and to be empowered to determine what that is for ourselves. And then, for a little while, I considered the word “flop” as the opposite or “failure,” it’s another F, but I didn’t like those. Flop sounded too final, you couldn’t stand back up again, and failure, I think, just has so much connotation wrapped around it. So I really liked this idea of fold because fold is also you fold up a chair or you fold up a tent and it doesn’t mean that you’ll never go camping again or that you’ll never get that tent back out. So, for me, it also really pulls through this idea of human potential that even if we end up folding in a situation, there’s still an opportunity in the future to do something different or to create a different outcome.

Alex: Really cool. There are other F’s too that actually you were telling me about the book you were reading right now and there are other F’s that you could have used like reading that book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, so I’m glad you didn’t go with that one for your book. As you’re telling me about your dyslexia, that kind of clinched it for me the way you’re talking about it where your interest in resilience comes from. It’s really around — I mean, what you’re describing is there’s an aspect of life that your brain made it more challenging for you to be a good student and to realize that that’s not fried pizza and all sorts of situations, you’ve had that challenge, but you’ve turned that into something that makes you flourish and that, I think, it’s just you are embodying what you are cognitively and conceptually interested in. And, to me, that’s a really very powerful thing to connect your experience with the work that you do because that’s where passion comes from. You’re passionate about the topic because you’ve personally experienced it. So the more you research the topic, the more you’re able to talk about it in an elegant way that uncovers some deeper rooted connections that then people can understand through your work, then you’re enabling people to deal with all sorts of different challenges in different ways and look at those challenges differently. So, thank you for doing that. I think it’s very valuable work. And, for our audience, it contains a lot of coaches, mostly coaches, I think thinking about resilience and the way you’re talking about the topic is very powerful for themselves and for their clients. So, thank you for all the great work that you do, Taryn.

Taryn: Oh, thank you for all of that. I’m so honored by your generous compliments and encouragement. Thank you.

Alex: Your work is awesome but I was going to joke, it must be the martini that we prepared for our conversation today.

Taryn: It is.

Alex: I have to say, I really didn’t do a good job with prepping this but I added very little vodka because it was 10 a.m. when we started but it’s nice, nice little energetic, puts you in a good mood. So, anything else you would want to add to our conversation today? 

Taryn: Yeah. I think what I would say is we really got to focus in on vulnerability, which I’m so excited about. That is the first and foundational practice of The Five Practices of Highly Resilient People, and, of course, there’s four more practices. There’s productive perseverance, which is how we intelligently pursue a goal, knowing when to maintain the mission in the face of challenge and when to pivot, large or small, in the face of diminishing returns. 

Alex: Well, that’s an important one for entrepreneurs so I look at things through the lens of, yes, done a lot of coaching, I have a PhD in psych, but the last 10 years of my life have been as an entrepreneur. Knowing when to hold them and knowing when to fold them is an art form for entrepreneurs because so many people have had a challenging experience with a company, with one of their companies, and then they decide, “Well, look, this is not gonna go anywhere, it’s not gonna go the way I want it to,” and then they fold and then then the next thing they do is awesome, hopefully, but, as an entrepreneur, knowing when to hold them and when to fold them is important and that second component of your model I think resonates with me as an entrepreneur, particularly.

Taryn: Yes. It’s so powerful for entrepreneurs. And I’ll tell you, it’s also coming up quite a bit now, pre-pandemic, where people are asking me and they’re probably asking many of you as coaches, “How do I think about my long-range plan? Can I even build a three- to five-year plan anymore?” The answer is yes, and through the practice of productive perseverance, it’s about checking in on those goals and results and outcomes much more frequently, because our environment, and you alluded to this earlier, Alex, is really shifting and changing, continues to shift and change with a high kind of — I’ll say it differently, our environment continues to shift and change with a high degree of magnitude. And so, as coaches, we get to do that for ourselves as entrepreneurs and we also get to help our coachees or our clients know when to persist despite challenge, when to pivot in a new direction, and to help them make sense of what are their internal and external cues that would help inform that decision.

Alex: Absolutely. So, tell us, as we close our episode today, tell us about the other three, you call them — what do you call them? Pillars? What do you call those —

Taryn: Practices.

Alex: Yes. How did I miss that? We talked about practice — so, yeah, I was thinking it has a P. Okay, cool. So tell us about the other three practices. 

Taryn: Yeah, just real quick. The third practice is the practice of connection and this is so deeply important for us as coaches because we are the tool, we are the instrument, that tune to this work with our clients. So, first and foremost, we get to be deeply connected to ourselves and also how we connect to our clients and our coachees, and then we also get to work with our clients and coachees on their connection with themselves, like so much of coaching is bringing out what is my zone of genius, what is my passion, what is my purpose, what brings me joy and energy, what takes my joy, it’s like so much of that, it’s in there, but unearthing those things, and what happens for so many people as they progress through their careers, through leadership ranks, is we tend to start to over index on connecting externally and it’s very easy to forget to connect internally. So, as coaches, we get to be reminded of that for ourselves and then we also get to help our clients reconnect with themselves. And just one more thing about this practice, we’re talking a lot these days about burnout, about exhaustion, about stress, overwhelm. There’s not a single person out there who is burned out or exhausted who hasn’t minimized the connection to themselves in some way. That’s not blaming people, that’s just saying, we feel like, oh, I’ve got so much to do, I’m going to stay up late, and I’m going to skip my workout, and when we do that, over time, that is the sort of like mushroom cloud of burnout and exhaustion. So connection is also so deeply important as a practice of resilience to be the buffer for the burnout and the exhaustion and the overwhelm. 

Alex: That’s a great point. 

Taryn: The fourth practice is gratiosity. It’s a hybrid word. The first part is for gratitude, to be able to look on our circumstances and to see the good in what occurred even if we wouldn’t have chosen the experience after some time, and the second part is generosity, so I mentioned that vulnerability has this really foundational element. Generosity is about sharing our resilience stories generously so that others can learn vicariously through our experience. So, as coaches, this can be storytelling about our clients or ourselves, helping our clients develop a gratitude practice to see the good that comes out of something even if it’s not favorable, and then how we share our stories of resilience generously in a way that harnesses that genuine vulnerability and allows others to learn from our experience vicariously, which is a beautiful thing to bring into coaching and mentorship relationships. 

Alex: Absolutely. 

Taryn: And then the last practice is the practice of possibility. And what I love about this is it’s really focused on potential. Anytime we face challenge, we get to navigate risk and opportunity. There’s always an opportunity and there’s always a risk, usually a number of risks and a number of opportunities. So, as coaches, we get to look at the possibilities that exist for us and also help our clients and coachees look at the possibilities that exist for them, how they can focus on progress rather than perfection and how we help them weigh the risks and opportunities to understand what to do next.

Alex: Beautiful. Love your five practices. I’m sure the book is going to do amazing. I’m sure next time we have you on the podcast, we’ll introduce you as a bestselling author. It sounds really honestly super interesting, very applicable, I think, for the use in the coaching context. So, thank you so much for the work that you do. Thank you so much for joining us in this episode of Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee and we look forward to seeing all the great things that come from the release of this new book. 

Taryn: Thank you so much. What an honor to be here with you. 

Alex: Thank you, Taryn.